Hacking A Path Through The Startup Jungle

The Fra Mauro world map, or mappa mundi, was a major cartographical work that compiled much of the geographical knowledge of the time. The map covers over five square meters, took several years to complete and was the most detailed and accurate world map that had been produced up until that time (1459)

Dead reckoning. In navigational terms, dead reckoning is the determination of one’s present location by projecting course and speed from a known past location or position. In the words of REM, ‘stand in the place where you live — now face North/think about direction, wonder why you haven’t before.’

It places little or no reliance on celestial or landmark-based observations, but relies heavily on a compass and a sense of good instinct, innate directional ability, memory, and a fair degree of intrepid thinking.

Naturally, as a means of orienting oneself, terrain association — landmark-based navigation, either by land or ocean — is vastly superior to dead reckoning. However, when visibility is limited during night-time, or due to environmental conditions such as fog, snow, rough seas, fire, or dense vegetation terrain association isn’t an option because you literally can’t see the landmarks needed to guide you. When the first cartographers charted the world they used dead reckoning because nobody provided a map for them. Their own guesswork was all they had, moving forward.

Being in a startup is a lot like navigating with visibility that’s inversely proportional to the size of the problem you’re taking on. If you’re attempting a tiny alteration to a pre-existing idea, looking at evolution rather than revolution, the path ahead is relatively clear. Those creating something truly radical must hack a path through the jungle.

Consider this from Paul Graham

“Neither Bill Gates nor Mark Zuckerberg knew at first how big their companies were going to get. All they knew was that they were onto something. Maybe it’s a bad idea to have really big ambitions initially, because the bigger your ambition, the longer it’s going to take, and the further you project into the future, the more likely you’ll get it wrong.

I think the way to use these big ideas is not to try to identify a precise point in the future and then ask yourself how to get from here to there, like the popular image of a visionary. You’ll be better off if you operate like Columbus and just head in a general westerly direction. Don’t try to construct the future like a building, because your current blueprint is almost certainly mistaken. Start with something you know works, and when you expand, expand westward.

The popular image of the visionary is someone with a clear view of the future, but empirically it may be better to have a blurry one.”

We can look to the infinitely quotable Richard Feynman for the only reliable way to sharpen a blurry view.

Feynman had a rare and brilliant way of deconstructing complexity, and the following quote goes to the heart of the scientific thinking that’s available to all startup founders.

“It doesn’t matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn’t matter how smart you are. If it doesn’t agree with experiment, it’s wrong.”

A large portion of success in life can be traced back to the type of experiments we’re able to run, and how intelligently we act on the findings we discover.

For a start-up just getting to the point where it can conduct experiments takes an enormous amount of work. You’ve got to convince smart, driven, busy people to drop everything and join you on a voyage into the unknown. Then, you have to capture the imagination of rightly sceptical investors. Get those two stages right and you might earn the privilege of building something a lot of people think makes no sense whatsoever.

Such is life as an entrepreneur.

To help you navigate, to fix that initial position, you may attempt to explain what you’re building. You may even decide to share your plan with the world. This can get ugly:

You might apply for every incubator and grant funding initiative you can find. You may forward plot to a spot on the horizon — say, Sydney — to pitch your idea to anyone who will meet you for a coffee. And you may (actually, you invariably will) find you’ve made an impressive dent in your life savings.

Take a wild guess as to when Karma was founded.

You may also find that, like the golden age explorers, the cartographers of old, you’ve never felt more alive, and every day has assumed just a bit more meaning and a little more value. You could find you are constantly reflecting, in your spare moments of quiet, on how fortunate you are to be working on a problem you care deeply about with people you care deeply about. You may even discover that what seemed crazy is the sanest thing you’ve ever done. That it has a direction all of its own.

Starting a startup can seem like a crazy thing to do. In many ways it is. But stay the course long enough and amazing things can happen. Like this:

Or this, this, this & this. Or a thousand other moments where Karma has helped the art of gratitude find a home on the internet.

After receiving a stack of Karma letters on his birthday, a filmmaker and friend to Dayne and I remarked that “Karma is a work of art”.

Leo Tolstoy said:

“Art is the activity by which a person, having experienced an emotion, intentionally transmits it to others.”

Tolstoy reminds us that art can act as a kind of cultural connective tissue, binding us all together by unearthing what it means to be human.

Karma users create art by reimagining letter writing for the modern age. In the act of engaging with others, by writing of their gratitude for their friendship, for knowledge, for assistance, they navigate a new path onwards by creating a position at that point in time, to carry forward into the future. It’s dead reckoning for one’s soul. A gratitude mappa mundi.

Each letter written, each reimagined use of this form of communication, captures some truth about the author and recipient. And in this seemingly small way, each letter is a rage against the insignificance and impermanence of our existence.

The late, great author, (Sir) Terry Pratchett, who died only last year, spoke to this when he wrote:

“No one is actually dead until the ripples they cause in the world die away.”

Karma letters capture these ripples by creating a unique window into the lives of our fellow human beings.

Now I have to concede that maybe art, in its tiny ripples on a vast cosmic ocean, could in fact be a waste of time. Maybe all we have is poetry, and dancing, and music, and painting, and reading and writing, and laughing and sex, and films and theatre and adventure. And lumps in our throat and beats in our chest. Maybe we won’t get anywhere in our journey, navigating by remembered and possible ephemera such as this.

Maybe it’s all a waste of time.

I think it probably is. But what a wonderful, awe inspiring, beautiful waste of time.

As we waste our time building this company we will keep plotting our navigation onwards, using the letters of Karma as reference points.

I don’t know exactly where our dead reckoning will take us, but I do know it’s a voyage worth embarking on.