Making Startups Powerful
This article explores strategic heuristics for startup founders to increase their company's power and valuation. It emphasizes the importance of owning customer relationships, creating network effects, and building platform-like ecosystems.
Why it matters
Provides actionable business strategy for entrepreneurs looking to scale beyond incremental growth.
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.
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