A Startup story: the Allegory of the Rock
There are times in a startup life where you should take a step back towards a new perspective. Your perception of reality is somehow diluted in the daily noise.
So, we often draw, create short stories or just picture hypothetical scenarios.
Picture this one.
Your startup is a rock rolling in a field, the speed represents the company’s growth rate and the size its valuation. The growth of the diameter of the rock is achieved by the collisions with other rocks along the way. This process can also create erosion.
The push from founders, investors and employees are the only forces applied to the system that moves the rock forward, accelerating as per Newton’s Second Law. Nevertheless, we have to remember inertia and friction. Inertia is the pain to make things move in the beginning. Friction represents all growth obstacles, namely your churn rate.

Therefore, you have to consider 3 main variables to work with:
- Management is the sum of the magnitude of the projection of all forces applied in the strategy’s direction. Then, it can be break down in two perspectives: direction and magnitude. If you guarantee that everybody is onboard with your startup’s strategy, you achieve direction and efficiency. The magnitude of the summed forces comes from peoples’ motivation.
- Strategy gives the direction that each individual has to take when pushing. If someone is highly motivated but pushes in a 45º direction relative to the defined strategy, it causes a deviation. To solve it, you have two options: reroute the direction of this force (using point 1) or, if you are unable to do it, balance this force with perpendicular ones that, summed up, have the same magnitude (using point 1 with other teams/people).
- Legacy is the outsider, barely recognized as important and easily forgotten. As presented before, the rock is losing small pieces of itself along the way (the erosion process). These will be carried on everyone’s back, increasing the friction as a consequence and subsequently reducing the rock’s speed. The best possible example is today’s tech world, where microservices’ architectures help to reduce dependencies. This decoupling represents the power to decide which small rocks you leave behind and what you will develop next.
Like a triangle in a Cartesian coordinate system, you cannot change one vertex’s coordinates without affecting all the angles.

