スタートアップが難しい理由

Chander Ramesh This was a speech given to Motion in a Cancun company offsite on July, 2024.

At the time, Motion had experienced unprecedented growth. Most people in the room had only ever seen hyper-growth. But I predicted that those fun times would end, and I wanted to brace the company for the coming period of difficulty. This proved especially prescient, as the growth did in fact stop nearly to the exact month I predicted. We then had to rally and pivot the company to find the next S-curve.

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p]:mt-0 [&>p]:mb-0 [&>p]:text-muted-foreground"> “For years milers had been striving against the clock, but the elusive four minutes had always beaten them,” he notes. “It had become as much a psychological barrier as a physical one. And like an unconquerable mountain, the closer it was approached, the more daunting it seemed.”

— Practically Radical by William C Taylor

For decades, everyone thought the 4 minute mile was something impossible. Experts had long theorized the ideal conditions: a larger track (they had a harder type of track that made it easier to kick off of), a cool day, maybe mid 70s, so the athletes wouldn’t over heat. No rain, of course, and so on and so forth.

In May 1954, Sir Roger Bannister breaks the 4 minute mile. The best part is that he does it in all the “wrong” conditions. A semi drizzly day in a no name track in front of a few thousand people.

And over night, it becomes possible. Perhaps more interestingly, it quickly became the norm. In the next 3 months, three more 4 minute miles took place — the second being Australian John Landy. The very next year, 1955, three runners do it in the same race. By 1964, we have the first high schooler to do it. And as of January 1, 2024, 732 Americans and over 1800 people globally have done what was supposed to be impossible.

p]:mt-0 [&>p]:mb-0 [&>p]:text-muted-foreground"> Was there a sudden growth spurt in human evolution? Was there a genetic engineering experiment that created a new race of super runners? No. What changed was the mental model. The runners of the past had been held back by a mindset that said they could not surpass the four-minute mile. When that limit was broken, the others saw that they could do something they had previously thought impossible.

— The Power of Impossible Thinking by Yoram Wind and Colin Crook

It’s important to know that there wasn’t some secret technique. If there were, perhaps Bannister would have been the only one to do it for quite some time. But that’s not what happened. He does it, and overnight, someone on the other side of the world stands up and believes that he can do it, too.

This same phenomenon — the mere act of seeing something be done inspiring others — is something I’m going to refer to henceforth as the Bannister Effect. Perhaps this case is rather trivial. Just run faster, what more can there be? Interestingly, this same effect takes place even in academic settings.

Kagle is a machine learning and data science competition platform, and Francois is a Google Deep Mind researcher.

We see the same example in business:

p]:mt-0 [&>p]:mb-0 [&>p]:text-muted-foreground"> There was a marketing channel we had looked at, but we put it on the shelf. Then I heard a whisper that someone else using this channel was crushing it. Now, I didn’t know what they were doing, their technique, and I don’t know how much they’re crushing it. I just heard enough to know that they are crushing it. And immediately, just the knowledge that someone else was crushing it, got us fired up — and over the weekend we did 30 grand of revenue on this one channel.

— Shaan Puri, CEO of Babi (Acquired by Twitch)

This ability to inspire people to believe in and execute on the impossible is present in many incredibly successful entrepreneurs and leaders. But one person embodied this phenomenon more than anyone else: Steve Jobs. So much so that he has his own wikipedia entry dedicated to this exact phenomenon.

p]:mt-0 [&>p]:mb-0 [&>p]:text-muted-foreground"> Then they did an iMac and an iPod nano in anodized aluminum, which meant that the metal had to be put in an acid bath and electrified so that its surface oxidized. Jobs was told it could not be done in the quantities he needed, so he had a factory built in China to handle it… “Ruby and others said it was impossible, but I wanted to do it.”

— Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson

How quickly we forget that, at the time, conventional wisdom was that a consumer product could never be made out of aluminum. It simply wasn’t sturdy enough, and it would scratch too easily. Best to leave that stuff for disposables like soda cans or lightweight airplane materials. Steve was determined to prove everyone, even his own reports, wrong.

Apple was roundly criticized by everyone when they first announced the Apple Store concept. The whole point of technology was to