A Startup That Pivoted Twice and Still Succeeded
In the world of startups, it is a luxury to be able to pivot once, let alone twice. YouTube and musical.ly are both examples of this rare phenomenon, but in general, even pivoting once engenders immense human and logistical challenges that most startups cannot withstand. As the founder of a newly minted startup, I am constantly coming to terms with the fragility of my business and the knowledge that I too may have to pivot one day. In parallel, as an active participant in my local Jewish community, I am currently listening to and discussing readings from the beginning of the book of Genesis and learning about a primordial startup, in the form of God’s covenant with the first Torahic protagonists, that pivoted twice and still managed to pull through. I’d like to recast the story of Genesis’s first three Parshat (Torah readings) through the contemporary prism of startups, drawing upon the rich hermeneutic tradition of the Meforshim (Rabbinic commentators) to contextualize and amplify some of the links between ancient Jewish liturgical tradition and the business landscape of 2017.
The Forbidden Fruit
If the first two chapters of Genesis are the seminal Judaic startup, then Genesis 3 contains Judaism’s first pivot — an exodus from the Garden of Eden and the beginning of both mortality and morality. Despite the negative connotations of this transition, learning how humankind pivoted from paradise provides a wealth of meaningful and positive information for anyone itching to press the reset button on their adventure with a startup.
Cultivating one’s failure
A major trope that repeats itself throughout the Torah is the idea that people bring disaster upon themselves or others through actions that are intentional at some psychological level. Freud calls this the Todestrieb (death drive), arguing that the tendency to simultaneously inflict and receive pain is “the most common and important of all perversions.” The same is true in the world of startups — often times, a tacit, mutual psychological need to fail plants the seeds for future disaster. This can manifest itself in many ways: a developer that moves a system towards failure because she is displeased with it and wants it to change, a marketing executive that makes safe and boring choices because she doesn’t believe in the product, a C.E.O. that is burnt out and stops managing. Irrespective of the scenario, the takeaway is the same — failure almost never comes ex nihilo, nor is it the “fault” of a particular person, but rather the manifestation of a fundamental psychological need to fail or cause failure.
The eating of the apple from the tree of knowledge is the first biblical example of this situation. In the Midrash Tanchuma, we find the following text about the trap into which Eve fell.
What is this comparable to? To one who wishes to divorce his wife. On the way home, he has a bill of divorce written up. He comes home with the bill of divorce in his hand, plotting a way to give it to her. He says to her: “Pour me a cup, that I may drink.” She pours out a cup for him. As soon as he takes the cup from her hand, he says to her: “Here is your divorce.” Says she to him: “What is my crime?” Says he to her: “Leave my house, for you have poured me a lukewarm cup.” Says she to him: “You knew in advance that I would pour you a lukewarm cup — you have already written the bill of divorce and brought it with you in your hand!”
By the same token, Adam said to G‑d: “Master of the World! For two thousand years before You created Your world, the Torah was safeguarded with You . . . and in it is written, ‘This is the law: If a man should die in a tent . . .’ (Numbers 19:14). Had You not prepared death for Your creatures, would You have so written? And then You come and attach the blame to me.” Hence (Psalms 66:5): “His fearsome plot upon the children of man.”
(Midrash Tanchuma)
In the Midrash, the failure occasioned by “pouring the cup” was sewn long before the wife came home, and the actual conflagration was merely a pretext. What’s important to note is that there is no moral dimension attached to this form of failure, neither for the person who subdues it or plans it. We should rather consider it as a basic human coping strategy and be honest about why it happens. Sometimes, absent of verbal mechanisms through which one can express one’s ideas, failing at something and then doing it again is the most efficient way to initiate change.
Blame
Coming to terms with failure is a major difficulty in any startup. How many times have people been called into a meeting knowing, or at least suspecting, that they would have to face a difficult decision and either give or take blame? Walking to the meeting, there are mixed feelings of guilt, shame, dread and injustice that kick in even before the first words are said.
Genesis 3:9 portrays exactly this moment, where God asks Adam where he is after having eaten from the Tree of Knowledge. Assumedly, Adam does not need to hide, as he knows that God sees him, and even more obviously, God does not need to ask. But what the Torah alludes to here is that, at emotionally tense junctures where a major impass presents itself, sometimes the only way to move forwards is by diffusing the situation with oblique or humorous language. Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak recounts the following analysis of the Russian Rabbi Schneur Zalman, who “presented the classic explanation offered by the commentaries: the question “Where are you?” was merely a “conversation opener” on the part of G‑d, who did not wish to unnerve Adam by immediately confronting him with his wrongdoing.’’’
