Start with the biggest thing

Do we need stepping stones tho?

In startups, what you’re doing is trying to find a viable business model that can be scaled. The issue with that is, some of the greatest founders are missionaries, which means that we’re not primarily playing the game for the money.

What are we playing the game for? I guess some form of meaning, or we’re just trying to cover our insecurities by making something we think will put us at the top of the social hierarchy. Either way, because we’re missionaries, it’s usually hard to envision how you could end up solving the problem you set out to solve in one shot, or at least from the start. You do need some form of “stepping stones”. You can’t go and solve huge problems from the get go, you start with things that don’t scale. In the startup world, the stepping stones could be previewed as either an exit (which gives you enough leverage to pursue bigger and bolder things), or raising a bigger round.

In reality, I’m kind of questioning how good it is to pre-determine the path you’ll undertake and have all the steps figured out early on. To some extent, everyone is kind of trying to do the same thing, which is to reason and map out what would be the most optimal and logical order of things to do. In reality, because everyone’s trying to do the same thing, anything you’d come up with wouldn’t be as valuable, simply because there’s a lot of competition for the same ideas or concepts that “you came up with.”

So what do you need to do? Just throw yourself into the unknown, with all your confidence, and hope that the Universe will find a way. Don’t wait to hit “the right” stepping stone before you do the thing, just do the thing. It’s hard for me to come to senses with this concept, but I realise it’s true with every passing day. I guess the big question is just figuring out what is “the thing”.

Think of Steve Jobs, he didn’t even start with a vision, he was a human being with a very strangely unique set of experiences, and he started doing The Thing from the very beginning.

In our rush to fund startups and glorify this entrepreneurship lifestyle, we’ve created more and more problems just so our monkeys’ brains have something fun to do like JERKr ( Just Enough Revenue to Keep Raising) from time to time…

My takeaway is that I should just go and do whatever I want to do, without 8d chess moves. Unless you’re someone like Elon Musk, don’t overthink how to do it, overthink what, where and with whom to do it. Try put yourself into places where serendipity just happens.

So in short, the best thing you can do as a founder is stay humble, adapt, and go all-in without any big expectations, but a vague vision on how do you want to make the world a better place.