The Company as a Machine for Doing Stuff
You have the right to work only but never to its fruits.
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Hi friends 👋 ,
Happy Tuesday! Short one for you today, about something I’ve been thinking about.
On a recent episode of Jack Altman’s Uncapped podcast, now-former Sequoia Steward Roelof Boetha said that there are too many startups: “There’s a lot more talent than really interesting companies to be built. And I think we’re spreading a lot of that talent thin right now.”
Another way of putting this is that a lot of people are starting startups because they can, not because they can’t not; building startups to win the lottery instead of building the thing they would build if they’d already won it.
This essay is on something I’ve noticed about the really interesting ones.
Let’s get to it.
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The Company as a Machine for Doing Stuff
A couple of months ago, I was down in Medellín, Colombia visiting Forrest Heath and his company, Somos Internet, in which Not Boring Capital invested last year and about which you’ll learn much more soon.
We were sitting on a couch on the third floor of Somos’ new office. As often happens when I spend time with Forrest, the conversation turned to how he would build certain things better, cheaper, and faster.
He could mine uranium from Colombia’s mountains and shovel it pretty much right into imported Canadian CANDU reactors to create tremendous amounts of power cheaply, with no enrichment required, for example. If Colombia was going to take advantage of flying cars, he’d need to build landing pads for them. Medellín is mountainous; he had a plan for building more metro cables throughout the city to unlock more land value.
At one point in the conversation, I said something like, “I hope you make billions and billions of dollars from Somos, because you would make a great billionaire.”
He looked at me kind of confused, like I’d missed the whole point of what he was doing down there, and said something like, “Why would I take money out of Somos? This is the machine I’m building to do all of that stuff.”
Forrest loves building infrastructure. It is the thing that he would do if he could retire tomorrow. But if he retired tomorrow, he would have to start over from scratch; he would be less able to do the things he wants to do. He is building the company to do those things, bigger than he could alone, with other people who want to do them, too.
This is rare.
I think when people get frustrated with the modern instantiation of Y Combinator, and with Silicon Valley more broadly, it’s because they know that there are not dozens of 19-year-olds so obsessed with automating away customer service jobs that they would do it in retirement. Most startups are vehicles for status and wealth, vehicles to accumulate the resources people think they need to do what they actually want to do or work on the thing they actually want to work on, if they even have any idea what that thing might be.
But it’s magical when you find it.
Last week, Brie Wolfson published an essay about her two months working inside of the AI coding startup Cursor, which she concluded with:
Perhaps my best evidence that the prize is the mission is that during my fall at Cursor, I overheard zero chatter from employees about getting rich. At Stripe and Figma (and most other startups), this was a favorite lunch table topic among the first few hundred employees at a decacorn. Yet at Cursor, as the valuation goes up and up, I haven’t heard a peep about the second homes people will buy, the great-great-grandchildren that will be put through college, or the time they’ll take off traversing the world. If people have dollar signs in their eyes, they’re not talking about it much. And I think it’s because the thing most of them would do if they could retire tomorrow would be whatever they’re doing now at Cursor.
There are many ways that people evaluate which startups might turn into really big and important companies, but to me, this is the most important one. It’s a version of a question I like to ask myself and founders: the Lottery Test.
If you won a billion dollars in the lottery tomorrow, would you fuck off to a beach, do something else you actually want to be doing, or roll the billion dollars into doing the thing you’re already doing bigger, faster, and better?
In Brie’s phrasing, would the people working at a company be working there if they could retire tomorrow?
Elon Musk is the canonical example here. He rolled his Zip2 and PayPal winnings into Tesla and SpaceX, at the risk of personal bankruptcy, because work was more important than the financial rewards. The money was useful in bringing together other people who also wanted to do the work.
This is an obvious thing to note, but worth noting: Elon Musk didn’t take his money, buy a big garage and a bunch of parts, and start tinkering away on electric cars and rockets by himself. He started companies, and hired people with the skills necessary to do the work at the scale required, many of whom would do what they did at Tesla and SpaceX if they could retire tomorrow. He wants to take humanity to Mars. He can’t do that alone.
At their best, companies are machines for doing the stuff a founder really wants to do, but bigger, with other people who want to do it too.
The longer I spend investing in and writing about startups, the more I think my job should just be to find the small handful of people who view their companies like Forrest does, and then put as much money and effort as I can behind them to help them build their machines.
Pretty much all Astro Mechanica founder Ian Brooke has ever wanted to do is build and fly fast planes. He’s built or owned like eighteen of them, on his own dime. But to build a supersonic plane, which takes a lot of very smart people, billions of dollars, and many years, he started a company.
Anil and Sunil Varanasi at Meter fit this archetype, too. For my Deep Dive on Meter, I asked Anil what made building the company fun for him: The word he used was “expansiveness.”
