It’s definitely an oldie (2013) but still very much a goodie
Full link: https://skibinsky.com/godel-incompleteness-for-startups/
Excerpts:
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As soon as a startup starts operating in the real world, the vast majority of factors will be outside of a startup direct control or even influence, while having absolutely dominating impact on that startup eventual outcome
Any … formal system capable of expressing elementary arithmetic cannot be both consistent and complete. In particular, for any consistent, … formal system that proves certain basic arithmetic truths, there is an arithmetical statement that is true, but not provable in theory
Infinity will always be far too rich, far too dense, far too big to be chained by anything countable – formal systems, software, and finite proofs. Better systems, better software can grab bigger chunks from infinity. Yet by expanding themselves they are no closer to fully capturing the potential variety hidden in continuum infinity. They just moved the boundary between “knowledge” and “unknown” further out.
The most brilliant minds already know pretty well about deficiency of any given formal system. The legendary Charlie Munger stresses the discipline of developing multiple overlapping mental models when developing his own formal system for investment. He understands no single system no matter how complex will give him the full truth
As an important side note, lets consider if time travelers move deeper into the past, to pitch Henry Ford or Nikola Tesla. However in this case the whole syntax of his proposition makes no sense. Computers do not exist, web and internet does not exist, everything he is saying is meaningless on a syntactical level. His statements belong to total unknowns for inventors of past centuries. Yet for Bill Gates, it represents a true yet un-provable statement.
Unfortunately neither old systems nor newly expanded ones like the one Larry helped create has knowledge about building social graphs or maintaining friend connections. There are a few companies out there – Friendster and Myspace, their whole capitalization is less then Google’s sushi budget
Discovery: The product or service the team builds is released to the real world. Real world complexity is continuum infinity, it’s not bound by any formal systems. What market “wisdom”, startup mentors, university professors, and plain old “common sense” knows is irrelevant – that’s formalization of reality, not the reality itself
Unfortunately there are absolutely no solid predictions we can do about this stage. At the end of the day the startup just has to be lucky enough to start close enough and navigate optimally enough to hit its first discovery before company disintegrates from lack of funding or team morale. The process can be as fast as few months or as long as a decade.
The process of formalization can take decades. As long as a startup has growth, especially non-linear growth driven by new products, the formalization is never finished. Yet sooner or later the process of formalization of any big discovery must end. Facebook will add the last unsigned user and will be permanently bound by birth rate. Everybody will own some version of the iPhone. Amazon’s catalog will carry every single item manufactured on the planet. The new expanded system that includes newly discovered true model might be big, yet it’s still a formal system, it’s still finite
Tech companies rarely die unless extremely badly mismanaged, they just move deeper and deeper into legacy part of the stack, as new formal systems keep being added to the outer shell.
Zombie startups represent small Gödel-statements. They are the small dots in the 3-area chart we used above. Gödel’s theorem only proves they exist – it doesn’t prove anything about their size or distribution. There will be Gödel statement for $100 opportunities just like there would be a few for $1B ones.
It’s inspiring to know at any moment in time there is an infinite number of true statements for new startups to discover and further expand our collective system. Gödel’s theorem is not really about our limits: it’s about possibilities always waiting to be discovered. The process is certainly hard and alien to us.