One of the consequences of Eden’s pivot is that Adam and Eve have internalized knowledge and thus are aware of their sex. Sexual awareness leads to a new construct about which we are all ambivalent — gender. While gender roles are profoundly unfortunate insofar as they are instrumentalized as a tool of disenfranchisement and disempowerment, they are also a source of pride and meaning — many people take great joy in being “a girl” or “a mom” in spite of the immense hardships that these two roles present in our male-dominated, patriarchal society. Roles in a startup that pivots are no different, and people have to internalize the positive and negative personal consequences of change. One of the first things that God does after reprimanding the serpent is to make clothes for the self-conscious Adam and Eve. His willingness to accompany people through changing circumstances reminds us that, to paraphrase Sartre (and Genesis), one’s existence precedes one’s essence. That is, the humanity of an individual persists and is whole irrespective of any changes in the roles they play. Teams that know how to focus on this mitigate many of the emotionally challenging aspects of pivoting.
Learning
Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi, when writing about the acquisition of free will, makes the point that gaining knowledge is not so much a question of filling a void rather than moving an objective:
‘Evil, and freedom of choice, existed before Adam ate from the Tree of Knowledge. But then evil was something external from the person, and the two domains were completely separate. Man’s mission in life was to “work and keep the Garden” — to cultivate the good and keep out the bad. By eating from the Tree, man gained intimate knowledge (daat) of evil, ingesting it into himself and — man being a microcosm of creation — into his world. From that point on the two realms were confused, there being no evil without good and no good without evil. The task of man became the “work of refinement” (avodat habirurim) — to distinguish and separate good from evil and evil from good.’
Jeff’s Gothelf’s tome on Lean UX makes a similar argument about user experience — instead of simply describing the new state of a user (i.e. she will have a skateboard), one should focus on the change in state (i.e. she will go from having a high carbon footprint to polluting less by not taking the a car). Applying this rhetoric to Zalman’s analysis of the Garden of Eden, it is not the static state of exile that interests us but rather the polyvalent process of adaptation. Read this way, God’s pivot teaches an important lesson about businesses — changing the orientation of a project only works when it stems from a genuine attentiveness to people’s shifting circumstances and proclivities. This helps mitigate the tragic dimension of change. In the best of all worlds, a pivot can be seen as the evolution of a collective towards a more efficient and constructive use of its inherent dynamism.
Noah
In the Parshah of Noah, humanity does not simply find itself exhiled from paradise. The entire human race is annihalated save one family. Taken at face value, this is an immense tragedy that was, at least in theory, completely avoidable. Was Noah a good steward of his enterprise? Is there anything positive that one can learn from Noah’s venture in ark building before God pivots a second time?
Recruitment
Ultimately, the seeds of Noah’s failure can be found in the very first sentences of the Parshah, where we learn that “Noah was a righteous man, perfect in his generations” (6:9). Rashi, an 11th century French Rabbi, notes the ambiguity of this sentence:
Among our sages, there are those who interpret this as being in praise of Noah: If he was righteous in his generation, then certainly he would have been even more righteous if he would have been in a generation of righteous people. And there are those who interpret this as a condemnation: In relation to his generation he was righteous, but had he been in Abraham’s generation, he wouldn’t have been regarded as anything.
Irrespective of what one’s interpretation is, the situation presented here resonates with a problem that every HR department faces at some point: when the pickings are slim, either the most competent person is isolated because everyone else is incompetent or the most competent person is also incompetent. In either case, the circumstances are not particularly propitious for innovation and success, which is a harbinger of catastrophe to come. My experience in startups has seen companies finding themselves hiring employees from a less-than-ideal recruitment round for a variety of reasons, some of which have to do with the company’s own failure to articulate what it needs. Of course, when recruitment challenges come up and one cannot build their dream team, one tries to build the best product they can so that, if and when the crash occurs, it is possible to pick up the pieces later down the line.
Word of Mouth
Firebase Invites reports on their website that: “Word of mouth is one of the most effective ways of getting users to install your app. In a recent study of thousands of smartphone users, researchers found that the #1 reason people discovered an app is because they heard about it from a friend or colleague.” If the same logic holds for arks and apps, Noah fails the Firebase test. In 120 of building an ark, he did not manage to change a single person’s ways so that God would spare humanity, nor did he convince anyone that it would be worth it to build an ark for themselves.
The Lubavitcher Rebbe expounds on this in detail:
In other words, Noah’s involvement with others was limited to his sense of what he ought to do for them, as opposed to a true concern for their wellbeing. He understood the necessity to act for the sake of another, recognizing that to fail to do so is a defect in one’s own character; but he fell short of transcending the self to care for others beyond the consideration of his own righteousness.
