Building start-ups from first principles
/
In my opinion one of the most helpful things YC has done for the start-up ecosystem is to apply a reductive mindset to start-up strategy: Make something people want. There is so much wisdom contained in that one sentence.
The thing it reminds me of most is studying mechanics at university. The way I was taught mechanics, your goal is to take a small set of first principles (mainly Newton’s laws of motion) and learn how to rigorously apply them to understand the motion of physical objects. The point in a classical mechanics course where you apply these simple laws and end up with a model of how a gyroscope works is breathtaking.
I watched Elon Musk speak at the Dublin Web Summit, and one of the most helpful points he made was that innovation is the product of reasoning from first principles (good summary here). Given his current set of companies he was mainly referring to the first principles of physics/chemistry, but I think there are some similar first principles for building start-ups that must be discovered and applied. YC’s motto feels like one of them. Like Newton’s laws of motion, the hard part isn’t reading the sentence once, the hard part is learning how to apply it to understand a gyroscope. Paul Graham’s essays on start-ups and their early customers often feel like the course notes that explain how to apply that first principle.
One of the hard things about being a start-up CEO is simultaneously building a product and a business from first principles whilst recognising the need to market your business through narrative and analogy. The classic example here is the “X of Y” pitch that drives most investor pitches. Narrative and storytelling is an incredibly important component of marketing and quickly explaining what you do. But if you want to build a great product & business, and you try to do that by analogy, you will fail. So the art is to learn how to use first principles when you are building, and analogy when you are selling.