Embrace Chaos

I often tell startups that they are mathematically-chaotic, and this usually gets a puzzled response, except sometimes from deeply technical founders. But in the passage from starting a company to building a successful fast growing and durable company there are thousands of micro-decisions, numerous permutations of potential teams (what if we had not hired “Sarah” for that role, what if “Joe” had not happened to be at our hack day), a mass of externalities (level of competition, big changes by the platforms companies often build on top of them, etc) and so on. Small changes in some of these parameters early on in the business may have profound impacts on the future success of the company.

Andy Weissman at USV wrote much more clearly than I can about this a few years ago and I keep going back to his article. It includes a perspective on how a good investor can best help the companies they work with:

“Taken a step further, I’ve always thought the most useful thing a venture investor can then do for a company is simply help them come up with that framework, that scaffolding, to throw all those choices into. And not specifically to help make the choices themselves. After all, one of the primary ways venture investors can add value is through having seen dozens and dozens of these chaoses. Presumably, we are well-suited to help determine frameworks for decision making in future, similar chaotic scenarios.”

So I was interest to read this week about Chaos Engineering which recognises that as software is increasingly built on top of a proliferation of services, databases, etc there is the possibility for a small defect in one area to explode into a major error for the overall system. I don’t think investors can help much here but it seems like some frameworks for managing these risks are emerging.

In summary, don’t engineer chaos but do embrace it.