Maybe I’ve got it all wrong about startups
Stop selling me the pitch and start selling me the novel
Many of you who know me know that I like to rail against any whiff of companies trying to sell me their “meaning.” I’ve wished before, for example, to find a place where the leaders are openly skeptical about their mission and vision. More generally, I’ve discussed how I want to work at companies where the group meaning never trumps the individual — that even the CEO could show up to work and say “I’m depressed today and I don’t want to work,” and then she’d get to work and that would be fine.
But maybe I’ve been looking at it in the wrong way.
In the grand scheme of things, for me life is meaningless. Or maybe I should say that meaning rapidly deteriorates once we go beyond a radius of one to two people. My relationship with my wife and my parents is a lot more meaningful than my relationship with, say, my relationship with my great uncle or Barack Obama. The same goes for work, the litmus test being that when we quit — if we’re being honest — we almost always quit because someone has hurt us and/or someone at another company has given us affection. It has little to do with “mission” or “vision.”
But life’s relative meaninglessness doesn’t prevent me from engrossing myself in a good novel or a Netflix series. Complex narrative might not provide meaning in a grand sense, but it does sure help pass the time. Sometimes it even helps us create meaning in the small sense by bringing together people into that one or two person radius that we call “community.”
What I want to suggest is that maybe instead of running away from meaningful companies, we should double down on them. What would it be like to make a company where purpose went beyond a mission and vision statement? Where the company unfolded like a novel, full of complexity and nuance? If it were just another way of avoiding our fear of death and building ego, yes, but a worthy one?
I remember when I was a history TA teaching my students about how to write a college-level history paper. The introduction should generally have a four-part structure where you introduce the problem, the question, the warrant and the hypothesis. I taught this because it’s a formula distilled from historians’ collective experience and it’s effective at conveying the kinds of stories that historians want to tell.
Just as a history paper’s introduction is only the beginning, however, a company’s mission and vision are just prologue. Yet entrepreneurs have come to worship prologue as the entire story, building entire frameworks upon rigorously honing in on assumptions that follow from concrete statements, writing hypotheses and validating them. I would know, I’ve been one of those entrepreneurs! And yet it’s never felt quite satisfying.
People say startups are sexy because they want to change the world. If you ask me, though, the reason we really find startups sexy is because they more than any other corporate entity can create complex and fresh stories. It’s the converse of my general rule that startups, with their limited resources and runway, are usually instruments par excellence for exploiting gaps in the market in innovative ways rather than being the most technically innovative. Big companies may have the resources and momentum to create big and powerful internal stories that dominate our lives, but they must remain simple. Coca-Cola’s How I Met Your Mother will never seduce you the way that the next Facebook’s House of Cards will. (I’m talking here about stories internal to the company’s culture, not its products.) I think that we know this intuitively even if we don’t state it.
The alternative in my mind to doubling down on corporate narrative is to remove narrative completely or, as I’ve advocated, to acknowledge that whatever narrative exists is limited and flawed and in the grand scheme of things rather foolish. I’m coming to recognize that removing narrative and meaning entirely isn’t possible, if only because a company is a thing that exists very much in This World. Asking one to strip itself of all existential illusions would be like asking a sitting president to become a social justice activist — perhaps you’re just barking up the wrong tree.
Acknowledging the limits of narrative and instilling a sense of humility and respect for life outside of the corporate narrative, however, isn’t incompatible with fostering a deep, rich and evolving corporate story. To the contrary, it unifies two magnificent life-giving principles: building a healthy ego as well as deconstructing it.