This also explains a curious aspect of Noah’s efforts to reach out to his generation. When the Flood came, Noah and his family entered the ark — alone. His 120-year campaign yielded not a single baal teshuvah (repentant)! Perhaps public relations was never Noah’s strong point, but how are we to explain the fact that in all this time he failed to win over a single individual?
But in order to influence others, one’s motives must be pure; in the words of our sages, “Words that come from the heart enter the heart.” Deep down, a person will always sense whether you truly have his interests at heart, or you are filling a need of your own by seeking to change him. If your work to enlighten your fellow stems from a desire to “do the right thing” but without really caring about the result, your call will be met with scant response. The echo of personal motive, be it the most laudable of personal motives, will be sensed, if only subconsciously, by the object of your efforts, and will ultimately put him off.
Ultimately, the only reason people share anything at massive scale is because they are genuinely enthusiastic. Picking a team or designing a product without considering the basic human need to connect to others is a recipe for disaster. Of course, one cannot force this behavior upon people — designing a product with love and care can only be done by loving, caring people that consider the thing they’re making as an extension of their compassion for others. I have seen some startups that do not acknowledge this reality and, on the contrary, create a culture that distances those who work on a product from those who use it. While this type of workflow can generate technical prowess and impressive flashes of brilliance, it usually does not survive simply because it lacks the basic thing that keeps people close to each other — word of mouth, enthusiasm and genuine empathy.
Wise Investments
The silver lining of God’s second pivot is that, like any good investor, he found a balance between providing support and encouraging autonomy. Nachmanides, a 12th century Jewish scholar, makes the argument that the actual size of Noah’s ark would have been much too small to accommodate pairs of each animal that populated antediluvian Earth. Thus, a miracle must have been involved, but if there were a miracle, then why not simply ask Noah to build a smaller vessel and spare him one-hundred-twenty years of labor? As Eli Block of the Rohr Jewish Learning Institute states, it is because God “prefers human innovation over Divine intervention. Miracles come on the heel of human effort; they do not replace it.”
G‑d looks to humanity for an overture — an attitude of preparedness that says that we are committed to doing what we can to shelter G‑d’s handiwork. … Astonish Me and the world with what you are capable of. Then you’ll find that even your limited structures can miraculously hold much more than seemed possible.
Thus, while Noah’s conversion rate was abysmal, his infrastructure was solid because of a wise divine investment. Solid infrastructure is a must when a company pivots, as redoing everything from scratch is a huge time sink. Salvaging the essential of what one has already created can be enough to start again. We see this bear out in Genesis’s third and final dramaturgical exposition where, after a lot of initial commotion, the stage is finally set for the sustainable growth of a people.
Abraham
Ten generations after Noah, we see an entirely new set of circumstances that create the conditions for our startup to succeed. Abraham proves to have the essential qualities of leadership, humility and a paradoxically quixotic pragmatism that earlier protagonists of Genesis lack, providing his “angel investor” with the ingredients needed to finally ensure a quality, long-term collaboration between all of the Torahic stakeholders.
Get out of the building
In my experience, the single, persistent mistake that most tech startups make is not getting out of the building early and fast enough. They either remain insulated in a cocoon of office culture that serves as an echo chamber to their ideas or attend events with similarly-minded people whose actions have little incidence on the ultimate success of their business. What makes Abraham the ideal C.O.O. is that he eagerly goes out into the world to test his ideas while at the same time acknowledging and managing his trepidations. The Rabbi Sholom DovBer of Lubavitch notes of Abraham “a person wanders about in his travels to those places where the sparks that are to be extracted by him await their redemption. The Cause of All Causes brings about the many circumstances and pretexts that bring a person to those places where his personal mission in life is to be acted out.”
Chassidic interpretation of Abraham’s decision to leave Ur for Cannan is replete with allegoric knowledge that could pertain to anyone: needing to leave one’s land (one’s will), one’s birthplace (one’s emotional stable zone), one’s house (one’s pedigree, one’s schooling) in order to truly succeed. Nachmanides realizes the symbolic importance of this: “Everything that happened to the Patriarchs is a signpost for their children. This is why the Torah elaborates its account of their journeys, their well-digging and the other events [of their lives]. . . . These all come as an instruction for the future: for when something happens to one of the three Patriarchs, one understands from it what is decreed to occur to his descendants.” Overcoming the discomfort of testing the validity of one’s ideas and modifying them accordingly is often the true litmus test of a startup’s success, not because it will show if an idea is good or bad, but because it shows if the person is willing to undertake an uncomfortable journey and find meaning in unlikely places.
