Open letter to founders: entrepreneurship is not physics

I’ve only seen it on mobile and it seems fine there. So consider narrowing your browser window? But I’m not sure what the specific issue is.

Business plans and financial models are useless, yet they are not.

They force the entrepreneur to put some level of deep thought into the entire endeavor and create some sort of initial hypothesis.

Even if it proves to be entirely incorrect in future, it provides a very good starting point, that you can keep iterating upon as you learn more.

Most of the times you don't know what you don't know and the business plans and financial models force you to think the entire thing through and start getting a feel for what you know and what all you perhaps don't know.

Edit: to be very clear, I’m not suggesting that one develops an old style 50 page business plan. I’m simply suggesting that one must have at least a basic understating of the business, the need, the opportunity, the revenue model and so on. It’s a business after all.

Apart from the God-awful layout, the article is pretty light on anything useful or actionable.

> I need merely two variables [...] resulting in a simple yet accurate model.

It's accurate-enough, but not accurate accurate. This is why things like quantum gravity are being researched. Maybe I'm looking too deeply into this analogy, but I think it's a really bad one.

> In highly complex systems such as business, things like butterfly effects can cause massive distortions rendering our models flawed.

Most businesses fail due to a lack of product-market fit. This has nothing to do with chaos theory or initial conditions. In fact, I'd say if you have product-market fit, the market tends to be very lenient of initial conditions.

> In order to perfectly predict the weather, you’d need incredible amounts of data and an equally overwhelming number of data points and then somehow synthesize that into an accurate prediction.

I'm pretty sure that we're still not sure if you can even actually predict the weather -- like, ever (we aren't sure if Navier–Stokes is smoothly solvable in 3D). All these physics analogies are just shallow and inaccurate.

> It’s easy for the takeaway to be human behavior is difficult, business is complex, all data is meaningless, we can’t apply a scientific process at all, let’s wing it. And while there are people who lean heavily on intuition (Gary Vaynerchuk comes to mind) I believe if that’s the takeaway, the pendulum has swung too far out of whack.

I'm not sure why this is "out of whack" -- to me, this seems like a perfectly valid strategy. As I get older, I value intuition more and more. There's a reason Warren Buffet's moniker is the "Oracle of Omaha."

Yeah, I think that's a fair point. It's probably a good idea to introduce a little chaos into the order, and try things that don't make sense.

Difficult to do though in huge companies. Which is why most disruptive innovation ends up being acquired by those companies rather than created by them.

On way to address that issue seems to be to allow a separate arm to essentially act as a startup, preferably far away from the main company.

Perhaps useless was too harsh. But the point I was trying to make is that in a situation with so much uncertainty and where the downsides are constrained, it's better to act and get real world feedback. Doubly dangerous to blindly believe in the plan and execute it well if it's flawed. You're right about your conclusion though. Trouble is, it's often only possible to tell ex-post-facto.