Do something important, quickly.

True momentum requires heavy work on an important story.

Last week I wrote about why AI (app) companies are growing so fast. There’s one really exciting reason (selling work allows you to attack bigger line items with better value props) and three not so good reasons (low/no margins, unlimited budgets, and funny numbers).

It’s becoming gospel that speed is all that matters and the meme of the week was whether or not momentum is a moat (hint: it’s obviously not).

Momentum is not a moat. But momentum is a boat. It is what gets you to the island where you can build a fortress. - Alex Immerman

Most of the time when people talk about momentum what they really mean is velocity (raw speed or distance covered per time). The difference between momentum and speed is mass. You can move really quickly but without mass/without doing something important, you only have velocity. True momentum requires heavy work on an important story.

Speed alone doesn’t matter. You can run really fast on a treadmill or off a cliff. And speed, despite being necessary, is not a moat (early companies don’t have moats).

as Johnny reminded me, speed (scalar) and velocity (vector) are not even the same thing. You can’t just be fast, you have to be in the right direction!

So momentum (of any kind) needs to be an output of your work not solely an input to your work. Momentum is a necessary condition for success: to be maximally successful you have to do important work quickly.

In the best case momentum is self reinforcing and propulsive: the world feels lighter (faster) and heavier (with purpose).

Much of what we’re seeing today in the market is manufactured and/or empty speed: revenue/product velocity for a facsimile of momentum, sui generis, to generate hype, fundraising, and customers. But it can’t sustain and the center cannot hold because the work is not important.

That’s the difference between organic progress against hugely important ideas, which generates momentum, and inorganic hype.

Logos and Legibility

You need recognizable logos: either on the team, among the customers, or on the cap table. Ideally more than 1!

Logos make you legible and legibility means that you don’t look stupid if you’re wrong. All VCs care about is the asymmetry of being right/making money without the risk of losing face.

Despite theoretically being in the risk-taking business, most VCs are extremely risk averse career preservationists. The easiest way to blow up your job is making a decision that looks stupid in retrospect. The easiest way to avoid that is sticking to “can’t miss” opportunities in the network.

If you can appear “in network” and “safe” by having “the right” customers, prior experience, and investors/angels, you are infinitely more legible than through traction alone. VCs only want to take risks on so many vectors at once and social proof/signalling through logos help immensely - rightly or wrongly.

Read more on legibility and illegible risk.

I Read

• In Search of Long Term Thinking - Finn Murphy

  • Attention spans collapse: fifteen-second clips, one-week news cycles, short-dated options trading. Remember Greenland? Remember Cluely? Remember Friend dot com’s subway ads? You won’t come Tuesday. Momentum is a moat, but its durability is fleeting.

• Why AI Is Not a Bubble: The best arguments I’ve heard on the $10 trillion question of the moment

• The Goon Squad Loneliness, porn’s next frontier, and the dream of endless masturbation. This is an incredible piece of writing about an exceptionally bleak subject: a disturbing portend for our collective cognitive damage. As Santi said, “It’s hard to recommend reading this piece, exactly, but what it does do is identify and describe the dark matter of contemporary digital life.”

• His firm doesn’t promote partners. Here’s how he got promoted anyway.I had a nice chat with Melia Russel from Business Insider (paywalled) about how and why I got promoted, where I’m investing, and why I’m building a career in New York.