Schrödinger’s Startup
Military metaphors have been weirdly popular in business for a very long time, and the startup world is sadly no exception. If you’re part of the circus, there’s a reasonable chance you might have been ‘killing it’, went on a ‘retreat’, ‘established a bridgehead’, or hell, ‘disrupted’ an entire industry — and all of these probably count towards your ‘competitive advantage’.
Two very readworthy VC bloggers have taken note of this recently: Roy Bahat of Bloomberg Beta points out how military “metaphor[s] justif[y] so much awful behavior. What’s a little environmental harm done by your company while building your product — if we’re at war.”
Likewise, Albert Wenger of USV also considers this type of jargon to be problematic — after all, “Nobody is shooting at you”. At the same time, he admits of being guilty of the habit himself when talking about the “The Fog of War”:
Have you ever been in a super stressful situation that afterwards, when things had calmed down, possibly weeks or months later felt like it was part of a dream or a movie? Well startups can be a lot like that especially around critical events such as a potential financing or sale of a company or a product launch. I have been calling it the “Fog of Startups”, after the expression the “Fog of War” but as I will point out in a minute that analogy is problematic.
I concur with the desire to stop the lame jingoist jargon, so here’s another, more civilian way to think about the startup uncertainty Albert describes:
Schrödinger’s Startup.
A startup really becomes Schrödinger’s Startup in the situations of extreme uncertainty that Albert points out: an exit, a financing round, closing a big new customer etc. In these situations, it feels as if the company could simulatenously be extremely successful and a total failure at the very same time — and for as long as the outcome is unknown (epistemologically), isn’t it arguably really both?
Unlike the “Fog of War”, Schrödinger’s Startup extends beyond crisis-mode — in a way, every non-mature startup company is in a constant state of Schrödingerist uncertainty (see this NYTimes piece on Google in 2002). This also explains the tendency of entrepreneurs to describe their journey as a high frequency oscillatory ‘rollercoaster’ (another fun non-military metaphor).
At the same time, thinking about all of this as Schroedinger’s Startup provides a way to solve and grow beyond crises: the black box of uncertainty can be openend, and it is the entrepreneur’s job to open these boxes and figure out herself what the truth really is, both on a macro and micro level.
A few micro examples:
- Your unlaunched mobile app. It could be smash hit success, it could be not. Only one way to find out.
- Your massive enterprise SaaS customer who stopped using your product a month ago. They might be about to churn. Or not. Only one way to find out.
- Is your company fundable? Are you going to be able to raise a Series A?
Only one way to find out.
On the macro level, one will find that a startup is not a single black box and more like a “Schrödinger’s Matryoshka”, whose ultimate truth table will only reveal itself through constant iterative box-openings.
Maybe it is this continuous courage to keep opening all those black boxes that really defines entrepreneurial activity? All sans the war, of course.
