Uncovering reality

The best arena for epistemology

Hi all —

There is an underlying theme to my writing, which I’ve only realized recently: Building a real business - one that has a desirable place in a meaningful market - means focusing on reality. What do customers actually need? What alternatives exist, and why aren’t customers choosing these? What’s going on in customers’ worlds causing them to need to change? What do they expect from you in the sales process, then from your product? As they interact with your product, what new needs emerge?

Figuring out reality is never-ending. Because as you learn real things, you observe other things that reveal new, bigger opportunities and fascinating challenges. You get to figure out elegant solutions that help your business grow and help you uncover new layers of problems and opportunities.

This is how startups are built: In a continuous process of uncovering, deepening, reflecting, solving, observing. In the trenches of doing.

But it seems like many founders never get to experience this.

My assessment is that founders are deluded into building for the world they wish existed, rather than understanding the world that does exist. Which means they build self-centered products with self-centered marketing, perfect for the world the founder imagines but confusing to real people in the real world.

And this is the natural outcome of today’s startup “best practices”:

Vision creates a parallel universe that presents a funhouse mirror to today’s customers. “In the future, AI will be at the center of everything.” Perhaps useful for investor pitches, convincing potential employees to join you, or for sparking inspiration, but not for building a real business.

Logic creates 2-dimensional thinking that rarely maps to the 3-dimensional world. “Customers only buy things to increase revenues, decrease costs, or decrease risk.” Relying on logical “sounds-right” axioms is an excuse to not deeply understand the opportunity in your market.

Template-style thinking gives the illusion of understanding reality, but often prevents it. “We filled out our Business Model Canvas, now on to OKRs!” Templates may provide structure, but in practice serve to absolve founders from the need for true critical thought or engaging with reality.

None of these are intrinsically bad, and if founders are above all focused on reality these tools can be helpful for communication to different audiences. Unfortunately, in practice they function as opportunity cost, distracting founders from building a real business. Or worse, they lead founders to think that this is how a real business is built, leaving them to rot in their empty parallel universe.

Once you experience building a real business, this all becomes obvious to you. You lose patience with these “best practices” and obsess over what’s real. You understand that reality provides the context in which businesses thrive or die, and that the founder’s role is to understand and communicate the context and the opportunity space to bring something new to life.

A final, moral point - entrepreneurship is often looked down upon by the intellectually elite fields of law, academics, Fortune 500 management, or politics. But it seems to me that entrepreneurship is the best arena for epistemology, and the people who approach entrepreneurship with the building a real company approach are best poised to see the world as it is, and engineer changes that actually work for the betterment of all.