What Got You Here Won't Get You There

The rules of the game are changing faster than humans can adapt and no playbook from the last decade will save you.

My Take:

I’m scared shitless.

Not the productive kind of fear that comes from a hard quarter or a tough competitor. I mean the deep, gut-level terror that comes from realizing the operating system you’ve spent your entire career building and using now obviates most of what you thought you knew.

Let me tell you how I know.

The Whiteboard Delusion

At Symmetri, our newest formation at super{set}, we started with a concept of end-to-end agentic marketing, recognizing that the last company Vivek and I built in this space couldn’t deliver enough surface area to define a standalone company in the current regime. Broad swaths of functionality, entire companies in olden times, now collapse into what I like to call a ‘single adorable agent.’

I woke up one night in a cold sweat. I realized that while we were attacking important challenges for the modern marketer using AI (things like segmentation, loyalty, and so on), we had missed a critical piece of the broader picture: How do consumer-facing brands deal with with reality that most consumers are now going to answer engines, not search engines, to figure out what they want?

It was a key piece in the definition of an entire category. We started noodling. Whiteboarding. Deep customer conversations. Iteration cycles. All the things that have been the backbone of every successful company formation I’ve ever been a part of.

I was heads down doing good work. The right work.

And then I looked up.

We had gone from helping to launch a new market to swimming in a sea of competitors. It happened that fucking fast.

The playbook that got me here - the careful, methodical approach to building that I’ve relied on for 25 years - had become a liability. Not because it was wrong, but because the velocity of business had increased not just 10X, but 50X, and in some places 100X.

The Month That Changed Everything

I gathered the founding team at Symmetri and I told them the truth: “The clock is not on our side. We’ve got two weeks to catch up.” We needed to create a marketer-first, purpose-built solution for what people call AEO (‘Answer Engine Optimization’) in literally two weeks.

Existential moments in a company are painful but often necessary. (If you survive, they’re the stories future employees share around the campfire.) This one was necessary.

The team got the message, zero distortion. Heads down, we shipped end-to-end in two weeks. (My amazing head of engineering, Jed, if he’s reading this, will tell you it was 2.5 weeks. CEO’s like to round down.)

Here’s what I learned: When you actually internalize the urgency - when you stop performing it and start feeling it in your bones - you get done in two weeks what used to take two quarters. Not because people are working unsustainable hours (though yeah, there’s some of that), but because all the friction that seemed essential just... evaporates when survival is on the line. And the new tooling allows you to move that much faster.

That month taught me something uncomfortable: I had been the bottleneck. I needed to utterly abandon my “good instincts” about process and quality gates and proper development cycles and embrace the new normal.

What got me here was absolutely not going to get me where I needed to go.

Why This Time Is Different

Max Planck once said that new scientific truths don’t win by persuasion - they triumph by outliving their opponents. Thomas Kuhn made that observation famous: paradigm shifts happen when the old guard dies off. New frameworks don’t convince the establishment; they just wait for the old guard to cozy in for their dirt nap.

Harsh, but accurate when revolutions took a generation or two.

Here’s the problem: that model is broken.

The frame of reference for software engineering, medical discovery, content creation - pick your domain - is now shifting every few months.

You don’t get to wait for the old people to die anymore. And you don’t get the comfort of being the young rebel who’ll outlive them, either. In this market, everyone is old AF - just a little sooner than some of us would’ve thought.

Think about what that means. You’re going to have to spend a lifetime adapting to one paradigm after another, long before you die. The psychological model of “master a craft, then coast on expertise” is dead. Expertise now has a half-life of months.

The 80s and 90s model was simple: get one great engineer and one great salesman. Build something that by today’s standards would be a laughably small feature set, and call it a company. It worked because the game was stable enough that mastery meant something.

Then came the Zuckerberg youth revolt. “Move fast and break things.” That was genuinely radical at the time - a rejection of the careful, measured approach. But even that revolution had a rhythm you could internalize. The rules changed, but they changed at a pace human beings could adapt to.

Now? Jessica Lessin from The Information nailed it: “OpenAI announces a major deal every 18 days - not 18 months. Investment records are shattered so fast we can’t even fit two data points, months apart, on the same chart.”

This is the water we’re swimming in.

What This Actually Means

Reality is the safest place to be. And the reality is this: what used to take a couple quarters now takes a week or two. Products launch weekly, not annually. Millions of users adopt something in days.

The survivors have internalized this new normal. Everyone else is toast.

So whatever you’re building, it’s time to triple your speed.

Not because hustle culture is virtuous (it isn’t) or because I’m a sucker for punishment (I am). Because markets could give a shit about your timetable.

Here’s the new mantra I want everyone I’m working with to internalize: What got you here won’t get you there.

There’s no time to dither. No safe harbor. No one’s coming to save you.

And this clock waits on no one.

What I’m Reading/Listening to:

U.S. Chamber of Commerce sues Trump administration over $100,000 H-1B visa fee via CNBC

In a release regarding the lawsuit on Thursday, the Chamber called the new fee unlawful since it “overrides provisions of the Immigration and Nationality Act that govern the H-1B program, including the requirement that fees be based on the costs incurred by the government in processing visas.”

Renting a San Francisco Apartment in the A.I. Boom? Good Luck. via NYTimes

Landlords used to receive only a few rental applications within a month of listing an apartment, but now are getting one to three on the same day an apartment lists, said Ryan Shane, president of the Housing Guild Management Company, which manages mostly Victorian and Edwardian-style apartment buildings. “It’s much, much easier than it has been in a very long time,” he said. Neighborhoods near A.I. companies — such as Mission Bay, where OpenAI has its headquarters — are particularly popular. Rents in Mission Bay jumped 13 percent over the past year, according to CoStar. Many techies at A.I. start-ups work long hours and want to live close to their offices, said Strada’s Mr. Goodman.