A company is just a belief engine

Belief powers everything

At the genesis of a company, you have only one thing: your own belief.

You have no customers, no employees, no product; nothing but your own belief.

Your first task is to find some customers*, or a co-founder. Recruiting both is surprisingly similar: you hit the road and talk brightly to everyone about the great thing you want to achieve.

A company only really exists between the people that believe in it.

At the start nobody knows or believes in the company, and for everyone’s purposes, it doesn’t exist. The company is only real when it has customers, but a customer must believe in a company and its ability to deliver before they’ll interact with it. Therefore a company is born in belief deadlock. The founders must, through force of personality, break through this deadlock.

Belief can inhibit and accelerate. Deadlock broken, you can find a critical mass of belief. A point where it is infectious. People believe in something so much that they have to tell others about it. Belief generates excitement, and generates more believers.

In a sense, building a crucible for growing belief is the task of creating a company.

Employees join a company when they believe in it. When they believe it’ll be around next year, that the equity is worth something, that they’ll get paid.

Investors are the most interesting piece of the belief ecosystem. An investor’s job is to place money into something likely to fail*. They need to pick the company that will be a knock-out success in 5 years, and it’s physically impossible to pick them. Whilst an employee or customer is involved with a company, the investor is committed. They need a few hundred thousand dollars worth of belief.

Founders are the vehicles of belief.

Founders hold the story, the kernel of the company. They spend all day telling the story; infecting those around them with their belief. They must build an amplifier to radiate this belief as far and wide as possible.

Why is belief so central to companies?

We live in a world of chaos. The future is impossible to predict. Bad things happen to good people. Belief is our psychological mechanism for coping with this; Belief gives us the foundation and certainty we need to consider the future.

Everything we hold true about the future is not fact, it is belief.

Without belief an economy would be impossible. Nearly every transaction would be hampered (‘will this ice-cream turn out good? will it be stolen once I buy it?’). No long term planning would be done. No work or investment would happen. No company would be possible.

As humans, we need to believe. We cannot exist without believing in things; moreover we want to believe (some people more than others). For most people, the way to implant belief is not through data, it’s through stories. Stories are how we digest and remember the world. Stories compel belief.

The company is belief, and belief spawns from a story. Belief is our conception of future. Belief makes future possible.

* Some companies don’t have customers. They need lots of belief.
* s/likely to fail/not be a billion dollars/g