We looked back at our past coverage to analyze the software company's trajectory.

For many companies, joining the ranks of the Inc. 5000, is often just the beginning of the journey. Markets rise and fall, customer tastes change, and small management snafus can snowball into company-killing disasters. Many firms successfully navigate those changes and still don't reach celestial heights. Instead, they remain the small- and medium-sized businesses that are so vital to our economy.

Then there are those Inc. 5000 companies that go on to become household names. You've probably heard of Zoom, Yelp, Dominoes, Zillow, Chobani, AMC theaters and Facebook; the list goes on. We looked back at our past coverage of six such alumni to identify how these companies parlayed fast growth into staying power.

It is often said there are three ways to grow a business: build, partner, or buy. Microsoft, one of the world's most valuable companies, with a $3 trillion valuation, is good at all three. But Inc. would argue that Microsoft's greatest strength comes from ownership.

That strategy dates back to the company's earliest days, when co-founders Bill Gates and Paul Allen purchased the rights to MS-DOS, an operating system designed to run Intel's 8086 microprocessor, and then licensed it to IBM for its Model 5150 personal computer. That PC became the first to gain widespread consumer adoption; as a result, MS-DOS became the dominant operating system, and Microsoft's revenue grew from $7 million in 1981 to $97 million in 1984.

That dominance came in handy when office productivity apps like WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3 were beating out Microsoft Word and Excel in the late '80s. Because most PCs ran MS-DOS, and its successor, Windows, Microsoft was able to make its own Office apps more compatible with Windows than those competing products.

Following its 1986 IPO--one of the biggest at the time--Microsoft began a strategy of growth through acquisitions. It purchased a host of lesser-known businesses that helped it enter new markets, including flagship products like Hotmail and PowerPoint, the latter of which was bundled at a discount with existing Office products to solidify Microsoft's foothold in the enterprise office productivity market.

Though Microsoft continues to make acquisitions--more recent take-overs include companies that dominate in unique sectors, like LinkedIn and Activision, and it has partnered with OpenAI since 2020--the company's main revenue drivers are its cloud computing business and enterprise software subscriptions. That's a testament to Microsoft's long running strategy: Whether it's through building, buying, or partnering, success often comes down to leveraging ownership.