The Company As An Organism

Varun Mayya

Between 2013 and 2020, I spent most of my time acquiring hard skills. Game and software development, video, writing, product, UI/UX design and more – as a scrappy founder who had raised very little money, I had to pick up all these skills because I did not have the experience to know how to outsource it well nor the money to hire experts yet. In 2020, I started to realise that building products was getting commoditized, and that distribution was becoming more valuable. I spent the majority of 2020-2024 building a network and distribution, and trying to monetize it with a community platform called Scenes. I also started learning how to hire well. But despite my best intentions, a lot of work would anyway end up on my plate. My core team would always stick around, so clearly I was able to build decent culture too.

But upon reflection, there were a few things I lacked:

⦁ The ability to pick markets correctly: For a decade or so, I used to believe that financial investors were useless since they were never directly producing value. But what I did not recognize at the time was there were two things I could learn from them: timing and the ability to pick markets better. I mistakenly used to believe that if there was an example of some business working, I could also build a business by building a better product – by virtue of better design or better user experience or lower price or more features. I was wrong. You need to find a gap and be early to a new market. Surprisingly, creating content helped me figure this out! Today I’ve realised that predicting what will be popular or useful 6 months in the future is a very important skill for a founder to have. Sometimes, I'd overshoot -- like working on virtual reality nearly FIVE years ago! Timing is everything.

⦁ The ability to scale culture: I knew how to build a tight knit core team that dreamed together. In all the companies I have ever started, the core team ends up living together for the first few years. But I did not know how to scale this beyond the first 50 people in the company. The culture only rubbed off on people I would personally interact and spend time with. I did not know how to create leaders in the company beyond the core team. I also did not understand the second order effects of my management decisions yet.

⦁ The ability to fully trust my thoughts and path: I listened too much to other people, especially other powerful and successful people. What I did not realise was that if you enter a really good market or are blessed with some very specific skill (for example you are excellent at raising capital), you can be successful even if you do a lot of other things wrong. When I disagreed with someone powerful, like a venture capital investor, I would often go with their advice because I would think “there’s no way this experienced person could be wrong”. What I did not realize was that not being in the trenches doing the work can disconnect someone like an investor from forming useful opinions about a field. Investor opinions on timeless things, like human behaviour and desire are very on point though. I did not know yet what advice to take and what to ignore – I lacked courage to go against the grain.

⦁ I did not understand myself: Every founder’s management style is a function of their strengths and weaknesses. While I was trying to emulate more successful founders, I did not realise that my own style is slightly different. I am a rabid experimenter, and my true skill lies in the zero to one journey. I do not enjoy money maxing as much as everyone else, and prefer to build things to be intellectually stimulated. For many years, I tried to stop experimenting, thinking that building a successful company is the result of radical focus. But I’ve come to realise that while there are certain companies and founder styles that benefit from radical focus, there are also styles (like Parker Conrad’s) that rely on using your multitasking ability. As generative AI has evolved, radical focus may not be the need of the hour anyway and rapid experimentation allowed me to learn a lot about the market very quickly. I understood that by teaming up with more process-oriented co-founders, I can actually play longer journeys by doing what I do well and leaving the rest to these co-founders I trust. More importantly, I’ve learned when to apply radical focus. Early stage startups are supposed to be temples of experimentation, and I’ve learned that not every mildly successful thing needs to be turned into a business. Some things can be experiments for the sake of experiments, and it is perfectly okay to run a company where 2 out of 10 things work as long as you shut failing projects down quickly. In a fast evolving space like generative AI or content, this experimentation is important and you learn so much from everything that does not work out (a lot of similarities with the hard disk sectors in the past). I would recommend a read of the Innovator’s Dilemma here.

