Startup Systems

systems that power startups

The first thing to do when thinking about starting a project, before you invest in systems design, infrastructure or fancy tools, is to practice getting some customers. And the second thing to do is to find out what it’s like to delight or disappoint those customers.

Customer traction is just about the only thing all successful organizations have in... See more

Choose your customers

First-principles thinking, or thinking from first principles, sounds a lot more complicated than it is. It’s simply a technique for approaching problems with a beginner’s mind. Instead of working within assumptions and what people around you “know” to be true, you do the hard work of figuring out what’s actually true and, thus, what’s truly... See more

Lenny Rachitsky • First-Principles Thinking

The thing about smart people is that they tend to think that if they think really hard about something, they might figure it out, when the truth is, in strategy (and life in general), there is never one right answer.

Strategy requires making choices about a future that is not yet known. I’m one of those people that tends to over-intellectualize

Sari Azout • Both are true

How Physics Explains Business

Nathan Baschez every.to

It’s hard to get a company to do a new thing, and the bigger the organization, the harder it is to change. Companies that are trying to change tend to require an equal and opposite force to overcome the inertia. Large enterprise sales teams are built around signing a single customer, while on the small business end of the market all you need is a few quick calls around an otherwise self-serve solution. When an executive wants their company to change, they often hire expensive, high-status consultants like McKinsey to make a plan that gets everyone on board.

If organizational inertia is one form of resistance that you might want to overcome, what are the business equivalents of simple machines that create mechanical advantage and multiply your input force into a much larger output force? And if they exist, do they have an equivalent trade-off of physical machines where you have to apply the force over a longer distance to gain leverage?

Maybe! Startups often hyper-focus on a small number of customers that share specific traits. This compresses all of the startup’s energy and force into a small space. It’s the opposite of being “spread thin.” The advantage of this approach is that you’re more likely to solve a problem, overcome inertia, and gain adoption by the customers you focus on. The trade-off is that it might be questionable how many more customers you’ll be able to find. I call this a market wedge, where you sacrifice scale for power.

A startup’s biggest competition isn’t an established player, it’s inertia.

The 100 Best Bits of Advice From 10 Years of First Round Review

Lenny Rachitsky • Hiring your early team

We try to be as rigorous and data-driven as possible in quarterly planning. All objectives are measurable, either in terms of quantifiable thresholds or Boolean “was X completed or not.” Our objectives are very aggressive, and often at the end of the quarter we only end up completing 70% in one direction or another. The remaining 30% helps identify... See more

Lenny Rachitsky • How Perplexity builds product

how Perplexity builds

When talking to people, look for two things: pain and pull . Pain tells you there’s an opportunity to solve a problem. Pull tells you that you’re actually solving the problem.

Here’s what pain and pull look like in practice:

People pay you money: Several people start to (or offer to) pay for your early product, ideally people you don’t have a direct