An under-appreciated founder superpower

Making the right thing intuitive and avoiding productivity taxes

Hi all—

There are plenty of articles out there on the “founder’s role.”

Fundraising. Hiring. Vision-ing.

But there’s one quality that I haven’t seen discussed enough:

Making the business opportunity blindingly obvious, so your team intuitively knows the right things to do in order to push the business forward.

Your role is to run headfirst into the biggest ambiguities and uncertainties about your business so your team doesn’t have to. You eat the complexity - you “figure the business out” - so your team can bring something that’s worth building into existence.

Startups are extremely difficult precisely because there are so many variables you have to deal with. You face infinite degrees of freedom. This is why going from 0 to 1 is so risky and so hard.

And you can’t outsource or delegate this. Great founders lower their shoulders and do the heavy lifting themselves.

If you don’t figure out your core business logic, every single member of your team has to deal with more ambiguity than they should. Your company pays “productivity tax” before and during every task, planning session, and meeting: Who are we selling to again? Why are they buying? How exactly are we differentiated? Ok, now we can deal with the issue at hand…

Every company, big or small, pays this productivity tax to some extent. But with startups, the productivity tax will kill you.

And so as a founder, I put “figuring the core business logic out” as my #1 responsibility - because if I don’t figure this out, no amount of fundraising, vision-ing, or hiring will matter.