I wrote this document over a couple of weeks as we've been nearly doubling headcount every single month. I am building a new company at the edge of generative AI and content, and this time around, I want to be very intentional about everything I do internally. I want to spend this year building wisdom and gaining experience scaling a company to headcounts beyond what I am comfortable with. Instead of constantly complaining about how I dislike scaling an organisation by scaling people, I am going to choose to get better at it. The most likely outcome for what we are trying to do is failure (what we are trying to do is very new), but I want to try to document as much of it for me as well as other interested founders. I believe analogies travel a lot faster than facts, so I’ve tried to draw parallels between a company and the human body. Even though it might not make sense, a company that has many humans inside of is best treated as a living being. A lot of this documentation is structured around the immune system, and is based on my decade long battle with my own immune system in a way. Some of this is biologically accurate, some is not. Doesn’t matter as long as you get the drift.

I do want to remind all readers that I am still learning and this document will get better over time as I learn more. You should take the good parts from this and add your own learnings to build the company you want.

Here goes.

The Body

Anyone trying to equate the human body to a company starts by claiming that the founder or a CEO is the “brain” of the company. In my observation, this is wrong.

The management team is more the brain of the company, and the founder(s) are the heart. Not because of the emotional reason that they’re the ones that bring the company together (this is not biologically accurate), but because they pump blood to keep the body alive.

The founder beats and pushes blood to the rest of the body. Blood carries many things and founders circulate a lot of things, but the main resources are oxygen and glucose. For the sake of this reading, let’s assume oxygen is cash and glucose is customer leads. The founder actually doesn’t produce either — they simply circulate it. But it’s called a circulatory system for a reason. The founder needs both oxygen and glucose pumped back. There is a disease called postural orthostatic tachycardia, where blood tends to pool at the legs after a human stands, because the legs are unable to send it back upwards.

In that case, the heart compensates – the founder will pump resources harder.

Let’s talk about the two resources – as I’ve established here, oxygen is cash, and customer leads are glucose. In the human body, the most glucose and oxygen is required by the brain, which in this case is your leadership team or CXO (executive) team. When we are under stress, the heart will beat harder. The body and brain need more nutrients during stress.

But remember, the founder needs the units to return nutrients. Repeated cycles of expected stress and return (also known as exercise) makes the body better — the companies get better at converting more leads (glucose) and better at using less oxygen (Vo2 max). Over time, the goal is for the heart to pump slower. Athletes have a resting heart rate between 30-40 because the organs have become efficient. Over time, you want the founder to not have to push as many nutrients to the team as the company is on autopilot. The goal of a company is for it to run with minimal intervention from the founders. The organs must keep the body in homeostasis by themselves.

The channels of communication for the founder are the many arteries, and the return of information and resources comes from veins — so with many different people in the team, the founder has various paths of to and fro communication. It’s messy, like our circulatory system. Even if a path is blocked, the founder usually will find a team mate through another path.

Let’s get to the brain. The human nervous system actually has two parts, high level management (also called the central nervous system), and mid level management, which is the peripheral nervous system. The central nervous makes some conscious and some unconscious decisions — the main focus is survival, safety, reputation, and reproduction. This makes sense, right? The executive team’s job is survival, to grow, and to maintain the brand.

The brain’s unofficial job is to learn, and try a lot of things. But when something works, you exploit it. There’s only one problem though. The central nervous system isn’t directly connected to the outside world. It’s fully dependent on organs and the peripheral nervous system for feedback. When you touch a flower, the peripheral nerves in your fingers are responsible for carrying information back to the brain. In fact, it’s a lot more complicated than you think.

There’s a delay between touching something and feeling a sensation. In fact, there are two different pains one feels when hit by something:

⦁ First pain: This is the sharp, immediate pain you feel. It's transmitted by fast-conducting Aδ (A-delta) fibers. The delay is usually very short, often fractions of a second.

⦁ Second pain: This is a duller, throbbing pain that follows. It's transmitted by slower C fibers and the delay can be a bit longer, around a second or so.

