Editor’s Notes: In this post, The CEO talks about creativity, organization, and briefly sketches the next seven businesses.
Adjacent opportunities.
In the same way that the ideal business can absorb unlimited talent and capital, the ideal business can expand indefinitely into adjacent markets. Also in the same way, no business achieves this ideal because of inherent limits. But that doesn’t mean we can’t try.
The Tao is like a well:
used but never used up.
It is like the eternal void:
filled with infinite possibilities.
Creativity is a force in the universe. Once you learn how to tap into it, you realize that it is truly unlimited. There is no limit to what humans can achieve, because we are the servants of ideas. I am possessed of the superstition that ideas are invading time from eternity, but that they need us to incarnate them, to make them real, to give them form. What a glorious calling.
Organization is also a force in the universe. Chaos and order are in a great war, and it is very difficult to overcome the forces of resistance to making anything work. This is the curse of Eden upon us, and of Babel: because if we could coordinate perfectly, understand each other perfectly, there is no limit to what we could achieve. But as it is, a man can, in one hour, tap into more ideas than he can achieve in a lifetime.
Invisible exists to compress this timeline. To coordinate labor, to give people access to systems, structures, processes, tools of order and frameworks of organization — to give them power, execution power, so that they can realize ideas at a faster rate. Invisible is an organization company. Organization is the tao of Invisible.
But what is the point of organization, if not to empower us to create more?
The Tao is called the Great Mother:
empty yet inexhaustible,
it gives birth to infinite worlds.
Nothing in this post is meant to be practical or immediately relevant. Oh me of little faith, but I doubt we’ll focus on any of these ideas within the next year. But I do hope that in the following year, we do invest in at least one of them, and make it a reality. Then the next, and the next.
This is a story I want to tell myself about the company’s future; what I look forward to. It reveals what this business is really about, spiritually. What an idea appears to be initially does not express its full potential. Inside any idea is really many ideas. New dimensions unfold and catch the world by surprise. But if you have the ear, you can hear them whispering, whispering their dreams, remembering the future, asking for help, asking you. Who am I to help an idea give birth? The one who can hear. If you’ve never heard an idea speak to you before, you don’t know how it affects you. It is hard to walk away. So my hope is to give these little ideas microphones, to help them broadcast their whispers, and maybe we can all help them return to the future.
Time is long, but the truth shall come to pass.
Within 24 months, I would like to retire as CEO, so I’ve begun succession planning. I expect my VPs to eventually do the same, and we will soon have development plans for every partner. Our VPs are the strongest leaders in the business, but for our Directors to grow, at some point, they need to step aside. But I have no intention of losing our best talent. So instead of an up-or-out system, we’re going to have an up-and-over system. The only way to do that is to create adjacent opportunities for them to start, run and grow new business divisions.
The next seven businesses, briefly sketched:
1. The Specialist Line. A premium service, starting at $30/hr, on top of Invisible’s existing business, The Process Line. If The Process Line is for instruction-based work, The Specialist Work is for work that can’t be turned into a process, but can be trained. Writing specialists, for example, would draft your emails for you. We’ve been talking about this for a while and done a number of experiments, but the main business continues to take priority. Eventually, we’ll get this off the ground.
2. The Strategist Line. A premium service, starting at $40/hr, that offers Strategists — trained Executive Assistants and Process Designers — who can show up either on-site or as a dedicated or on-demand remote resource. They embed deeply enough in your business to understand your problems, design process solutions, and make sure that you’re getting the most out of Invisible’s process line.
3. The Vendor Network. There are many things that Invisible assistants can’t do, but that another vendor can. By doing partnerships and integrations, we can truly deliver on the promise: “A single bot that can do everything.”
4. The Consumer Business. When we’re good enough, and scaleable enough, to handle millions of small accounts with high expectations, then we’ll dramatically expand our market, our use cases will shift, and our processes will be forced to evolve far more rapidly.
5. The Invisible Academy. Invisible already trains its agents to do processes, but we can broaden this into a formal education, and train a new generation of business leaders worldwide. The younger our students are, the better. We can teach them how to become auto-didacts: to learn how to learn, to become curious, ambitious, organized, and creative, to read the classics, to think through writing…
6. The Folder. The more creative we are, the more data we generate, and all of that data needs to be organized into files and folders with titles and taxonomies that make sense: so that we don’t have cluttered desktops, so that it’s all in one place, so that we can always find what we need, and so that we can easily share with others. Downloading your brain to paper, then uploading it into a digital brain in the cloud, is a huge undertaking — even for one person. But if we could do it for millions of people— it would be a new era for the internet, an emergent hive mind, a form of intellectual immortality.
7. Cheeky. Cheeky was the name of a community I ran for almost a year, where I published startup ideas that nobody had time to start, and we would brainstorm and discuss them over email and in-person. Cheeky gave birth to Invisible, because through Cheeky, partly because I realized that the biggest problem is solutions, and also because I realized that without Invisible, I couldn’t scale Cheeky! But now that Invisible exists, this would be the ultimate platform not only for innovation, but also for engaging remote teams in creative exercises, which is now being recognized as the challenge with scaling remote teams. Whereas the tao of Invisible is organization, the tao of Cheeky is creativity, and there is no better way I can think of to inspire everyone in the company to think bigger, to realize there really is no end to what we can do together.
Think more imperialistically.
The Tao is like a bellows:
it is empty yet infinitely capable.
The more you use it, the more it produces…
