Making Startups Powerful

in it. You don't need to x. Just y. One way startups' ideas get twisted into knots is by evolving from something else; there's now a part they don't need, and they don't realize it yet. But with very early stage startups especially, the reason the idea is complicated is often fear. The company is unconsciously cowering by doing something less ambitious than they could. Just y is often, in effect, just stand up straight. And when they do they're much taller.

But all these strategies for making startups more powerful have one thing in common — or more precisely, have to obey one constraint. They all have to make things better for the customer. You can't add network effects or make the money flow through you or go full stack just because you'd like to. You can only do these things when the result is better for the customer. Otherwise you won't have any uptake.

These are strategies for making startups powerful in the long term, but startups that execute them don't usually have any power at the point when they do. And indeed this initial weakness of startups is why, on the whole, they're good for the world. Newly founded startups are too weak to force anything on anyone. The only way they can become powerful is to make customers' lives better. In fact this constraint is so rigid that you can run it backwards to generate ideas. What would the perfect world look like, from the customer's point of view? If there's a component of that world that the startup could transform itself into, it probably should.

Notes

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