Telescoping Ambition
All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake up in the day to find it was vanity, but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dreams with open eyes, to make it possible. - T.E Lawrence, The Seven Pillars of Wisdom
Everybody wants to be a bodybuilder, but nobody wants to lift no heavy-ass weights. - Ronnie Coleman
Any resemblance to people living, dead, or fictional, is purely coincidental.
San Francisco is delusional, and has been for a long time. This is occasionally a good thing; San Francisco is one of the few places capable of taking big ideas seriously when they’d be laughed out of the room anywhere else, and in tech SF provides the funding and social infrastructure to let people run with them. For this reason SF tends to attract people with big ideas, and people drawn to big ideas. Sometimes this is a pretty bad thing; big ideas tend to be totalizing, and often attract vulnerable people just seeking some sort of meaning they can subsume themselves in. This ruins lives. I live in Charlie Manson’s old neighborhood.
The status hierarchy in SF tech circles revolves around big ideas; when every tenth person you meet has a couple million bucks lying around between their couch cushions, and when everyone dresses like shit, your social standing is proportional to your ability to think up or appropriate some vision of a fundamentally different world, and your ability to convince others that the ideas are important and that you’re serious. That couple million in couch change quickly turns into a couple million in seed funding if you can pull it off.
Unfortunately, it’s much easier to become a preacher of grandiose visions than it is to actually execute. This leads to a lot of LARP. You can live off a seed round for a long time, even with SF rents, and if your vision is big enough it’s assumed that executing will take a long time too - you don’t need to show results anytime soon. This frees up a lot of spare time for parties and conferences. It’s a lifestyle choice unique to SF. By the time the money dries up everyone will have moved on and you can flip your “””founder experience””” into “scouting” for a tier 2 VC firm and it’s onward to associate from there.
In SF, the existence of the LARP is a cost of business. Some of the big ideas turn out to be important, and it’s morally good that VCs burn piles of money to find out which ones they are.
It’s easy to treat any sufficiently big idea as bullshit on its face. Ordinarily this would be an excellent filter; most big ideas; about civilization, society, technology, whatever you like, are bullshit, and should not concern anyone beyond maybe an intellectual exercise. But for an ambitious person, this basic bullshit filter isn’t good enough, because the most important ideas are big ideas which happen to be true.
I have an engineering education and come from a Slavic background, but also an innate drive to make stuff people want, so naturally I’ve struggled with this tension my entire life. As easy as it is to LARP, it’s even easier to be a cynic; if you just assume everything is bullshit, you’re going to be right almost all of the time. Every well-funded failed startup, every technology that didn’t work out, everything that is ‘obviously nonsense from the start’ is another proof point for that worldview. But being right about these things is both easy and unimportant. Failure is overdetermined.
What should ambitious people do to avoid falling into either of these traps? How do you tell the real from the fake, especially in San Francisco? I don’t have any easy answers, I’ve been wrong about this a lot, but this has been important enough for me that I’ve put in serious effort to figure it out.
I’ve spent the last year and a half or so building my company, Chroma. About six months ago, I realized that I was doing my co-founder and my team a great disservice because I didn’t really have a clear ambition for what the company could become. I found that I had a mental block when I thought about Chroma as a sufficiently big idea.
I could go through the motions of talking about how data companies become big and important in the abstract, but if we were going to succeed that had to change to something much more concrete. I had to find a way to think about my company’s future that wouldn’t just feel like a LARP, but would actually connect with what we were doing concretely, every day. I needed to find a way to take my own ideas seriously.
When I want to understand something deeply I read about its history - a technology, an idea, a company, a nation, etc. In particular I try to get a sense of the people involved, understand their perspective, try to feel out their personalities. Chroma is a data company, so I started by reading the history of giant data companies from when they were baby companies like mine. Softwar, a (pretty entertaining) history of Larry Ellison’s Oracle was very valuable here; Ellison is clearly a madman but he’s my kind of madman. Larry if you’re reading this, let’s get dinner. (I’ve only ever met one other person who has read this book, but it’s a fun read and I recommend it!).
Softwar didn’t give me a blueprint; Chroma isn’t Oracle and this isn’t 1977. No book is ever going to tell me what I need to do, and I can’t substitute another man’s ambition for my own. But it did give me a sense of what it was possible to think about. Analogies are imprecise but I’ve sometimes found them to be a good starting point. Reading Softwar helped me understand where Chroma stood with respect to the history it’s a part of, which got me just a little ways past the mental block.
Understanding the moment in time we’re in let me tell a story to myself that I could find plausible, and therefore take seriously. Since then I’ve gotten much better at thinking about (and therefore, talking about) what we’re doing and where we’re going. I find that I can lay out in considerable detail what we need to do over the next several years for Chroma to be everything it could be, what the risks really are, and how we’re going to overcome them.
I’m not suggesting that reading Softwar is going to have the same effect for you as it has for me. I do think there’s a lot of merit in understanding the history of what you’re doing to a much deeper level than average. Certainly I think it helps you tell a much more credible story. I think the lesson is that you need to find a way to tell a story you believe in without deceiving yourself into LARP in the process. For me that was history, for you it might be something else.
Being able to tell a story to myself, and really believe in it, has had an interesting “telescoping” effect on my personal ambition; small things I do today connect to big things in the future. Today matters for tomorrow. One might think that seeing every step I have to take to get from here to there would lead to flights of the type of grandiosity I’m trying to avoid. Occasionally it does - sometimes I find myself saying “*obviously Chroma is going to become a multibillion dollar company*”, but only muttered under my breath in the shower, or maybe to Jeff at our founder meeting when my morning coffee is hitting right. But mostly it’s been very grounding.
We have an engineering team, but I still write code. Lately I have the sense that I know the purpose behind every line I write, not just in terms of its immediate utility or as part of the feature we’re shipping, but in the story of the company’s future I now carry around in my head. I think about the engineers we’ll hire to revise it in the future, the strengths and weaknesses it will introduce into our product, and that product’s position in the market. It’s invigorating. I find I can sustain any amount of effort in this state. I can make better decisions, and be a better leader for my team.
I’ve started looking at other things in my life in the same way, trying to generalize taking my ideas about Chroma seriously to taking other aspects of my life, and its future, seriously in the same concrete sense. It’s a work in progress, but I’m sure it has something to do with telling myself a story I can really believe.