How to Build Bigger Ambition: Photoroom's Growth Strategy

Key Takeaways

• Focus deeply on one area first. Photoroom grew 10x by focusing on photo, then another 10x by narrowing to e-commerce photo. Depth and ambition aren't opposites—depth is the path to achieving big goals.
• YC changes your reference points. Exposure to founders building billion-dollar companies makes ambitious goals feel achievable rather than abstract.
• Culture shapes ambition differently. American founders tend to be more confident in stating big goals, while European founders often downplay their ambitions due to cultural norms around failure.
• Ambitious goals attract better talent. Smart people want to work on hard, meaningful problems. A bigger mission helps you hire people smarter than yourself.
• Set ambitious targets and work backward. Once you define a 10x goal, the path to achieve it becomes clearer than if you aimed incrementally.

From Abstract Dream to Concrete Reality

Before YC, building a billion-dollar company felt like a joke among friends—something nobody seriously believed was possible. YC changed that by providing a playbook and surrounding founders with people who had already built at that scale.

One founder recalled being asked "How big could it get?" during YC in summer 2014. American founders confidently said "a billion-dollar company," but he had to train himself to say it naturally. After YC, the bar shifted: it wasn't just a billion—it was ten billion or more.

This shift happens continuously at YC through retreats and constant exposure to other founders' growth curves. Seeing a 19-year-old deploying satellites in space resets your benchmarks about what's possible.

Why European Founders Underestimate Their Potential

In many European countries, announcing a big idea often invites skepticism or warnings about failure. In the US, the response is typically "That's amazing!"—inherently encouraging founders to keep pushing.

This cultural difference matters because ambitious problems attract more talented people. If you don't have a hard, ambitious goal, it's difficult to hire people smarter than yourself. Working with exceptional talent and aiming for something big becomes key to success.

One practical example: Photoroom deliberately speaks English in the Paris office as a filter for global ambition. If someone doesn't understand why two French founders speak English together, they don't fit the company's mission to be a truly global product.

Tactical Ways to Build and Maintain Ambition

Surround yourself with ambitious people. Block out voices telling you a billion-dollar target is too high. Your peer group sets your reference points.

Use ranking and post-mortems. Once you're bigger, it's easy to forget the end goal. Rank projects by impact: "If this works perfectly, how much revenue will it bring?" When projects underperform, conduct post-mortems to understand what went wrong in the decision chain.

Define the V0 (minimum version) of projects. Most projects fail to deliver expected impact. By cutting projects down to their essence, you can learn in days what might take months to discover otherwise. This lets you try more ideas, which is how you find impact.

Set a 10x goal and work backward. Ask your team: "How will this business lead to 100 million ARR?" This forces thinking about market size and the most ambitious version of what you're building. Even if you fall short, you'll land higher than with a modest goal.

Force yourself to think bigger. One exercise: list all your options, then ask "What's 10x above that?" and "What if I had full control?" Forcing yourself to aim higher counteracts the natural tendency to doubt.

The Power of Setting the Bar High

Photoroom's founders remember doing an offsite when they had only a few million in ARR. They set a goal to reach 20 million, and the entire room said it was impossible. One year later, they hit it.

Goals have a self-fulfilling quality. If you think you can accomplish something on one vertical, you'll realize it yourself—but only if you constantly ask, "Can we be at that point?" Talking to ambitious people and setting the bar in the right way compounds this effect.

Sam Altman's advice captures this: "Just add a zero to whatever success metric you have in mind." That alone forces the useful thought exercise of how you'd get there.

A Final Reality Check on Ambition

Not every founder needs extreme ambition. Some people want a stable, profitable company they're passionate about—and that's entirely fine. But if you take VC money, you're signing up for growth. Your investors and employees expect year-over-year scaling.

This is a one-way door decision. The moment you take venture funding, you've committed to more ambitious growth targets. Understanding this upfront helps you align with co-founders and team members on what you're building for.

Conclusion

Photoroom's path from 300 million downloads to becoming the largest YC company headquartered in Europe shows that ambitious goals, combined with disciplined focus, compound over time. Start by going deep on one problem, surround yourself with driven people, set targets that feel slightly impossible, and work backward from them. Doubts will surface—acknowledge them, but don't let them drive your decisions. With focused ambition and the right team, building something significant is within reach.

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Original source: How Photoroom Trained Themselves To Dream Bigger

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