Measure Twice Cut Once: The Idea Maze and Dead Ends

And other ways not to kill a startup

I first learned about the idea maze from a talk that Balaji did in 2018 at Coinbase. Here’s a good post from Chris Dixon on the topic and an accompanying slide that does the idea good justice for the “idea“ of media on the internet:

Funny thing about these slides being ~10 years out of date is you can see the treasure shifts - iTunes, maybe not today but Spotify and Apple Music are big businesses. Some of these even I have not heard of (like KaZoA wtf is that lol).

Balaji paired this concept with a concept of “verbs“ - things that you can do with money (buy/sell, stake, purchase, send, earn). Each verb had a specific product vertical that we were attacking at Coinbase. Now 7 years after that talk, I’m starting to wonder where the treasure exists.

One core question I’ve asked myself over the last few years is this: is the decentralized money on the internet maze just filled with dead ends? I’ve spent (too much) time here and can’t for the life of me think of a winning strategy long-term besides Bitcoin as digital gold. What if instead of a maze filled with centralized custody / decentralized custody, lending, exchange, transaction (b2b vs b2c) over a long enough time horizon it actually looks like this with only two options:

I’ve also been thinking about this with AI, and with a slight amount of future-sight think the beginning of the maze might look something like the following:

This still has to play out, but what I’m realizing is that as your ideating having this maze mapped out (literally) is quite important. It’s important on a per-builder basis and on a team basis to really try to find root truth to why something will work or not and is also where second mover advantage with some lessons from the first might pay back handsomely.

As you zoom out even the future of software companies might look something like:

What you might realize with these slides is that you also need to think through first what your foundational decisions are that are make or break and that can’t change - make those product + strategy decisions first, then execute.

The idea maze is totally yours to own, but choose wisely because many things die two years before shutdown because the wrong decisions were made at the very beginning.