startups as managing a whiteout.

I used to think the greatest issue within running a company would be finding the idea, people, or a market of some sort. It comes inherently with the seducing challenge of being able to make all of these factors work in lockstep towards perfect consistency, enabling you to make an inordinate amount of money and impact on the world at the same time.

The reality, of course, is a bit more complicated than that. Where I used to see businesses as a vehicle for making money, I now see them as systemized entities designed to problem solve with a specific goal. Most of bureaucracy and structure as a company grows, is an attempt to problem solve or to provide guidance towards how to do it.

There has been a thread, and I don't quite know how to frame it, of a phenomenon that I've seen repeat again and again. This happens at every level of a startup, but is most pronounced within founders. It is also often a source of friction with others, both inside and outside the business.

A business is like a child, where it requires a great amount of commitment and resource intensity to be able to stand on its' own. It also requires ever evolving amounts of problem solving, and information to come in that shifts the direction of a company or improves it.

In many ways: a company is an engine. It is constantly churning, looking for material to eat, to theoretically create a product that makes money at scale. Because of the constant input required by the engine, humans are constantly making split second decisions at a rate unparalleled.

This engine exists in every corporate entity, but is uniquely tough in startups.

#1 - There is not a baseline of history to fit to, so things are constantly evolving and the highs and lows only get bigger as time goes on.

#2 - A startup can have less bureaucracy and financial resources to manage this middle that handles the dissemination of knowledge. Startups can often rely on a few, key core people who own the entire mental model of the organization.

#3 - The choices a startup may make are exponentially compounding, and can be often life altering for the path of a company in a way very few mature corporate decisions are.

Because you as a founder or employee of this startup are always "in it", you constantly live in this mental model of your company. And most complexity when it comes to communicating or getting across your point is translating this model, adding your perspective to it, holding this model in multiple different states from different angles, and being able to perceive an action and predict where it may go. You are doing this all of the time, under so many conditions.

In physical terms, a whiteout is a weather condition where the surroundings blend into the landscape, rendering it hard to see or to make out anything in front of you. The horizon blends into the ground, leading normal directional cues to be almost useless.

In startup terms, the whiteout is the constant envelopment of mental model gathering and shifting that someone must do to exist and excel in a startup environment. I used to think the hardest part of a startup is gathering the skills, and I now feel that it is managing the whiteout.

When the whiteout takes over too much, someone experiences problems on so many interpersonal and communal levels.

Interpersonally, someone may ONLY talk about their company, as it is what takes up all of their brain and what they have given the most time to. This is great in a company, but greatly annoying if you are in a relation with someone whose sole topic is their company. It also reduces the ability of someone to stop thinking about a topic enough to get distance and valuable perspective from it.

Someone may also be tightly coupled to their company, and unable to divest from their work life to the point where the fate of them and the company are intertwined. They become enmeshed with themselves and the corporate entity as one, therefore unable to see themselves and their perspective as one of many.

They can also have such a multi-sided model and hold so many extramarital thoughts that they cannot form a cohesive opinion on their own, because they are always aiming to optimize for the best outcome.

There are many founders who I have met that are unable to form their own opinion clearly about a situation, because they have taken in too much advice or narratives and face a "decision paralysis" side effect. First time founders specifically struggle with this ability to make their own decisions or to trust their own voice.

Within the context of a company environment, a whiteout keeps people in crisis mode. It keeps them at the level of which they are operating, which is the day to day prospect of constantly problem solving. Often, successful companies are navigating the unknown at a span of different time horizons: day to day, month to month, year to year.

The whiteout definitionally prevents that. Someone, or even the company, is too overwhelmed with organizing a single or multiple time horizons to even be able to focus on managing all of them.

For example, companies who are in extreme states of funding or change face this often. Companies who just raised cannot imagine a resource constrained world, and companies who are running out of money cannot imagine a world of abundance before them.

How a company exists and operates is fluid over time, and managing that mental fluidity and viewing decisions over multiple time horizons is mentally taxing.

A whiteout is burnout amplifying. It can be a source of extremes that enables people in certain conditions to excel at their jobs, or is ruinous. These extreme conditions permeate everything in the startup industry, and why walking into it feels more like gambling than it does committing to a career. When someone owns their job so entirely and is unable to see a land beyond it, they define success as the whiteout subsiding. But it never ceases. It always continues. You must manage to find your way through it despite the disabling nature of it.

The whiteout can be a thing that your brain naturally does in order to steep you and orient you towards the level of problem you are aiming to solve. It may also limit your purview to yourself entirely, keeping you suspended in a state of time and perspective that will blind you if look at it too much.

I'm thinking of the whiteout for many reasons:

#1) we are learning how to manage it at Faura, and in my personal life.

#2) I have both been with people in the whiteout, and have been the one inside of it and have come to see the effect it has on interpersonal relations.

#3) I'm reading the book "Steve Jobs in Exile", which concisely drives a lot of these points home for me. It speaks to how Steve Jobs' strengths became his biggest enemy when he was founding NeXT. His multiple personal desires actually undermined many chances for NeXT to get the market share, the lack of which eventually killed it.

He fucked up a lot, and started a family and had a life outside of work. He learned that he was not always correct and at time was conflating the will of himself personally with that of the company. Most of the benefits that he brought to the products of extreme focus, pushing without compromise, and a highly aggressive vision can be seen as byproducts of the whiteout.

I used to be incredibly impressed by people with intense sustained focus and a hustle that transcended human capabilities. Now, having seen the cost of what that is, I don't know if I find it to be an advantage as I once did.

I also don't particularly know what the solution to it is. Building a life outside of work, and having other values and markers of worth outside of a career seem to be the start. I admire my friends a lot more who have other hobbies and things they can invest in, and also admire people strongly when they are in crunch-time who are able to maintain a sense of self among it all. Definitely, a major solution is staying the fuck off of LinkedIn.

I am struggling to not let the alluring pull of investing deeply into my career take away from the life that would benefit from it.

Unfortunately, it's only when you're able to manage the whiteout, that you can actually find out where the fuck you're going.