Sam Hinkie, who invested in Meter and has spent a lot of time with the Varanasis, said something that really summarizes my whole argument, “These are not people looking to turn their insights into dollars in their pockets soon. Their interest in being acquired or getting to IPO to put money in the bank or go do another thing would really stun people if they realized how low that is.”
The thing that you’re trying to use your company vehicle to accomplish doesn’t have to be a lifelong passion like infrastructure has been for Forrest, planes have been for Ian, or networking has been for Anil and Sunil. Elon didn’t dream of electric cars as a young boy in South Africa.
But it does have to be big enough to remain endlessly fascinating and continue to expand for the decades it takes to build something truly important.
In his interview with Base Power Company co-founder and CEO Zach Dell for the company’s Series C, Terrain’s Willem Van Lancker observed that “The best entrepreneurs become their category, become their product.”
Zach’s explanation of what he learned from his dad’s obsession and how energy similarly captivated him is the best three minutes you can watch on what I’m talking about:
The other day, after reading Brie’s essay and while thinking about this one, I went on a walk with Aishwarya Khanduja, who said at one point “You have the right to work only but never to its fruits,” and then shared an essay she’d written a couple years ago. In it, she called Chapter 2, Verse 47 of the Bhagavad Gita her favorite Sanskrit verse:
कर्मण्येवाधिकारस्ते मा फलेषु कदाचन।
मा कर्मफलहेतुर्भूर्मा ते सङ्गोऽस्त्वकर्मणि॥ २-४७
In English:
You have the right to work only but never to its fruits.
Let not the fruits of action be your motive, nor let your attachment be to inaction.
Most people work for the fruits. It is rare to find people who work for the work itself. Rarer still is to find the situation Brie found at Cursor: a group of people working for the work itself, together, in order to do greater work together than they could alone.
I’m starting to think those groups are the only kind worth backing.
That’s all for today. We’ll be back in your inbox Friday with a Weekly Dose. In the meantime, if there’s a thing you’ve been putting off that you would do if you retired tomorrow, go build it a website.
Thanks for reading,
Packy
This interpretation of the Gita verse is a bit of a stretch. The traditional interpretation (and I believe the correct and useful one) is that your commitment is to doing the “right thing” without attachment to particular success/failure outcomes. Dharma, code of honor, chivalry, that sort of thing. Deontological ethics. What you’re describing sounds like boundless ambition that is in fact very attached to particular outcomes and will do anything to get it, ie consequentialist ethics, means justifying ends, etc (Mars, defeating the “woke mind virus” in Elon’s case). The Gita (and Mahabharata) is like 80% deontological with 20% consequentialist complications that create interesting moral ambiguity in the plot. Krishna, who reveals the Gita to Arjuna, actually sanctions a number of dharma violations throughout the plot of the Mahabharata that provoke much debate even today. So if you want the standard takeaway, it is “be deontological, play by dharma almost always, make judicious consequentialist exceptions sometimes, and you better have the moral judgment of god incarnate when you do.” Closer to this ideal of detached action in Elon’s case would be the “first principles over analogical reasoning” principle, which is a sort of epistemic deontological ethics. One that’s not particularly righteous, and which he’s not particularly consistent about following anyway. Almost all his public reasoning is not just consequentialist but bad faith. Make up justifications that will morally permit what he wants to do anyway, which is a function of his goals.
The point about companies being machines to do things is fine within limits, but there’s a reason we talk of taking money out of companies and putting it elsewhere. It’s not greed. It is humility. It is recognizing other people have ideas too and some of them might be better than yours. It’s willingness to follow as well as lead. It’s allowing other people room to help define the future, not merely participate uncritically in the one you offer. If all you do is let a few people with boundless ambition loose, and let tribes of starry eyed acolytes who buy into the vision follow, you actually create a very impoverished world where the only choices are: Be an Elon, join an Elon, or get out of the way, shut up and say thank you. This is terrible. A world that allows for a wide range of ambitions, and allows a pluralistic future to emerge from many contending opinions about it, creates a fundamentally different ecology of innovation. This is where uncritical Thielism gets you. A monoculture of Muskism-Trumpism and mimesis that gathers all agency in the hands of a few monarchical figures and suppresses all other future visions to the death in a zero-sum way, labeling them enemies to be destroyed.
The discourse about being “agentic” and “you can just do things” is very revealing. The loudness of that rhetoric has been increasing in proportion to agency over the future being aggressively monopolized by fewer and fewer people and their rabid tribes of uncritical missionary admirers.
I think the real test isn’t what someone would do after winning the lottery. It’s what they were doing before anyone cared. The founders who end up building important companies are usually working on something they can’t stop thinking about, long before there’s a company around it. The startup just grows around the obsession. If you took away the company tomorrow, they’d still wake up and keep doing the same thing. That’s the part that is most important.