When mid management senses something in the business, you hear about the immediate problem first (there is a small delay here too), and then you gain a deeper understanding of the problem a few weeks later (second pain). The point is that the central nervous system (executive management) is fully dependent on the peripheral nervous system (mid management) for feedback. This opens the company up to all sorts of bullshittery and miscommunication between an external event taking place and the top level management’s understanding of it. Strategy is set by executives, but the actual execution and feedback collection is performed by mid and lower level folks. If your nervous peripheral system is not built to be fast and accurate, your exec team will face all sorts of problems. Early stage companies should probably not have a peripheral nervous system — your central nervous system must be in direct contact with the world.

The brain is also sense-making. It navigates. It tells itself a story. A lot of people think it’s the CEO or founder’s job to tell the company’s story internally. In the early days, this may be true. But after a while, I have noticed that the top and mid level management will create their own culture and internal story. A lot of this is out of the founder’s control but can be gently influenced.

Middle level management, including HR, sales management, and finance – they’re all organs. Some are external facing — like the ears. They pick up information from outside. Some are internal, like the liver — producing glucose (the liver is like the sales department in a company). When your blood sugar dips (like during fasting or intense exercise), the liver can make glucose from scratch. Since I’ve already equated the liver to a part of sales, you can think of this process like outbound sales 🙂

The liver also stores glucose in the form of glycogen in a process called Glycogenolysis. Basically, the liver can also store glucose (leads) for later extraction. Remember, glucose = leads.

You want the brain’s control on things like the liver to be automatic. What that means is that you want sales to be a process. If people leave or new people join, you want everything from onboarding to appraisals to exit to be sort of automatic.

However, you want the brain’s control over some parts to be partially automatic, like the eyes or mouth. What this means is that some parts of the business are full of ambiguity and require really smart analytical people to make decisions. For example – the eyes are like the system that looks at the outside world (i.e markets and competitors). The brain needs manual control over this to a large extent and you want to avoid this being fully automatic.

Making decisions on what new markets to enter? Probably shouldn’t be an automatic, formulaic process.

Hiring for automatic vs non-automatic roles is also very different. For automatic roles, you are probably looking for diligence and the ability to do the same thing over and over again well. For non-automatic roles you are probably looking for a lot more creativity and initiative but also experience. You probably don’t want too much initiative in an automatic sales process for example. You want people who can follow the process well.

Most organs failing will kill your company, but some you can survive without.

For example, I see HR like kidneys. It filters blood — communication, leads, cash. It filters everything. It’s not perfect. Bad stuff will still get through. But it tries.

You can cut off a large part of your kidneys and be fine. The lungs are like the finance department. They circulate filtered oxygen in the bloodstream (cash). You can live with one lung or kidney (i.e run with poor HR or finance). But you will pay the price later for cutting off these parts in the long run. Some like design (hair) make you more attractive to mates (this can play an important but underappreciated role), but the human body is okay without it too.

The job of most of the organs is to maintain Homeostasis:

Homeostasis is the body's ability to maintain a relatively stable internal environment despite changes in the external environment (i.e market). This means keeping things like body temperature, blood sugar levels, pH balance, and fluid levels within a narrow, healthy range.

Their job is to keep things running as it is. As an enlightened lumberjack would say: Chop wood, carry water (basically means the ability to do the same things over and over again).

At some scale, you will have a small research department that tries new things. The research department and new projects are similar to the hands and legs of the body. Hands and legs helped early man explore new environments (markets) and make tools (build efficiencies).

Protein And Carbohydrates

Note: Some parts of this section might be specific to “organic distribution based businesses” as I call them. These are businesses where leads come from YouTube, Instagram, and Twitter rather than through traditional advertising.

To produce glucose, humans eat food.

In our case, food is our distribution – the people that watch our videos. For you it may be the advertisements you run or the people you know in your contacts list who may buy whatever you are selling.

Of course some distribution is like protein, some is like carbohydrate. Ignore the health influencers, both carbohydrates and protein are important. Humans can’t survive with just protein.

