The irresistible allure of Everything
In 1998, when Amazon was an ambitious startup, Jeff Bezos, said, “We want to make every book available-the good, the bad & the ugly.”
Looking at Amazon’s sprawling foray into commerce, streaming, AWS, and now healthcare AND space, one might say Brad Stone’s book ‘The Everything Store?’ in its title may have undersold Bezos’ ambition.
Zuckerberg while morphing Facebook beyond a cliquey, college-focused networking website imagined a mobile-first “open social utility”, envisioning nearly 3bn users, guided by the move-fast-and-break-things mantra.
Founders start with good intentions but where do they reach in the end?
The Good. Good intentions
Founders take a daydream and will it into a vision. A Herculean feat.
They find the one insight that makes them unique to get funding. No easy challenge.
They build on that insight until they gain some traction. Necessary.
Then they race to make that traction into enough of a ramp that they can dominate. Dominating is good- it is important to survive. There is also the competition with others who will outexecute you in the ‘now’ if you miss the ball.
The Bad. Joining the table.
And that brings them to the battle of survival. Choices have already been made to get this far and the team is executing.
Startup fundraising’s open secret is investors want 10X+ returns. To keep promising 10X returns with confidence when they return to investors for more funding, founders go big, sometimes not with enough evidence that it will work.
The race to execute drives to tact, which can lead to missed opportunities. Expedia shut down a short-term rental business it created from 2 acquisitions (Pillow and ApartmentJet). Vreal, a VR streaming platform shut down after raising $12M in Series A, unable to find enough demand for their product or find a pivot, while VR companies founded before Vreal managed to survive.
And worst of all, as a founder you could end up no more having that unique, differentiating insight and the competition might.
The Ugly. The irresistible allure of becoming Everything
Vision vs Reality
Medium is founded by Twitter founder Evan Williams. The hope was to transform publishing on the internet by giving anyone with an interest in writing space to do it in a far longer form than is possible on Twitter. In a way, Medium pioneered thoughtful writing for the average user.
Medium Mission
The best ideas can change who we are. Medium is where those ideas take shape, take off, and spark powerful conversations. We’re an open platform where over 100 million readers come to find insightful and dynamic thinking.
Medium’s vision has been to be where ideas take shape, take off and spark powerful conversations. But it completely missed the Newsletter economy.
Medium’s vision has been to be where ideas take shape, take off and spark powerful conversations. But it completely missed the Newsletter economy.
Evan Williams is an exceptional founder who uniquely had the credibility and experience from founding Twitter but not the obligation to run it. He is one of the few people who dared to set a vision beyond the transactional.
Vision vs Reality
Facebook’s mission statement is “ to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected.” A nuanced journey that much of the world has taken along with Facebook going from when that used to be true to not, and several swings on both sides, thanks to their acquisition strategy which worked sometimes (WhatsApp, Instagram) but also failed (Snapchat).
Facebook’s mission is to make the world more connected. But it missed out on communities as a form of connection.
Facebook’s mission is to make the world more connected. But it missed out on communities as a form of connection.
The irresistible allure of becoming Everything.
Not every idea, not every startup is positioned to think as big as Medium, Amazon, and Facebook. But when the right founder taps the right idea at the right time, the desire for it to become everything, the unique combination of observing the world as is and also being able to visualize what can be, that is what fuels them to get started in the first place. Founding the company is giving into that desire and that can become evident in the Everything-ness of the pitch, the vision, or the mission of the company they create.
The ugly. The vastness of reality
And yet, despite the bold start, startups that go on to create and dominate new demand curves are not, in reality scratching the surface of what their size and share would suggest in fulfilling that mission.
This is the ugly side of the desire for Everything. This is Facebook missing out on communities, and this is Medium missing out on Newsletters.
One obvious suspect why this happens is the company forgets how to execute the way it did in the early days. Survival means onwards progress, and to reach the world the company grows its own size until it no more can operate like before. This decline in innovation as the company becomes bigger is well studied and researched.
How big technology systems are slowing innovation
The inability to innovate does not quite explain it entirely. This is a deeper disconnect that some startup-turned-large companies have been able to avoid but many others have not. Many others can’t keep up.
This is the ugly. The earnest attempt to become everything, that starts well but does not always end well for startups.
This is why, among other reasons, large companies will acquire emerging startups with products that fit their space (a.k.a their mission) and the most successful big companies who have thrived over cycles have moats or ecosystems so the next new idea does not take them down.
What is more interesting, at least to me, is what this means for founders.
If you are founding a company in a space that already is served by big tech or big co in a non-tech industry, will you be for or against an acquisition? That question may be waiting for you down the line, and your survival may depend on it.
How would you articulate your mission? Is the vision that moves you incomplete if it is not everything, so to speak, the way Evan Williams and Zuckerberg did? And will you take that road knowing how hard it may be to accomplish even after reaching several measures of success that may today seem impossible?
Thanks for reading Part 1.
In Part 2, I will cover why I am optimistic about the future being different.