The Case for Brute Force

Everyone likes a pretty winner, but winners often only become pretty in retrospect.

Society has a tendency to enjoy hearing reports of effortless wins and immediate successes, maybe because it suggests that there is a different breed of human for whom everything just comes easily—which gives the rest a good excuse for why things don’t work as well for them.

But 10 years and 1,000 investments in, I have seen sheer brute force play a central role in several of the outlier cases I’ve been a part of. And whatever story is told after—that’s a different story.

Yes, several of these companies have been fairly slow and unimpressive for years, and then, all at once, caught the current wave and found themselves in the eye of the storm, at the center of the zeitgeist. Or maybe, to be more precise, it’s more like the wave caught them, and the eye of the storm simply moved over their location. They were just staying afloat long enough.

In order for this to happen, you must of course be in an interesting space to start, because not all spaces are born alike.

But there is a whole lot to be said for just sticking it out longer than others and enduring the inevitable, constant pain that comes along the way.

The startup game is both fun and cruel, and it’s not easy to keep going when the thing that you spend every waking hour on isn’t really making much visible progress, while you hear all the loud headlines and public celebrations.

Continuing to make some sort of forward progress is the key, for morale, but also because compounding does play a powerful role in this equation. Several companies I have seen inched their way to their first $1M in ARR, only then to really start feeling the forces of compounding that kick in when you have a certain base of customers and a sales and marketing machine in motion.

Brute force works for fundraising, too, by the way.

In a few cases, I’ve helped put together rounds in a day or two. In others, it took a few months. But, as usual, as soon as we got our first big commitment, all the ensuing dominoes started to fall.

When you’re reaching out to dozens or even hundreds of investors and are seeing very little love, it’s not necessarily that what you are building isn’t worthwhile. At any moment in time, there are some types of ideas that are easier to raise money for, and others that are harder. Right now, it’s still fairly easy to raise for an AI idea, especially if you have a few fancy researcher résumés on your team. Meanwhile, there are hard-tech ideas in health, hardware, and bio that are not quite as immediately magnetic. The trend could very well shift in coming years.

As a wise friend of mine recently said, investors—and people in general—have very short-term memories. As soon as you have a success, they will forget about the entire struggle along the way, and you will simply have a halo around you.

You just have to push hard enough for long enough, if you want to make that dent in the universe.