Startup Systems

There are few companies that have successfully scaled taste better than MSCHF (pronounced “mischief”). Well, not exactly a company, as they explained to me when I visited their Brooklyn-based workshop set across the street from a skate park, but an “artist’s collective that happened to raise venture capital.” Or, according to their self-selected... See more

Maximum leverage is the result of commitment, of daily persistence, of gradual and insane and apparently useless effort over time.

The result is a meta-market: because founders know what playbook their competition is running, they end up positioning themselves against moves their competitors will make in three years. Let’s say I run a newsletter software company, similar to Substack or Beehiiv. Since each company has a unique starting point, we’ll each have relative strengths.... See more

There are endless tasks to be done in starting a new venture. But most of the tasks are necessary but insufficient. You can’t begin without them, but by themselves, they won’t create enough impact for your work to make a change happen.

And every new project must create change, or else it fails.

We spend our time focusing on the tasks because the... See more

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

So why wouldn't all founders start by engaging with users individually? Because it's hard and demoralizing. Sales gives you a kind of harsh feedback that "marketing" doesn't. You try to convince someone to use what you've built, and they won't. These conversations are painful, but necessary. I suspect from my experience that founders who want to... See more

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:

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

... See more

Product-market fit always starts with the customer. And Dan Olsen’s PMF framework starts from the bottom up.