Before I confuse you any further, let me explain what carbohydrates and protein here are. Carbohydrates are the kind of audiences you gain from putting out short form, low loyalty, low insight content. Protein is the kind of audience you gain from putting out deep, meaningful, insightful content. Usually, this is long-form content. You can compare the relative loyalty of a short and long form creator and see that the long form creators command far more loyalty than new age short form creators. The more educational their content, the more loyalty (PhysicsWallah is a good example). Of course, short form content is far easier to produce than long form content. Carbs are easier to eat than protein. What you want though, is to create content that looks like carbohydrates but packs protein. The heath wave in America has perfected this. They often pack in solid protein with the delightful packaging of a carbohydrate. This is the kind of content I aspire to make – solid, meaningful, insightful content, but packaged like candy.

There is a form of carbohydrate you should avoid consuming though – ultra processed carbs. The online version of this is clickbait content filled with very little substance, typically attacking some individual online. This brings you an audience that generally doesn’t convert into leads. Don’t get me wrong – they may thoroughly enjoy what you’ve put out, but they will not want to have anything to do with you after that.

The holy grail is a high calorie protein meal disguised as a carbohydrate. The channel Kurgesagt is a great example of this. High quality science content, wrapped in childlike packaging and pretty visuals.

However, people don’t like investing in protein (long form, deeply researched content is hard to produce consistently). Carbs (pizza!) are way more fun and easier to produce in a factory-like fashion.

But protein brings you solid, long term glucose. No sudden spikes, and no drops later. Even today, I get leads who reach out to me that have come from my old coverage of research based reports where the content has solid meat and insight. Whereas that short form video that went viral last week? It got me some leads for a day or two and then tapped out.

Carbs are useful if you need a quick fix of leads, but it is temporary. This is why companies that fully rely on advertising need to keep doing it every day or die. Yes, there are companies you can run purely without advertising, on just brand or organic distribution.

In the B2B context specifically, you should avoid going after unripe foods. I see a lot of companies trying to sell to early stage seed startups (who don’t have money), but if you look at the composition of revenue of successful companies (even consumer companies) it usually comes from large enterprise power users. The calorie counts of ripe fruits are better than immature ones :) Again – try to avoid selling to early stage startups and always score that lead poorly. Nothing against them, but they will waste your time. I wasted years selling to early stage startups and this is the #1 piece of advice I would go and give myself from a couple of years ago.

When eating, avoid poison mushrooms — avoid creating content that looks too shiny if it might cause problems later. Extremely controversial stuff sits here.

Don’t get addicted to carbs. It’ll help you survive, but you don’t build a long term brand easily. With long form writing and video, you build a brand.

The reason I believe distribution based businesses are going to be extremely disruptive is because other types of businesses that have existed so far cannot grow their own crops. Distribution based businesses are like the agricultural revolution. The other companies are either hunting (outbound sales) or buying food at the table at the Facebook restaurant and Google Ads cafe. They are unable to farm. After getting fed up with the ad platforms, they come to us because they also realise they can come to our farms for food at better rates. More importantly, for some of them, we setup farms and introduce them to the agricultural revolution at our content subsidiary youtubeasaservice.com.

Fertile Land

Back to the eyes. A lot of people think the brain and eye are separate.

In the development of an embryo, the brain and eyes originate from the same primary layer of cells, the ectoderm, but they differentiate and develop into distinct structures through a complex process known as organogenesis.

You cannot make executive decisions without keeping your eyes peeled. You should know miles in advance if oxygen or food are disappearing in your territory. This means looking at how the market needs are evolving and whether customers 1) exist 2) are being taken by some other competitor 3) are changing their behaviour. With AI, all of this is more important than ever. You should know if your fruits are being eaten by other people.

Now let’s talk about other organisations. In this context, they would be akin to other bodies, or “humans”.

Most are just there, we have nothing to do with them. Like SBI. I haven’t worked with SBI as a client ever, so I don’t care about them in my day-to-day.

Some are peers. You get to learn from them.

Some you have trades with for food or some other resource.

But mainly I want to talk about threats. A small proportion of them will be vying for the same food sources you are going after in the same piece of land as you.

