Achievement, here and there

A pivot.

There?

Silicon Valley loves the pivot.

More than it loves the overnight success, it loves the story of the do-or-die entrepreneur, down to their last dime, and unafraid to roll the dice one more time.¹ It loves dreams, halfway dead, brought back to life with a brilliant insight and a fearless gamble. Dynastic wealth, snatched from the jaws of bankruptcy; a plan, punched in the face and on its heels, back for another round; when the barbarians are at the gate, the Horn of Helm Hammerhand, one last time. In Silicon Valley, this is the crucible; this is the culture; this is Sparta.² The pivot is the romantic stuff in a startup—ingenuity, grit, bold optimism and ambitious tenacity—all in a single maneuver. Because I could not stop for Death – I pivoted –.

But there is also something revealing in the pivot. When people start companies, their fundraising decks and “About us” pages say that they’re the perfect founders to build this product for this market at this time. They talk about how, when they were a product manager at Ramp, they saw the frustrations that traveling salespeople have with submitting per diem expenses. They say that this experience is broken, that they love helping teams save time and money, and something about the intelligence age. They say they’re building software by finance teams, for finance teams. They reverse engineer their personal histories to explain how so many of their professional decisions led them to this point, which is exactly where they want to be.³ They use the words “passion” and “corporate expenses” in the same sentence.

Or at least, they do at first. Because if that product flops fast enough—before the company runs out of money, more or less—they’ll move on to a better idea, and a new calling. The market for expense software was too fragmented, but maybe we can pivot into an automatic note-taking app for field sales reps. The real-time feedback app for college professors was a bust, but maybe it’s a good data infrastructure tool? Organizing bourbon meetups didn’t work, so maybe sharing photos will?

These swerves are so common in Silicon Valley that we don’t question them. Instead, we name them, celebrate them, and treat them like a normal part of every startup’s zigzag of life. But it would be weird if this happened elsewhere?

Like, suppose you’ve been working at a restaurant—say, The Ramp—and you want to start a bar that serves gimmicky San Francisco-themed cocktails. Why might you start that bar? There are at least two reasons:

1. To run a bar that serves gimmicky San Francisco-themed cocktails.

2. Something else? To get rich? To be in charge? To impress your friends who also run bars and restaurants and bike shops and other small businesses?

Presumably, most people start bars for something like the first reason: They want to run a bar and invent some cocktails. Small businesses, it seems, are created to be that small business—to serve goofy drinks, or coffee, or fix bicycles, or drive concrete trucks to construction sites. They may not be passions, but they have purpose. And when death stops for a bar, it doesn’t pivot into bail bonds; it goes out of business. Pawn shops don’t become bakeries. Liquor stores don’t launch laundromats.

But what are the foundational studs of a startup? What is the unmovable bedrock that makes it it? What knob would a founder rather die than turn?

For most companies, I’m not sure there is one. Because, at their most honest core, startups don’t exist to solve a specific problem; they exist to make something, anything, that people want. What thing, for whom—it doesn’t matter, so long as they want it.

In other words, startup founders run a bar that serves gimmicky San Francisco-themed cocktails for the second reason. They do it because they want to get rich; to be admired; to work with their friends; to make an impact; to be their own boss; to impress their peers and spite their enemies; to have fun; to have autonomy, mastery, and purpose. They do it for reasons that are both cynical and wholesome, but they rarely do it just for cocktails or expense reports. These things are instead circumstantial vehicles of ambition, the disposable boosters of a hopeful rocket ship. Nobody will quite say this—the Ramp PM starting with say expense reports are their cause, and people will compliment them on how beautiful their cause is—but everyone knows that the real cause is survival⁴ and success.

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Success, though, is social. The people who chase it aren’t just chasing a second home in the mountains, or a bank account of a certain size; they are chasing status. They are climbing a ladder, and often care as much about how high they look as how high they are.⁵

Obviously, this is hardly a profound point; of course people care about what others think of them. Money is one thing, but you can’t fake influence.

Still, it has notable consequences. Silicon Valley has a long history of talking about “changing the world,” and the people who join startups have a compulsive habit of saying they’re doing it because they want to “make an impact.” But these motivations have qualifications: We want to change the world with technology, and make an impact in a way that is prestigious here.

For example, Aaron Levie, the founder and CEO of Box, an enterprise file storage company that makes $1 billion a year, has 2.5 million followers on Twitter. Dirk Van de Put, the CEO of the food and beverage company Mondelez International, which oversees dozens of household brands and makes more than $36 billion a year, has 3,100 followers. Levie also has 74,000 followers on LinkedIn; Janno Lieber, the CEO of the New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which makes almost $7 billion a year in fares and transports millions of people every day, has 874. Though these are imperfect measuring sticks, they’re indicative of our social scoreboard: Celebrity isn’t about just money or making a difference, but about startups, software, and following the brand guidelines of being a builder.

