3-2-1 Traction:
Woo-woo, ontic experimental realism, and why you can’t create culture

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Hey Reader 👋

Yeah, that subject line’s a doozy, but this newsletter’s not. I’ve got some good stuff for you, though. Here are 3 ideas from me, 2 ideas from others, and 1 question to help you focus.

Let’s go.

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I. 3 ideas from me

You can’t create culture

As your startup grows, you’re going to start thinking about culture.

Most new leaders (and far too many experienced ones, tbh) set about the task of “creating” the culture that they want:

• Hire a “head of culture” or some such HR-by-any-other-name position [1];
• Draft their mission, vision, and values, and bring them down from Mount Sinai to the raucous throngs below them;
• Create an employee handbook with policies and procedures for enforcing and reinforcing said “culture”;
• Institute cultural rituals, holiday parties, and “treats” for high performers;
• And then wonder why performance is low.

Mostly, it’s just bullshit. Because culture isn’t something you set about to create.

Culture is what “is”: it’s the sum total of all the decisions you’ve made to date.

Show me a “bad” culture, and I’ll show you a series of “bad” decisions.

As an aside, those decisions are guided by our values — but the real ones, the internal ones, not the flowery ones we choose to glorify on paper.

• You can say you’re about inclusivity, but you have already decided whom to include;
• You can say you’re about experimentation and failing fast, but you have already decided whether and what to test;
• Etc.

When leaders say they want to “create a culture”, they mean they want to “change the culture”.

And the only way to change culture is to make different decisions.

It’s almost never one decision. It’s hundreds, and they compound over time. Changing the culture with different decisions requires making more decisions in the future that align with your aspirational values than the number of decisions you made in past with your old values.

Better solution? Don’t get into a position where you need to change it.

Culture starts when you’re a solo founder. Be the kind of company you want to create. Embody the values you want to promote. And consider every decision in the context those values.

Culture is what “is”, so make your “is” fantastic.

[1] This is a pet peeve, cuz the “head of culture” is you.

Startups are just testing

I don’t mean to say startups have a lot of testing, or even that testing is central.

I’m saying that’s all there is.

Steve Blank famously defined a “startup” as an organisation in search of a business model, and it’s the best definition I’ve found. So, logically…​

• How do you find a business model? You put it out in the market it, test, and revise.
• How do you know when you’re done? When you don’t need to test anymore.

Testing. It’s literally all a startup is.

As it turns out, that’s extraordinarily helpful, because it tells us exactly what to do:

1. Create a business model hypothesis (customer, value prop, value chain, and viability)
2. Identify your riskiest assumption
3. Run an experiment
4. Reflect on the result
5. Return to step 1

When it all “just works”, you’re no longer a startup. Start scaling.

Don’t confuse needs with problems

A common place to get tripped up during value proposition design is to confuse what the customer has to get done with the problem the customer has in getting it done.

It’s subtle, but critical.

There are two common manifestations:

• The user can’t get the need met, therefore causing a problem.
• The user can get the need met, but in a suboptimal way, which causes a problem.

Problem are within needs. Needs are jobs-to-be-done — things a customer hires a product to solve. But the problems are in the how.

Meeting needs without solving a problem isn’t interesting. And solving problems without meeting needs is speculative at best.

A compelling value proposition comes from the surfacing and solving of problems within needs. Identify the need, speak to the pain, and provide a path out of the pain, and you’ll drive the hook in your customers.

Else, they’ll just keep scrolling.

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II. 2 ideas from others

​The Goopification of AI​

This article in The Atlantic explores how the repetitive and familiar nature of self-help concepts is central to the coaching genre’s appeal — which makes it well-suited to be done by AI.

If I’m being honest, I originally wanted to include this article because the headline gave me the giggles — Jaydoom doesn’t like the woo-woo.

But then it got under my skin a little, for two important reasons.

First, this is another tale about AI only taking your job if you’re not doing anything interesting. The self-help industry doesn’t just happen to have platitudes and repetition — it’s the very point of it. The clichés of “eat pray love” or “go talk to customers” (self-skewer!) are little more than motivational mantras for the things we already know.

That doesn’t make it bad, nor wrong. But from the creative standpoint, it’s not very interesting. If you want to survive as an educator, as a guru, or as a therapist, your value will be in your capacity for creativity and originality — it’s in the application of concepts.

It’s also a tale of the kind of advice you shouldn’t follow, but that’s a subject for another time.

​The Chatter Podcast: Information Ecology with Alicia Wanless​

And now for something a little different: an interview on the Chatter podcast with Alicia Wanless, a pioneer in information ecology.

Over the last 6 or 7 years, we’ve been having a cultural conversation about our “information ecosystem”:

• The evolution of “news,” with the introduction of cable, and then the internet;
• The risk management of foreign-owned platforms like TikTok;
• The role of misinformation and disinformation in our society;
• Potential government regulation of social media companies;
• Content moderation on their platforms;
• Foreign interference in US elections;
• and much more.

It’s a rich and worthy discussion for a society to have. But…

One of the more interesting aspects of this wide-ranging conversation was Wanless’ point that we don’t actually have a definition of the field of information ecology, nor agreement on any of the key terms used within it.

The metaphor of an “ecosystem” is quite apt, but —

We don’t even have a collective definition of what a “healthy” information ecosystem looks like, and we’re all trying to create one.

It’s worth a listen.

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III. 1 question for you

A startup is always testing something. So, where’s your focus this week, and how will you learn if you’re right about what you think?

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Ready to take the next step? I have free office hours every week; coaching for founders looking for early traction; and design sprints to help you get from Seed to Series A.

901 H St, Ste 120 PMB 42, Sacramento, CA 95814
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