The human body’s threat detection and evolution system evolved over time.

Usually, you shouldn’t see things as threats. Any new company that competes with you — doesn’t automatically make them a threat.

But the minute they compete with you AND seem competent (usually it’s the colourful animals and plants, the ones with existing distribution in your spaces). You generally have to take notice.

Step one is identifying the threat. Ideally it’s the eyes and brains that identify these threats early.

Step two is to decide whether to fight or flight.

Whichever path you choose, the standard sympathetic (fight) response takes place. Heart rate will go up. The founder will start pumping more cash (oxygen) and leads (glucose). The glucose levels of the body actually go up during a stressful event (it’s called the counterregulatory response). Breathing now gets faster (higher cash consumption). Now you either run (pivot) or fight. Most founders will spend a lot more on advertising generating leads when a competitor is hot on their heels.

The more you are well oiled, the more exercise you have performed, the lower your oxygen consumption and the higher the ability for you to sink glucose into your muscles, the better. So if you are in great shape, you can either pivot or beat the other person up.

But I’m of the philosophy that you should avoid too many direct fights unless you are going to be the clear winner.

Because no matter what, you will take damage. You will spend more, you may lose customers, your ability to explore and do research is limited. Adrenaline gives you tunnel vision, and this narrows your eyes, which in this case is your narrowed focus. Any company with a threat to their core business goes back into tunnel vision and focuses back on the core.

If animals always take damage in a fight, what are the alternatives?

From what I can see, they turn to display. Animals spend a lot of battle time posturing. To demand the other one back down. It’s actually a physical damage sparing move. Companies beef up. They raise money for a war chest, they do PR, they do the song and dance on Twitter.

But regardless, if you have to fight, prepare to take damage, and also better be in good shape. If you are not in good shape, don’t fight. If you are a company that cannot absorb a lot of glucose or has a high oxygen requirement in a race or too much fat tissue, you should avoid fighting. Almost every time there is a fertile land discovered with juicy fruit trees in it, expect a fight.

The other alternative is to settle for partnering with them and being #2. Acquisitions are a good route to this. Eventually markets consolidate because a few decide to band up and compete out the others.

Monkeys do this a lot. Weaker monkeys partner against an alpha in order to take on the alpha.

You can do that.

If we feel we are going to lose a type of content space, we try to partner with other top content creators.

Whenever you partner, you lose significant equity but gain more certainty.

To defend from a large sector, you need allies. We have lots of companies who are allies. Treat them nicely and share as much as you can. Investors, partners, friends. They will be useful when a bigger, sectoral threat comes. Several early stage founders become arrogant after seeing some early success. This is a mistake. People can partner and come after you if they recognize you are sitting on fertile land. Make sure you have allies or you may lose ground.

The easy way is to avoid spaces with too much competition. The ways to do this are to pick a small niche with an unattractive, minimally fertile land with very few growing fruits. The alternative (which I prefer) is to find an early market with land that you believe will become fertile in a few seasons. You need other competent people to disbelieve that the land you are sitting on is fertile. They will figure it out someday, but you need time to eat and build your body before they arrive.

If there’s a new, green pasture, you should beware. Otherwise you will be #10 and get very little. All your competitors with much larger war chests will bully you. They see the opportunity too.

But the core problem about taking any battle is stress.

When you’re stressed. Your body temperature goes up. Breathing rate goes up. Which means you are using up more cash and spending to generate more leads. Also as the founder, you are reprioritizing away from anything other than winning land.

You will flood the system with adrenaline and cortisol. Like I said before, adrenaline gives you tunnel vision. It increases glucose levels. Paradoxically, if glucose or oxygen levels fall too low, like we’re running out of leads or cash, your body actually responds with adrenaline to raise glucose levels. Unnecessary organs are temporary slowed.

Since the company is all one system, everything suffers.