That’s why we built 140 characters instead of flying cars, and recreated our parents as apps: Because you can build a company on those ideas, and building a company is what we celebrate. What it does doesn’t really matter, just as it doesn’t really matter to a founder what they pivot into.

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A year ago, I spent a couple days with people who work in the public health and economic development division of a large Indian IT firm. Their team’s mission was to recruit more young Indians to work on these problems, and they’d been struggling: The best talent liked the trophies offered by major consulting and accounting firms. Despite the importance of the issues the team was working on, the hundreds of millions of lives that could be improved by them, and the comparable pay that they could offer, people preferred the status of McKinsey and KPMG.

But they had recently piloted a program that was changing that. Instead of hiring people directly, they created an investment fund, and reframed their mission around entrepreneurship. They called it an incubator, held Shark Tank-style pitches, accepted companies into cohorts, and hosted a demo day at the end. Though the pay was probably worse—the employees were founders of small startups, rather than employees of a multinational corporation—the job was cooler.

It was working. A spoonful of startup sugar helps the civic medicine go down.

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To get the political part out of the way, whatever Elon Musk and his gang of Bebops and Rocksteadys are doing in Washington is clearly illegal. If Congress passes a law that requires the United States Treasury to put a trillion dollars into a hole and light it on fire, then not doing that is breaking the law. People may not want to do it; they may think that keeping the trillion dollars⁶ is “good,” or “justified,” or “based,” but is definitely not “allowed.” You do not get to drive 100 miles per hour because it is fun; you do not get to make your own laws because you built a big company or won a Mensa contest. The Constitution only matters because people do what it says. There is a fragile magic to all of this—to a collective agreement to follow the rules, even if some of those rules displease us—and we are snuffing it out.

Anyway. Something smaller is happening in this moment too. For years, Silicon Valley has looked at Washington with a suspicious side-eye, and given little credit to the work that happens there. In tech, there has been no prestige in policymaking.

Now, there is. Policy suddenly matters, as do the people who work in it. Tech celebrities are calling unelected bureaucrats national treasures. Government jobs are “a blast.” Fights about DOGE are in our group chats and on our message boards, and the nexus of discourse has moved to Washington, so much so that it feels weird to write blogs like this one and not mention it. A new social scaffold has emerged in Silicon Valley, supporting a new form of success. Changing the world now means something other than creating another enterprise SaaS app.

I’m not sure it’ll last. Part of this is probably novelty: We’re hypnotized by the gossip and rubbernecking at the spectacle of the whole thing. At some point, we’ll probably get bored,⁷ we’ll get distracted by some new technical bombshell, and we’ll go back to debating AI and ignoring DC.

But, again, there is something revealing in the pivot. Even if it’s temporary, our turn to Washington is a reminder that our attention isn’t fixed, and that ambition is relative, and that achievement, even in Silicon Valley, isn’t only here and not there.

1. For better or for worse, Google—which went straight from epiphany to IPO—is respected but Tesla—saved by a desperate eleventh-hour rescue—and Nvidia—made rich by an all-in gamble on AI—are revered.

2. I’ve always wondered how much announcers plan for this stuff? Surely, they at least have some loose ideas, ready to go just in case? Somebody should make that 30 for 30: The greatest calls that never were.

3. It’s telling that even Elizabeth Holmes had to invent her own founding myth. If someone who started a company that could’ve saved millions of lives (had it not been for, you know, the crimes) has to exaggerate why she’s doing it, what hope do those of us who are making automated compliance reporting software have?

4. Here’s another question: What does it mean for a business to fail? A coffee shop that stopped serving coffee would probably be considered a failure. But an expense filing startup that stopped managing expenses? The idea failed, but the business didn’t. A startup can discontinue its products, replace its founders, and wipe out its investors, and still be the same startup as it was before. It can fire everyone—which is equivalent to missing payroll, for all practical intents and purposes—and still be considered alive. In other words, so long as a startup could still succeed at anything, it hasn’t failed.

5. Like, what would you do if you weren’t allowed to consider anyone else’s opinion? Not, “what do you want to do?,” because you may say, “I want to play in the NBA” or “I want to be a CEO,” and we often want those jobs because other people think they’re cool and prestigious. But would we want to play in the NBA or be a CEO if it came with the same status and fame as being a software engineer, or running a cafe, or driving an Uber?

Though I have no idea if this is a useful question to ask, it’s telling how hard it seems to answer. Ironically, we are often more attuned to other people’s opinions than we are to our own.

6. Or, I dunno, buying spaceships with it.

7. And really, Elon Musk will probably get bored.