Principle 1 is half cosmetic and half substantive. The cosmetic half is that in today’s highly institutionalized startup ecosystem, it is no longer possible to raise venture capital without a compelling narrative for “founder market fit”. Of course, the personal narrative is only secondarily related to the founder’s “true” capacity to execute in a given area, and primarily necessary in order to appeal to meretricious investors. (Though, to the investors’ defense, it is also one of the few signals that s/he can actually index on at the time of investing, and accordingly one of the few signals that the entrepreneur can actually give.) The substantive half is that, because a company can only survive as long as it is capitalized, and because of the self-reinforcing nature of human organization, the founder’s ability to “craft a narrative” to investors and prospective employees is directly related to the success and longevity of the company.
Principle 2 is primarily about the rate at which a founder can self-correct toward a goal. The control problem for a self-driving car is an apt analogy. The sensors must sample the environment often in order to calibrate its internal representation (mental models) of the world with reality. Otherwise, the two may likely diverge, and the car (founder) will likely crash (fail). One concrete example is being able to have sales conversations relatively quickly and rapidly. Another may be A/B testing features for a wide consumer audience.
Principle 3 is subtle and difficult to describe, for it is difficult to analytically describe what characterizes “life”. Suffice it to say that there are a category of things which get easier over time and a category of things which stay the same, or even get harder over time. It goes without saying that one should do the things that get easier over time. Network effects are quintessential examples of self-reinforcing mechanisms, wherein each new customer makes it easier to acquire the next one.
Life is fundamentally self-sustaining and emergent. Creating a company is like creating life – it cannot live by itself if it requires the constant care and attention of the founders. At some point, the role of the founder is to facilitate and guide, rather than to grow or push. The difference is subtle – one is about getting out of the way of a natural process, and the other is about exerting unnatural energy to inorganically sustain something.
The analogy of gardening is apt. The gardener must initially exert unnatural energy to plant and tend to a sapling early on in its life, but at some point, the sapling will grow into a tree and only require infrequent watering. So too will a company, in the beginning, require effort, and later (hopefully) be relatively effortless.
Principles 2 and 3 can be combined to form the corollary mandate: evolve quickly. Evolution involves: (a) a sufficient population of organisms (b) undergoing successive cycles of selection (c) that are perturbed in each cycle with fitness-enhancing or fitness-destroying mutations. Each cycle, the population that is most relevant to a particular goal is selected for and allowed to repopulate. So too must we learn to gently perturb and select for traits that help us move toward a goal.