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 was referring to that early all-in specifically, not the entire Elon arc, but heard. I like the modern examples better.
Of course we need both. Personally, I think there’s something very cool about people pulling a bunch of people together to work on a specific big problem they care a lot about.
Need to come back on this because I'm not smart enough to respond in real time, particularly to the Gita point, but on the companies as machines to do things section, I don't think that's what I'm trying to say. There's a lot of room between "Elon or Else" and everyone builds their own thing, and a lot of variations of vision / approach within the "companies as machines" group - Cursor and Base seem very different from each other.
I harp on Elon because you held him up as a canonical example. Cursor and your Colombian friend can likely stand on their own and be richer examples that way. Elonwashing would be bad and impoverishing even if he were a good canonical case. And it’s endemic now. As for lots of room — my point precisely. It’s room that gets taken over as narratives like this reinforce monocultural tendencies and fetishize missionary commitment. People solving for dollars and exits aren’t necessarily villains anymore than missionary types are necessarily heroes. You need both types and many more types besides.
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.
I came through science, so most people were doing the thing they would do if they won the lottery. Except then they would be able to stop having to apply for funding every three years!
As I read my way through this, so many thoughts, questions, realizations, and acknowledgements slid, floated, and flew through my mind. This has got to be the best thought piece for any startup founder to read and use to examine the real reasons they're doing what they're doing. I had to come to some hard realizations; but, I also got to give credit for what we want to accomplish.
I have to address some other pressing tasks right now, but I'm giving myself time this evening to reread this, make copious notes on my favorite pad with my favorite pen before publishing anything online about my motivations for building Kithli.com.
I'm a SWE on a sick leave for a few months and I love Cursor. In the past few months I developed 20+ projects with Cursor, from small Chrome extensions to webapps with complex and sophisticated features. The productivity to development has been accelerated by so much by LLMs, that now any ideas even those would used to seem too ambitious can easily be prototyped and turned into a full product. I am definitely feeling the pure joy of creation and doing things from the work itself. I don't have weekends; even with AI I can't keep up with the speed my mind generating new ideas.
"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."
"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."
Funny how people describe companies as engines of productivity when most early stage ones behave more like elaborate Rube Goldberg contraptions. The moment the machine finally clicks into place is the moment investors like me stop pretending we understood the mechanism all along.
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 was referring to that early all-in specifically, not the entire Elon arc, but heard. I like the modern examples better.
Of course we need both. Personally, I think there’s something very cool about people pulling a bunch of people together to work on a specific big problem they care a lot about.
Cathedral building is cool
But creating or participating a bazaar is cooler in my book :)
The meta-bazaar is that we each get our own books!
Need to come back on this because I'm not smart enough to respond in real time, particularly to the Gita point, but on the companies as machines to do things section, I don't think that's what I'm trying to say. There's a lot of room between "Elon or Else" and everyone builds their own thing, and a lot of variations of vision / approach within the "companies as machines" group - Cursor and Base seem very different from each other.
I harp on Elon because you held him up as a canonical example. Cursor and your Colombian friend can likely stand on their own and be richer examples that way. Elonwashing would be bad and impoverishing even if he were a good canonical case. And it’s endemic now. As for lots of room — my point precisely. It’s room that gets taken over as narratives like this reinforce monocultural tendencies and fetishize missionary commitment. People solving for dollars and exits aren’t necessarily villains anymore than missionary types are necessarily heroes. You need both types and many more types besides.
Do we though 👀
Book-burners all around
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.
I came through science, so most people were doing the thing they would do if they won the lottery. Except then they would be able to stop having to apply for funding every three years!
Would be a very nice way to do science!
Indeed. Forgot to say I really liked the article. Thanks for writing it!
As I read my way through this, so many thoughts, questions, realizations, and acknowledgements slid, floated, and flew through my mind. This has got to be the best thought piece for any startup founder to read and use to examine the real reasons they're doing what they're doing. I had to come to some hard realizations; but, I also got to give credit for what we want to accomplish.
I have to address some other pressing tasks right now, but I'm giving myself time this evening to reread this, make copious notes on my favorite pad with my favorite pen before publishing anything online about my motivations for building Kithli.com.
I'm a SWE on a sick leave for a few months and I love Cursor. In the past few months I developed 20+ projects with Cursor, from small Chrome extensions to webapps with complex and sophisticated features. The productivity to development has been accelerated by so much by LLMs, that now any ideas even those would used to seem too ambitious can easily be prototyped and turned into a full product. I am definitely feeling the pure joy of creation and doing things from the work itself. I don't have weekends; even with AI I can't keep up with the speed my mind generating new ideas.
Love this and thanks for the perspective!
Similar idea from Levy's Facebook:
"I mean, like, anyone from Harvard can get a job and make a bunch of money. Not everyone at Harvard can have a social network."
“Try as hard as you can to not have a billion dollars.” Kevin Kelly, Founder/Editor, Wired
"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."
I think you are right.
"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."
I think you are right.
Great work!
If Bhagavad Gita is a logical part of a post; it changes journalism to philosophy.. and captivates the reader
This is exactly why I started my newsletter on here
Writing + thinking about what interest me now > waiting to have the right permission/credentials
"Falling in love with the problem" is real. And meaningful.
Both great and terrible companies are cybernetic organisms, part human and part machine. Part II of Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” is about this.
Funny how people describe companies as engines of productivity when most early stage ones behave more like elaborate Rube Goldberg contraptions. The moment the machine finally clicks into place is the moment investors like me stop pretending we understood the mechanism all along.