Thesis in the driver seat
TLDR: With the popularity of a Redditor who 1,000x’d his initial investment of capital, and Bezos who 2000x’d his initial investment of time/energy into what is the trillion dollar company that is Amazon; we can see that thesis driven investments, monetary or not can hit home runs more often than a one-hit wonder
I’ve been staring at these twitter side projects (or startups?) and have been slowly thinking what the point of most of them are. It’s hard figuring out why people are trying to raise money on a html site with a typeform waiting list.... like where is the thesis behind them; why do we need another assistant or another genz marketing studio, what’s the thesis, not just the moat/value prop: how’s this going to be a trillion dollar company?
Most ideas/startups fail to answer this and unsurprisingly many don’t get funding. If you think whatever you’re building is for fun and games, I believe you should stop working on it. Full stop. If there’s no thesis that drives what you’re doing that can potentially be insanely big, I really don’t see a point trying to build small startups/side projects even if you’re “trying out new tools”.
Some examples that I believe are thesis driven and can potentially be trillion dollar companies (figuratively not literally):
- Branch:
What’s the point of expensive real estate and awkward zoom calls when you can artificially generate serendipity and hide behind a character on a screen? What’s the point of Slack, Zoom, and the weird little Slack add on that is Donut.com? Add in Notion and Linear integrations and you’ve got yourself a full on office.
- Atomic Search / Golden:
Why is search so linear? Why are we just searching through lists of html sites when you can create knowledge graphs instead and search among that? Why is called the web when google’s just indexing the web into a trillion index cards one after the other?
- Atmos
Why is home building such a tedious process? Why can’t you just build homes with a click of the button; no need to worry about all the regulatory stuff or anything: just plot and build.
- Circle.so
In a world where everyone consumes content, why do content creators need to build discord servers and websites? Why not just share your value as a content creators to consumers without all the algorithmic BS?
- Railway/Repl.it/Fig
Most programmers aren’t doing crazy shit. They’re just doing plain old React or some Ruby; why does it take so long to go from 0 -> production? Why do I need to go to the terminal, install a bunch of package managers to then install packages to then finally run locally?? Then I need to codify all that bs into a docker file and deploy it onto a bare metal server and setup a load balancer / reverse proxy and then setup ssl every few months to make sure my certs are valid??? And what if I’m coding with a coworker and we want to collaborate? wtf am I supposed to to then, wait for him to make a commit, review it, wait for ci/cd, merge it, then I need to pull it, and then add my hello world print statement?
Probably a lot of companies I’m forgetting because I’m on a coffee high, but whenever you’re working on something or investing in something: look for thesis. Forget execution or any other BS a “I sold 10 companies for a billion” clubhouse room tells you, for you to start a company..... just have a strong thesis and show people why you can be a trillion dollar company.
Show why you can re-invent real estate like Airbnb/opendoor or why 10 years no one will ever step a foot out their door like amazon/instacart. Or show why people won’t need to pick their outfits because Stitchfix will figure it out and ship it to you. Show why you think why a company whose shares are shorted more than there are shares available will have a short squeeze in a year.
Forget short term gains, look for long term mega gains. If you’re wrong, you’re screwed out of like 10 years of your life and a ton of money. But if you’re right, you’re a god.
End note: Wrote this in like 20 min; im not proofreading this shit, because this is a newsletter not a blog, take everything with a few pounds of salt, and I’ll probably regret a lot of this in the future. Good luck!