The most important is that the brain will experience anxiety. You will feel no pain of any decision during that period but decision making will be slightly impaired. Sensemaking is suspended. You will choose to eat carbohydrates 🙂

You should try to avoid competitive spaces with active, long term players unless you notice some gap or some change in the environment. This is because they know the terrain by heart. They already have access to the best leads. They have built relationships with customers already. They have iterated on the product long enough. They have glucose and oxygen reserves. They know obvious pitfalls. They know the map well.

Part of becoming successful as a company seems to be making your own knowledge of your own terrain complete. You can also choose to make it intentionally confusing for competitors.

Several companies beat their drums about their profitability. They make the space easy to understand for competitors. I’ve met a lot of founders who are making several times more than unicorns but uninterested in the press because they want to hide their competitive advantages from others.

If you give someone else a map of your territory, you cannot be surprised when competitors arrive.

Beware of 1) hungry competitors about to die 2) very young and nothing to lose or 3) very ambitious. And colourful competitors with distribution. The animal kingdom, this is known as Aposematism. Aposematism is an animal's way of warning predators that it's dangerous or unpleasant to attack. This could involve bright colors, strong smells, venom, sharp spines, or aggressive behavior.

Also, VC companies scare me and why I am unlikely to raise money again.

It’s like some person pumping oxygen and consuming huge doses of carbs and pumping himself or herself full of adrenaline repeatedly to give himself a permanent state of fight or flight.

Sure — he or she is going to win some fights. But they will get diabetes later on – which means baseline glucose numbers are elevated, peripheral nervous system takes damage, poor vision and eventually, a faulty heart. Baseline oxygen (cash) consumption is really high too. But if there’s an early fertile land, this person is a bully. This monstrosity can outcompete other players in the short term and in fertile lands where the winner takes everything, a competitor who has raised a lot can be a serious threat.

But conventional wisdom favours low baseline numbers of oxygen requirements and the ability to sink more glucose efficiency. Being lean and burning less money makes you more efficient over the long run.

That’s why no matter how well we do, we avoid overspending on anything. That’s why I chose to do this bootstrap this time. It’s a wiser option long term and it gives us plenty of time to exercise. But in order to bootstrap, I need to either look for less fertile, unattractive land (less likely to attract VC steroid monsters) or to be early to a fertile land that VCs do not believe yet is fertile.

When you’re a young company with 5-10 employees, the surface areas of your arteries are small. They’re clear. Over time, cholesterol deposits plaque and creates blockages. You get stiff. Changing things require lots of approvals now. Bureaucracy appears. Ego slows down the company. Founders need to be capable of pumping through the plaque if they need to. You need to keep seeing threats or exercising to avoid plaque. Nothing like competitors to keep you focused on battle instead of internal bullshit. You want lean, mean, flexible arteries. Once plaque has developed, removing it will always hurt surrounding tissue, but it needs to be removed at some point.

The best equivalent for arteries in a company are your communication channels - our Slack, WhatsApp or in person communication. You want fairly transparent communication except to and from the brain where you want to have a blood brain barrier (BBB). The BBB protects the brain from pathogens and toxins circulating in the blood, which could disrupt neural function.

You have to have some privileged information at the level of your executive management. Allowing nonsense into your blood brain barrier creates chaos. As much as people have appreciated remote work (I wrote a book called Pyjama Profit several years before work from home was mainstream), it slows down your communication system (slow arteries and veins) and if mid level managers are remote, it slows down feedback from the peripheral nervous system to the central nervous system.

The feedback loop from your peripheral nervous system finding out something new from the environment to your brain making a decision on that piece of evidence to a response is slow. This is okay if you already have product market fit and are in the “chop wood, carry water” stage of the business. Otherwise, it’s wiser to be in person.

Autoimmunity

Let’s talk about employees.

I don’t remember who said this, but “100% of early battles are external but as the company matures, 50% of battles are internal”. That’s because of autoimmunity.

When employees are disconnected from revenue (like engineers) or don’t have to directly focus on threats, they start creating internal fires.