The Promised Land
Now the Lord said to Abram, “Go out from your country, your relatives, and your father’s household to the land that I will show you. Then I will make you into a great nation, and I will bless you, and I will make your name great, so that you will exemplify divine blessing.” (Genesis 12)
It is undeniable that one of the most problematic tendencies of Western civilization is presaged in this part of the Torah — in the worst of cases, a righteous idiot can act like a hapless, destructive vagabond that claims to own the parcel of land on which he chooses to settle, invariably to the immense chagrin of the land’s current inhabitants. Temporarily putting aside the politically devastating history of this passage’s interpretation, I’d like to focus on how Genesis’s construct of a Promised Land ultimately leads to the success of God’s second pivot.
For me, the most piercing analysis of Abraham’s character comes from Kierkegaard in his precocious Fear and Trembling, a text on my list of humanity’s must-reads. In his magnificent essay, Kierkegaard focuses on a later incident where Abraham is asked to sacrifice his only son Isaac. But the conclusion is the same — that to undertake such a spiritually challenging and uncertain endeavor, one needs an immense reservoir of faith. Faith, as defined by Kierkegaard, is an intimate yet unintelligible belief in what one is doing, uninfluenced by notions of external approbation or posthumous fame. It is also an honest acknowledgement of the dread, doubt and questions one feels about one’s convictions.
Faith, as linked to the notion of a Promised Land, is related to what any entrepreneur feels. Acute sentiments of ambivalence abound when one starts a business — one must be convinced that their idea merits success in some form, otherwise one would not have started a business in the first place. At the same time, everyone is painfully aware of the low success rate of startups and the multiple challenges that all startups face. The Lubavitcher Rebbe echoes this sentiment powerfully, if not controversially, with the following assertion: “Although we may find ourselves in galut, under the dominion of nations more powerful than us, this does not in the least affect our ownership of the Holy Land.” The danger of this quote and others like it is taking it literally — when ownership manifests itself through physical territorial claims and violence, it denigrates the significance of the only true ownership anyone has: that of their own person, their dreams and their aspirations. Taken in this light, the dominion of other “nations” is that of Leviathans like Google and Facebook whose dreams have become our reality, not to mention the myriad of potential partners you will encounter whose successes and failures will provoke inevitable sentiments of jealousy and Schadenfreude.
The genius of The Lubavitcher Rebbe’s quote is that it brings us back to the immutable, ineffable core of faith — our ownership of our most intimate convictions. Any startup that finds itself pivoting towards a position where it may better articulate the ephemeral and chimeric nature of a shared conviction is ultimately pivoting in the right direction, no matter how painful the process is.
Staying invested
Perhaps the craziest, most mystifying aspect of all of this is that God, in Genesis, stays completely invested in his startup in spite of its initial massive losses. Why? What type of investor would stay committed to a project given such bad results? The secret that we learn here, and perhaps the most important one, is that being a good investor is not just about choosing good projects — it’s about knowing how to support and nurture them for the long haul.
This is one of the core tenants of Judaism and is, moreover, a contributing factor to the resilience of the Jewish people over the millenia. In addition to the Torah itself, a veritable trove of poems and Talmudic musings proclaim an unwavering faith in God’s accompaniment of the Jewish people in spite of their major mistakes and misfortunes. This is, of course, a broader allegory for the emotional validation for which everyone yearns in their life: support from parents, from partners, from community leaders, etc.. Here, as we are talking about startups, investors complete the extended metaphor. The support of even one solid investor incites you to think outside of the box and take risks. The anecdote of Abraham putting God on hold to welcome guests (Genesis 18) is an example of this: sometimes, the best investors know that they will need to step out of the picture for something to succeed. Irrespective of the multiple vicissitudes through which a business must transmogrify, steady investment is the bedrock upon which success thrives.
As startups constantly look for new paradigms through which they can understand what they are doing and where they are going, I feel that the many spiritual heritages of the world can help us rekindle ancient wisdom and apply it to problems that we feel are ostensibly contemporary. I know that, in Finland where my startup Meeshkan is based, there is an understandable taboo when one brings up religion in the workplace due to the moralizing and proselytizing approach certain people have with respect to their beliefs. My own personal relationship to the religion into which I was born (Judaism, in case you haven’t guessed by now) is a long, dialectic conversation with an imperfect and constantly reconstructed past about where I see myself and my extended community going. In doing so, I have fleeting moments of understanding about my present: my emotional state, my values, what I am willing to give up and what I dare to achieve. It is an accumulation of these present moments that give life its spice and, when done right, can be the ingredients of many great new beginnings. Or, in other words, a great startup.
Mike Solomon is the C.E.O. of Meeshkan and the Artistic Director of the Ensemble 101. If you liked this story, please pass it along!
