success or not, hard to tell...

Several months ago, I purposefully stopped writing in this blog due to my own frustrations with the difficulty of getting Rebound funded. This frustration stemmed from several consecutive failures in a period already filled with other, more personal and impacting failures. In the end I stopped writing in the middle of several posts (which now I will try to finish) because I no longer cared to try to improve such a terribly impossible system.

That feeling has now ebbed a bit. And as it passed, I wanted to capture one side of it: the realization that, due to our own human limits, it is hard to even imagine what success looks like.  

A great analogy for this observation is the way we think about evolution in nature. For even the minority (pathetic right) of Americans who understand evolution to be the way all current living things have come to be, we tend to think about it in terms that we can understand: “survival of the fittest”.

Our own minds force us to think about it this way because it is safe and actionable. The way the thought is organized automatically answers the question “How do I survive?” But the phrase is not just overly simplistic, it is wrong. The fittest statistically survive over vast unimaginable population turnover and the trend is unobservable to any single member of that population living even 100 lives. (that is not to say we can’t observe it, we can, but only due to our long lives relative to some others’) Furthermore “fitness” at any given moment of a population does not guarantee survival, even if “fitness” was a knowable thing. So even if you knew exactly how to become the “fittest” member of your population, you own individual chances of survival are not really measurably higher than the average.  

In the end, evolution is a system by which things improve that, while an observable fact, is incomprehensible to humans. It’s failure to gain acceptance outside of the technical community, is a sign of that incomprehensibility.  Our brains have evolved to survive by solving imminent problems and understanding the system that created them is just not something they are predisposed to do.  

I realized recently that the way we create startups is the same way. So many people claim to understand the system, to control the system, or to have ideas how to improve the system (me being one of them). But in reality, the system is not even something we can understand in the lifetime of one startup, or even a human lifetime of startups.

Like evolution, we reduce what we observe to understandable ideas: MVPs, 5^th level leaders, failing fast, etc etc. These thoughts are safe an actionable, but they don’t really help that much on a day-to-day basis. They may give your startup some tiny advantage making it slightly more “fit”. But they do very little to improve a startups chance of survival. I don’t really have an answer to this. Nor do I know how to improve the system.

In the end, the only real thing to do is to try.