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Startups

Building a company on the assumption that most of them fail.

11: in business
10:18: average
113 min: in total
13: across the network

Startups across the network →

All briefs11

Enphase Energy

Enphase didn’t invent solar—it invented a way to sell inverters as the bottleneck, not the afterthought.

Airbnb

Brian Chesky · 2008

Airbnb’s origin is materially humble: a rent crisis, two roommates, an air mattress, and Pop-Tarts. Its business model — brokerage via commission — was clear from the start, but its execution required repeated, costly pivots: cereal sales, crashed websites, YC’s $20k for 6%, and Sequoia’s $585k only after that. Its European expansion relied on acquiring Accoleo — not organic growth or superior product. The story Airbnb tells about itself is one of design-led innovation; the record shows it was one of opportunistic adaptation, funded by hustle and validated by investors only after infrastructure and evidence accumulated.

Atari

Nolan Bushnell · 1972

Atari was a distribution-first company disguised as a technology pioneer.

Brian Chesky

Airbnb wasn’t built on vision—it was built on rent arrears, cereal boxes, and crashed websites.

Reed Hastings

Netflix didn’t sell content — it sold culture as a hiring interface.

Sam Altman

Altman built cultural dominance before building a business model.

Tobias Lütke

A founder built a shop to sell snowboards, then sold the shop’s software instead—and kept 40% of the votes while owning just 7% of the shares.

Uber

Travis Kalanick · 2009

Uber is a platform whose early growth relied on regulatory noncompliance, strategic rebranding, and reactive imitation — not technical invention or user-first design. Its financial mechanics are transparent: high take rates on massive transaction volume. Its story is not about disruption, but about exploiting gaps between law and enforcement.

YouTube

Steve Chen, Chad Hurley & Jawed Karim · 2005

YouTube was a technical execution of a simple idea—upload and share video—with no monetisation strategy. Its founders leveraged prior wealth, network access, and timing to achieve rapid scale, then sold to Google before proving sustainability. The gap between usage and revenue was never closed—it was exited.

Adam Neumann

Adam Neumann didn’t pivot — he rebranded failure as infrastructure.

Phil Knight

Nike began not with a shoe, but with a handshake and a regional distribution licence.