The North Star Strategy
Pathfinding algorithms are an incredibly powerful way of modeling entrepreneurship.
First, consider the random walk. Here, you choose a random edge to explore a graph, traverse that edge, then choose another edge at random. You wind up going back to the same places over and over, making minimal progress.
This is akin to an entrepreneur chasing the latest hot trend on Twitter, pivoting every week, having no strong opinions about the world and chasing whatever catches their attention like a puppy. It's hard to reach one's goal since progress is hardly ever made. Perhaps the goal was never even clearly defined to begin with.
A more efficient algorithm would be Dijkstra's algorithm. Rather than traversing at random, we explore edges based on how far away they are from our current state. If we know about the destination, we can use A* which is again even more efficient. Here, we introduce the notion of a heuristic: how much closer we think the next state will be to our goal. You can see in the animation below: the left is purely Dijkstra's algorithm (exploring the closest edges at each step), while the right increasingly prefers a heuristic towards the end goal.
Defining our end goal, and deciding our next step based how much closer that step will intuitively take us towards our goal, is the optimal strategy.
This is what I call the North Strategy strategy. When you get lost in the darkness, and you're not sure which way to head, steer towards the North Star.
Let's look at some examples. Consider this video clip of Steve Jobs where he talks about his strategy for Apple.
"What we want to do is build an incredibly great computer in a book that you can carry around with you and learn how to use in 20 minutes. We don't know how to do that yet, but right now it fits in a breadbox, it's $10,000, and it's called Lisa. The next thing we will do is find a way to put it in a shoe box and sell it for like $2500. The last thing we will do find a way to get it into the book and sell it for under $1000."
That speech was from 1983. The MacBook officially launched in 2006, 23 years later. That's the power of a clear vision and a strategy on how to get there. There were a million different pieces that needed to come together: materials research, supply chain logistics, engineering, marketing, etc. but the core vision never changed. That's how you change the world. Goosebumps.
If you study the greatest entrepreneurs of all time, you'll notice that practically all of them have employed this strategy. I suspect this is because it's incredibly hard to keep a company of thousands of people aligned if they can't all look up at the North Star and think "ah yes, we're heading in the right direction".
"The outcome of any given company is the vector sum of the people within it. Improve the alignment of the individual vectors and their amplitude and the outcome will improve accordingly."
Elon followed a similar strategy for his companies. With Tesla, "accelerate the transition to sustainable energy", and SpaceX "make life multiplanetary". Both had clearly defined visions early on that rallied investors, customers and employees to join the pursuit. Neither vision changed, even as each company grew from a team that could fit in a garage, to some of the largest in existence.
Recently, Sam Altman did something similar with "we'll ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI) benefits all of humanity." Sam and his team worked on this goal for 7 years straight before inventing ChatGPT. Blake Scholl did something similar with Boom, "we're going to bring back supersonic flight". Celine Halioua, "giving our best friends (dogs) more time", the list goes on.
From this we can deduct a simple strategy for accomplishing moonshots in any field.
- Clearly define a long-term goal, a North Star, that never changes.
- Take iterative steps towards that goal. Choose each next step based on your intuition of what will bring you closer to that goal.
- Repeat for years, or decades, until the goal is reached.
One should note the difference between the vision and the strategy. The vision is the North Star, it should be clear and unwavering. The plans on how you get there are what remain flexible.