Making Startups Powerful
September 2026 One of the most useful heuristics I have when doing office hours with startups is to ask: what would make this company more powerful? Asking how the company could make more money is a good heuristic too, but it tends to yield incremental improvements. Whereas thinking about how to make it more powerful will sometimes make it orders of magnitude more valuable. There are a lot of different variants of this question, depending on the type of company. Is there a way to transform the company from a mere component supplier into the one that owns the relationship with the customer? Or the related question: is there a way to make the money flow through it? It's always good when money flows through you. [1] Is there a way to create something akin to an app store, where other companies can build upon your product? Then all their efforts to create valuable things make you more valuable too. Ideally this is combined with owning the customer relationship and making the mone