The pain cave

Why is it painful?

No podcast this week - but here’s a super cool interview I did in Finland last week with Richard Makara (produced by Nicolas Dolenc + Seb Westerling + Sky Productions)!

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I created this slide nearly a year ago, and it is still the #1 slide founders talk to me about:

I have been thinking about the nature of the pre-PMF “pain cave”: Why do we experience 0-1 as pain?

My pain cave

A year and a half after graduating Harvard Business School, when my peers were making a lot of money and generally progressing in their adult lives, I was running a failing startup (poorly) and making just enough money to share a 500-square-foot studio apartment… while watching other startups take off.

My typical day involved commuting an hour and a half each way to my investor’s office, where I would sit in a small phone room and cold-call owners of janitorial firms, often getting laughed at when the owners heard my pitch, then emerging from the phone room to see a VC looking at me with a kind of expression that I interpreted as, “you’re a failure.” I agreed, but I didn’t know what to do.

This slide was a fairly accurate representation of my inner monologue at the time:

It sucked. I think you’ll agree that it sucked. But… why did it suck?

It wasn’t actually bad

A reframe: There was nothing objectively bad about my situation as a first-time founder. In fact, my situation was pretty awesome. We had money, we had time. I had the opportunity to call business owners and learn from them, I could go meet with them in-person and make something great happen! I owned my destiny! Cool!

Sure, going from 0-1 is massively intellectually challenging, complex, risky, and ambiguous. But complexity, ambiguity, risk, and difficulty don’t cause pain. There is nothing inherently painful about them.

Instead: My interpretation of these things caused me all my pain. The pain cave was all in my head.

What’s in my head?

Here’s how I currently understand the pain cave. There is:

1. Objective reality (the “territory”)

2. What’s in my head (my interpretation of reality, the “map”)

In my head, there’s a story about who I am and how the world works. This is, essentially, my operating philosophy. As a first-time founder, my story was something like: “I’m smart, hard-working, and a good person, and because of that, I deserve success.”

Yet… I was not succeeding. Because of this, my understanding of reality - and, by extension, my whole identity - was being thrown into a wood chipper.

In theory, I could have enjoyed this. After all, it was an opportunity to learn how the world actually worked! But I didn’t enjoy it. It felt like pain because I was trying to preserve the story in my head, despite receiving constant signals that it was wrong. I think the smart person’s phrase for this is “cognitive dissonance.” Whatever it’s called, it sucks.

You can see it in the Pain Cave slide: The quotes mostly aren’t about understanding reality. They are complaints lodged by someone who has a worldview that’s getting constantly pummeled, who just wants success so he can stop dealing with reality:

In the pain cave, you can either fight reality (which leads to more pain), or you can rewrite the story in your head.

Change your story

A few weeks ago, I sent a video demo to a potential customer and got absolutely roasted. He said, almost verbatim: “This demo is awful and you are stupid. I don’t understand what you’re doing, why it’s different, why I should care. If there’s anything interesting here, I don’t see it and don’t have time to figure it out.”

This would have knocked me into a funk for days, if not weeks, in my first startup. This time, I was annoyed for a minute, but I got over it. I asked a few follow-up questions, got some useful input, and carried on with my day.

Why doesn’t this bother me anymore? It’s not that I just have so much scar tissue I can’t feel anything. Nor am I just a masochist now. I think it’s simply that I have changed the story in my head - my model of reality is different, which leads me to not interpret reality as painful.

All my work on the Physics of Startups is my attempt to actually model reality. The model says, in short: Everything is downstream of finding and serving demand. Startups work if they “fit” demand, customers pull the product out of the startup’s hands.¹

Given this model of reality, my job as a founder is to (1) find someone who wants to be served, (2) find a way to serve them that they perceive as a “fit”, and then (3) figure out the repeatable version of 1+2. I fully believe that if I do these things, everything else works out.

Because I have this model of reality, I don’t feel like I’m in the pain cave. I’m just obsessed with figuring out who wants to be served and how to serve them. Which means I mostly interpret negative feedback (and positive feedback) as useful signals of who wants to be served + how I can serve them. These signals give me energy because they “fit” my story, they don’t cause me pain because I’m trying to preserve a bad story.

So: If you’re struggling… what’s really causing your pain? Look at your calendar, look at the content of your thoughts, what is the story in your head?

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PS: Want my help finding product-market fit & figuring out your repeatable sales pitch? Learn more here - I just recorded a new video explaining how I help.

1. There are many other potential models/stories I could have in my head - “just do things,” “be your authentic self,” “fake it ‘til you make it,” etc. I think my story best represents reality, though other stories may feel better and even lead to better short-term results.