The inner work of startup building

Years ago, I stumbled upon the short film Powers of Ten by Charles and Ray Eames, two of the most famous designers of the mid-century era. It tells the story of exponential growth, starting with a shot of a man lying on a blanket in Grant Park in Chicago.

The field of view is 10 meters wide, filmed at a height of 1 meter. The camera then moves up and away from the man by 1 power of 10 meters every 10 seconds. Very quickly, he and his blanket shrink to a tiny spec in a much wider field of view as the larger world comes into focus. By a height of 10^6 meters, you can see the entire earth. By 10^24, you can see a swath of outer space 100 million light-years across.

The camera then reverses course and heads back toward the man, pausing again at 10^0 meters before moving inward. At 10^-1, you can make out the skin on his right hand. At 10^-3, you can see a small blood vessel inside his hand. The film ends at 10^-14 with a shot of a single proton in a carbon atom, part of a DNA strand in a white blood cell within this vessel.

I love Powers of Ten for its elegant contrast of the macro and the micro, the outer world and the inner world. Its subtle message is clear: we are fascinated by the vastness of outer space with all its possibilities, but the inner world is just as awe inspiring.

I recently watched Powers of Ten for the first time since leaving Torch, the startup I co-founded seven years ago, and it struck me as a great metaphor for the challenge of company building. This metaphor works on several levels. For one, founders get whiplash seesawing back and forth between the macro view of their company and the microscopic details of tax compliance or copy editing a social media post.

This metaphor also resonates on a more fundamental level—balancing the work of the outer world with the work of the inner world. We founders tend to focus on the work of the outer world, the world outside of ourselves, the external challenges of net revenue retention, growth rates, and product velocity.

These are hairy intellectual problems that deserve a lot of attention, challenges that can be solved with growth strategies, A/B testing, and all-night coding sessions. Over time, these challenges repeat themselves and become patterns we learn to recognize and solve early on.

Inner work is the inverse of outer world work. If outer work is intellectual, inner work is emotional. It requires you to identify your habitual ways of responding to stress, whether the stressor is a person or something that happened at your company, and trace them backward to their origin. Once you find the origin, you’ve identified an emotional pattern that you can start to work within a more skillful way. As with outer-world patterns, inner-world patterns repeat themselves. But these patterns are harder to recognize and tend to repeat many times before you get that eureka moment where you realize you’ve been here before. They are, by definition, unconscious.

That’s why it took me so long to recognize my own perfectionism. I could kind of see it for what it was, but not really. I would have described myself as driven, success-oriented, or some other euphemism. I saw my striving as a plus, and in many ways, it was. In high school, I used it to study for the SATs, taking 2 entire SATs per night until I had exhausted my local area bookstores of practice tests. I used it to pursue a ridiculous amount of training.

Between my college graduation and co-founding Torch, I spent ten years in various full-time graduate programs. Ten years! But I didn’t see my perfectionism for what it was until I started connecting the outer world behavior it drove me to pursue another inner world problem: people pleasing.

People pleasers often grow up with parents who need them to be a certain way. My single mom started a PhD program when I was born and finished when I was eight, working full-time the entire way. I was the main focus of her life, but she didn’t have room for me to be a kid and misbehave. The competing demands of her work, school, and I meant that I had to be highly self-sufficient and very easy to raise. Therefore, I didn’t learn to say “no” until much later. When no is not an option, you gaslight yourself into saying yes and convincing yourself that this yes is authentic.

When I became a founder, I had no idea how my perfectionism and people-pleasing would combine to impair my leadership. I needed hundreds of tiny outer world prompts to show me. They were all harmless enough–a direct report who wanted in-depth feedback on a deck, a customer who wanted me to speak at their next all-hands or a new hire who wished to face time to learn about the science behind Torch.

I wanted Torch to succeed, and I didn’t want to let anyone down along the way, so I rarely, if ever, said no. This approach took a toll as burnout became my constant companion, but even as my burnout drove me to new lows, I struggled to set healthy boundaries for my time.

This is the nature of inner work. Its challenges are really hard and old, having lurked in the background for most of your life, waiting for you to deal with them. Inner work takes a lot of effort, so you’re motivated to ignore it and focus on outer world problems instead. Yet if you follow the thread of any outer-world problem for long enough, you’ll find an inner-world problem at the other end. I’m reminded of this every time a founder asks me to consult on a potential breakup with their co-founder. Inevitably, the two are in a standoff, arguing over who is to blame for the feature that didn’t ship or the round that fell through. Too often, these outer-world problems reflect unacknowledged inner-world issues with the co-founders or their relationship. You could even argue that from a personal growth perspective, the whole point of founding a company is to be forced to do the inner work you would otherwise avoid. A startup done right teaches you how to avoid avoidance.

That’s one of the major lessons I learned from Torch–one that I pass on to each of the founders in my coaching practice. Avoiding avoidance means being willing to confront outer-world problems at an altitude of 10^24 meters and inner-world problems at 10^-14. Great founders do the work to become comfortable toggling between the ultra-macro and the microscopic.

They can spot a weakness in their market differentiation and positioning, but they can just as easily navigate their own inner patterns. This helps them stop bracing against the strain of their company and start using it as a vehicle for their development. It’s also a shift out of a victim mindset and into a mindset of empowerment and resilience.

I did not make this transition perfectly when I was a co-founder. There were lots of false starts and wrong turns, but I made it well enough to look back on that time with gratitude and a knowing smile rather than resentment and regret. I’m curious to hear whether this resonates with any of you…