Infinity
Infinity is enough.
Never having enough in the beginning, we chase more. We're consumed by our own excesses in the end. All because our insatiable appetite was set on everything, early.
It's zero's fault. Time value of money defines zero as perfection. Divide anything by zero and the result is infinity. Even mediocre success in zero time and/or funded by zero capital would be magical. Compound something like that and it would delight forever. More infinity!
Realizing zero isn't possible, we still draw the up and to the right hockey sticks compounding ad infinitum.
Why? Because that's what you get when at the beginning of an S-curve adoption cycle. The alternative plan in which you're too early doesn't get funded. Being the wrong horse is... less pretty.
But if everyone is chasing that exponential growth, what happens when we catch the bus?
It helps to borrow an analogy from one of the greats. Go back to the pyramids, pharaohs and language with which the Ancient Egyptians ruled for three milenia. Imagine all of human wealth were encapsulated in one cubic meter of physical possessions. Then compound it by 4.5%, 1% or even 0.1% for 3,000 years. How much volume would be required?
Surprisingly, only ~0.1% per annum growth can be sustained for more than a couple hundred years. Even then, if compounded for 3,000 years, the implied 20x growth can still crush systems designed for an order of magnitude lower load. British, Mongol, Russian, Spanish and Qing Empires all eventually collapsed due to the same unsustainable physics. That's part of the reason we've globally been borrowing time since WWII. One way or another, entropy wins; the music will stop.
Parking the Malthusian Trap for a moment, young companies need to pick three things:
(1) Output achieved in first 1-2 years
(2) Target impact in the market, world or multiverse
(3) Years allotted to get it done before someone else does, or the heat death of the universe
Make sure both (1) and (2) are impactful, output-based metrics - not vanity metrics like employees or funding. Then work backwards: take the nth root of (2) divided by (1). That's the compound annual growth rate to aim for - every year, consistently. A miss makes the subsequent years harder, and eventually impossible. The timeline cannot change.
Do consider:
(a) the 3-5 year plan will be wrong; but 8-12 years is the minimum to do anything great, and the maximum we have... waiting 15-20 years also doesn't solve
(b) 50% CAGR works, while 100% CAGR (or doubling every year) feels right against the limits outside of software unless you've discovered new physics
Then go crush your plan, but move on before the negative inflection point.
Never having enough in the beginning, we chase more. We're consumed by our own excesses in the end. All because our insatiable appetite was set on everything, early.
It's zero's fault. Time value of money defines zero as perfection. Divide anything by zero and the result is infinity. Even mediocre success in zero time and/or funded by zero capital would be magical. Compound something like that and it would delight forever. More infinity!
Realizing zero isn't possible, we still draw the up and to the right hockey sticks compounding ad infinitum.
Why? Because that's what you get when at the beginning of an S-curve adoption cycle. The alternative plan in which you're too early doesn't get funded. Being the wrong horse is... less pretty.
But if everyone is chasing that exponential growth, what happens when we catch the bus?
It helps to borrow an analogy from one of the greats. Go back to the pyramids, pharaohs and language with which the Ancient Egyptians ruled for three milenia. Imagine all of human wealth were encapsulated in one cubic meter of physical possessions. Then compound it by 4.5%, 1% or even 0.1% for 3,000 years. How much volume would be required?
Surprisingly, only ~0.1% per annum growth can be sustained for more than a couple hundred years. Even then, if compounded for 3,000 years, the implied 20x growth can still crush systems designed for an order of magnitude lower load. British, Mongol, Russian, Spanish and Qing Empires all eventually collapsed due to the same unsustainable physics. That's part of the reason we've globally been borrowing time since WWII. One way or another, entropy wins; the music will stop.
Parking the Malthusian Trap for a moment, young companies need to pick three things:
(1) Output achieved in first 1-2 years
(2) Target impact in the market, world or multiverse
(3) Years allotted to get it done before someone else does, or the heat death of the universe
Make sure both (1) and (2) are impactful, output-based metrics - not vanity metrics like employees or funding. Then work backwards: take the nth root of (2) divided by (1). That's the compound annual growth rate to aim for - every year, consistently. A miss makes the subsequent years harder, and eventually impossible. The timeline cannot change.
Do consider:
(a) the 3-5 year plan will be wrong; but 8-12 years is the minimum to do anything great, and the maximum we have... waiting 15-20 years also doesn't solve
(b) 50% CAGR works, while 100% CAGR (or doubling every year) feels right against the limits outside of software unless you've discovered new physics
Then go crush your plan, but move on before the negative inflection point.
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