Life as a Laboratory for Learning, Leverage and Legacy
Startup is a way of life, and it really isn’t a life for everyone.
The startup life is tough, but it can also be rewarding.
What is the startup life about?
To me, the startup life is a laboratory for learning, leverage and legacy.
Firstly, the startup life is a laboratory where founders can experiment with ways to test their hypothesis in society at scale. In this laboratory, founders are tinkerers and they get to mix and match, tweak and stir, experiment and scale. There is no academic school for the startup life. Entrepreneurship cannot be taught in school. There are no examinations and group projects for grading. There are also no degrees to be handed out at the end of it. The startup is bigger than the classroom, and it occurs in real time in real life in the real world. There are no better ways to learn about business than starting a business, so start a startup to learn about startup! Roll up your sleeves and get your hands dirty. In the startup laboratory, progress and setbacks are dimes a dozen. What matters is not how frequently you get right about outcomes, but how much you make when you are right; conversely being wrong, when it is not costly, does not matter as long as you survive. Test and apply your thoughts, your visions and your hypothesis in your startup laboratory and get rewarded with wealth for being right.
Secondly, the startup life is a learning pilgrimage. You will explore and you will grow. You will experiment and you will learn. You will glean insights, truths, and first principles from your success and failures. You will learn from your challenges and breakthroughs. In the startup life, you will learn from many sources and you will read to lead. All founders are leaders, and all leaders are readers. There are no exceptions. Even indiehackers read to lead themselves in the ever-changing tech landscape. It is the founders who are life-long learners that move up in the learning curve of the startup life.
Thirdly, the startup life is a leverage. Archimedes famously said, ‘Give me a lever and a place to stand and I will move the earth.’ In startups, technology is the leverage that gives founders the superpower to move the earth and create huge impact with inversely proportionate effort. Traditionally, businesses leverages come from products, capital and labour. These leverages allow entrepreneurs to gain disproportionately high returns. Today, technology and products that have no marginal cost of replication are the ultimate leverages. For example, teachers in the past could only teach a class of 40 students; today, Sal Khan of Khan Academy can easily record a single lesson, post it on youtube, and reach 70 million students worldwide. Likewise, it is technology as a leverage that allows Joe Rogan to record and distribute his podcast to 200 million people every month. Jack Dorsey, Mark Zuckerberg and Larry Page have also made their fortunes with the code-based leverages they have. Well known Indiehacker Pieter Levels uses codes as the ultimate leverage too – he automated his processes with bots and made $50 000 monthly as a one-man operation.
Just as important is the founder’s depth as a form of leverage for compounded returns – character, integrity, authenticity, reliability, reputation and substance are some examples of inner qualities that can scale in outer reality. Essentially, all benefits in life come from leverages that yield compound interests. What the founder learn in life and at the startup laboratory, he should leverage for maximum returns. That is scaling from the inside out. And to scale the breadth of one’s work , one must start by taking care of the depth of one’s life.
Lastly, the startup life is a legacy; just as a startup is a legacy. I am an advocate of building to last, and not building to flip. I do not have anything against the practice of building a startup for acquisition, but I believe startups can be more than that. In every generation, founders build on the legacies of other founders before them when they innovate. For example, with the invention of personal computers came the invention of the Windows the operating system ; then came the internet and the invention of netscape and internet explorer; and out of that came the invention of Facebook, Google and Netflix. Of course, I am grossly simplifying the history of technological innovation, but the point is a simple one: Founders innovate by standing on the shoulders of other founders. This is how legacies get pass on.
All startups serve the single purpose of creating values for customers. Leaving a sustainable startup is leaving a worthwhile legacy. Such legacy cannot really be taught in classrooms. It must be modelled and cultivated. It requires constant effort. The generations that come after will build further upon the foundations laid by founders of today.
This is the startup life. Live well, and live with passion and purpose.
1. Naval Ravikant spoke extensively about leverage in his conversation with Nivi. I highly recommend it: https://nav.al/rich
