The old motto: Build something people want. Anything at all!
The new motto: Build something the world needs.
The old method: Pivot until exponential growth.
The new method: Work backwards from utopia.
I meet many people who are beautifully eager to start companies, despite the low expected value of pain-to-payoff. Founders early in their journey, more whirlwind than dynamo, seek an answer to a simple question:
How do I decide what to work on?
(AKA What should my startup do?)
I’ve spewed some version of the received wisdom on this many times: Find a set of customers who has a problem and build something quick and dirty to solve it. Use that initial traction as your base camp to solve the same or adjacent problems for an ever widening set of people. Rinse, repeat, billionaire!
That advice today is not just bad, it’s irresponsible.
We used to send the brightest entrepreneurs out into a field with a divining rod, a pep talk, and a $2M seed round. Maybe they’d turn their ambition into a world-changing product and strike a rich vein of oil! If not, try, try again. (No wonder even this method’s biggest boosters are expressing regrets.)
Lean startup ideas date from an era when the financial establishment was on fire and founders were the optimistic barbarians at the gates. In the late 2000s, it felt like we could freely experiment around the ashes and hope to build something new, and the cash flowed to make it so. Hacking was entrepreneurship. We owed the world little.
Now Los Angeles is on fire, tech runs much of the socioeconomic show, and we owe the world much more. The stakes for humanity right now are higher than they have ever been. Some have incredible abundance; yet material suffering is as widespread as it is unnecessary, feeding the righteous indignation of working people everywhere. The climate crisis threatens to change the planet beyond its ability to support our population. An anti-cooperative world politics could slide all too easily into nuclear annihilation. You are probably addicted to the news, so I’ll leave the list there.
Startups have moved from the edge to the absolute center. Founders with moral hearts and clear minds are rejecting the old ways. I don’t want to invest in startups that wander blithely the way we did 15 years ago. I want all my money and effort to go only into possible futures worth inhabiting. The world needs startups to imagine those better worlds and pull them forward to the present.
The old ways
Circa 2008, the release of the iPhone and quantitative easing combined into a potent acid-base volcano of opportunity. Anyone with a modicum of programming ability and common sense perceived that every industry was gleefully up for grabs.
It felt like code gave us the power to build skyscrapers without blueprints. Find a problem you understand, hack together something that solves it in a small way, then experiment relentlessly until you’ve solved it for a much larger market of millions of people.
What a product would eventually do, what impact it might have? Not nearly as important as maneuvering speed. Instagram began life as Bourbn, an unpopular Foursquare clone whose photos were the draw. Slack was a failed gaming company’s chat tool. Both amplified a small feature of unrelated software into culture-defining platforms and massive sales.
(I know the origins of our startup-building methods well, because they date from when I caught the startup bug myself. Before I ended up at Tumblr, I had a turn as one of these feverish pivoters. After spending 8-10 hours at my relatively demanding actual engineering job, I would take the subway home to Brooklyn and spend the whole evening in front of my laptop, trying to build products that I hoped would become companies. Something massive, something important, seemed just an evening of clacking in TextMate away. I had a rotating cast of co-conspirators, building things with absurd names like FollowWidget. It was enormously fun.)
The new ways
So, you’re a founder in 2025. How do you know what to build, and how do you get started building it?
My advice is to work backwards from utopia.
Illustrate the worthwhile future
Put yourself in a world a decade from now, maybe even twenty years ahead. Look around. Describe vividly the world you want to live in. Isolate the elements that make it safe, sane, joyful, surprising, creative, beautiful, livable, nourishing, alive. What, in that perfect future, is abundant which is today rare or impossible?
Illuminate a tiny slice of of a compelling human future. Give us your solarpunk, your scaleable housing for all, your clean water distilled from the air, your fully automated food supply. Gravitate towards your personal expertise. Make this future real in words, in drawings, in whatever form gives the vision power.
I choose the word utopia intentionally. What you seek is a vivd guiding myth, not a master plan. This vision is not the end of your work nor a roadmap.
Thinking this way is harder than it seems. Short-termism and greed dominate our current culture, masquerading as grand visions. Avoid those traps! Don’t take this a call to build the perfectly moated monopoly of American lawn-trimming.
But also don’t limit yourself to basic utility: The world needs joy as much as it needs clean energy. I’d gladly fund founders with a vision to bring us exponentially greater amounts of either.
Build its first artifact
With this sharp vision of the future in hand, now comes step two: work backwards. Envision all the developments needed to get to that future, however fanciful, however wrong, until you unwind all the way to today.
Put yourself in the shoes of a historian in the future. You are looking back at the year 2025. What first seeds of the beautiful world were planted? What surprising elements of technology and culture combined to augur the greatness of today? What necessary infrastructure was built that opened the door to your utopia?
Isolate that first artifact, that first product, the very first node in the development tree that leads to the world you want. The first step may not look like much, it may even look like play. No matter. Go build that first little nugget of the history of the better world. Build it today, for that future to be possible.
An example may help. Take fan favorite tech company, SpaceX. In Musk’s utopia—which, I’ll be honest, I have some qualms with—humanity has ready to access to the stars and spreads across the solar system. If you were a historian from 2100, you would note that it all began with innovations that radically lowered the difficulty and cost to reach space in the 2010s. And this is exactly what SpaceX has built.
This method works for more earthbound founders as well. I was the first investor in Headway. At their inception in 2018, the utopia they imagined was simple enough: Everyone in America who needs a therapist, should be able to see a therapist. At first, they solved what seemed like an absolutely niche but real problem. They made it easy for people who did have insurance to get more easily reimbursed for seeing an out-of-network therapist. This isn’t even part of their business today, but it was the critical first waypoint—it was what would need to be true in 2018 for everyone in America who needed it to be able to see a therapist in 2030.
Who will build like this?
The best founders today know what the Good Place looks like, and they are building by tiny increments to get there.
Companies like this are not easy, not that any startup ever is. Only a select set of founders will switch to this mode. The old ways have a way of sticking around.
The best founders of today will not look like the last crop. New methods require an outsider’s mindset. The next great founders will be artists turning their practice into products; quiet experts in scientific fields jumping from the research bench into company-making; college students who didn’t drop out, who studied their history and want to alter the timeline in a very precise way. I think of recent investments like Opponent, which represents Ian Cheng’s vision of a future where screens can offer kids unbounded, mind-building play instead of virtual drugs.
The earliest versions of our better future are being built right now, not by founders seeking miniature problems to kickstart their empires, but by clear-headed historians of the future, working backwards from the world they want to live in.
If you’re one of those venturesome few, I’d love to meet you.