Companies are collections of old human decisions
Old org charts, processes and industry assumptions are human decisions, not physics. Founders should question the constraints everyone stopped noticing.
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Startup StrategyValidation, venture design, market choices, and the practical work of building a company.
In 1994, Steve Jobs said something founders still forget the moment their company starts growing:
“Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you.”
It sounds obvious until you look at how most companies actually work.
Someone designed the org chart years ago. Someone introduced a process to solve a problem that may no longer exist. Someone decided, “This is how our industry works.”
Then everyone else started treating those decisions like physics - and of course it is not.
You do not need to be the smartest person in the room. You just need to be the person annoying enough to ask why the room is built this way in the first place. And come up with another vision.
Once you start seeing companies as collections of old human decisions, it becomes very difficult to accept “that’s just how we do things” as an answer.
This is also what I do during a Startup Crash Test: question the assumptions everyone inside the company has stopped noticing.