It’s useful to think of the immune system as having two parts – Innate, and Adaptive. The Innate Immune System is your body's first line of defence and is a non-specific system that responds quickly to a wide variety of threats. When new yet non-specific problems occur, companies already have some idea of how to solve and fix them. This part of the immune system is usually an extension of how the founders and early management think and rarely codified or written down. Most companies have similar innate immune systems. If your office bathroom stops working, most companies will solve it in a similar way.

The Adaptive Immune System, also known as the acquired immune system, is a branch that develops a highly specific response to individual pathogens (like bacteria or viruses). The hallmark of an adaptive immune system is an antibody response. This is often intentional and most employees will watch for the founder’s response (and the gravity of response to certain events). When faced with a new threat, the initial response is usually from the innate immune system and if the threat is formidable or something that could be repetitive, the adaptive immune system creates antibodies against it. The more harsh the initial response to an event by the founder, the better the antibody response from the team the next time. After a long period of not facing a particular threat, the antibody response cools off. To keep it going, constant vaccinations are required, i.e, constantly reminding people of the specific negative instances and the rules formed because of that.

The immune system responds to threats with inflammation, which is characterised by redness, pain and swelling.

There’s always a little inflammation going on because most startups are constantly fighting tiny battles.

But if you have too strong a response to an internal or external threat, you get warm or hot. You become feverish. The heart rate goes up. The founders have to direct resources to the problem area.

Some inflammation is normal and necessary. People that believe that companies can run with zero inflammation are wrong, and too much is of course a recipe for disaster.

But sometimes it’s abnormal. Sometimes it is autoimmune. Autoimmunity is when your immune system attacks healthy tissue by mistakenly recognizing them as invaders.

In the company context, autoimmunity is when certain rules are “bad” rules and they’re applied religiously. Just like antibody formation to healthy tissue in diseases like arthritis, you must be very careful as a founder of what you attack, and also think through second order issues.

Take this instance as an example: Maybe a manager fired an employee for some reason, and the employee reported this to HR as an “abuse of power” (I have seen this happen before). Now “abuse of power” is a term that encompasses a lot of things – was this abuse of power sexual? Was it an ego trip? Was it simply a frustrated manager who was fed up with his employee? Without other people in the room or evidence, this quickly devolves into a he-said she-said scenario. Let’s assume as the founder, you decide to reprimand the manager. Let’s assume this “abuse of power” didn’t actually happen, but you decide to fire the manager anyway to make sure employees feel better.

All the other managers see this. Employees unconsciously think – this is unacceptable behaviour, let’s attack managers for any kind of assertive behaviour. Other managers now avoid firing employees, even troublesome ones, for fear of being reprimanded.

You’re now in trouble. You’re attacking healthy tissue. And you may think, “I can hire a professional to fix this later”.

You can’t. The system will support the problem. On my Discord, there was an active person who wanted to be an admin. He made friends with absolutely everyone. Over the next few weeks, I was tagged by him and others asking to be admin repeatedly.

I said no. Based on experience, I generally avoid giving adminship to anyone who asks too much for it. It almost always leads to a power trip later. There were no problems with the person per se, but I didn’t want to take the risk.

But the community started complaining – saying “you are not giving a chance to good people”. The problem is the entire body is now ok with slightly spamming, "make his admin" behaviour. It’s how organisations in the US become catatonic. And woke. This is why Disney creates woke content or Google Gemini’s AI generates a Chinese Abraham Lincoln – because a vocal crowd can sometimes make you take decisions to pacify them that lead to problematic second order effects.

On the other hand, if you let managers actually abuse talent – you have the exact same problem again. You’re autoimmune against talent. Good people will leave when injustice takes place.

You need to set rules that are favourable for the company's long term survival. You need the company to be geared to fight threats. And you want to eliminate internal antibodies all the time before they get problematic. Immune tolerance is important — there should be a 2-3% tolerance to some mild bad behaviour. The brain and eyes have some immune privilege: for example, eyesight is crucial. The immune privilege system helps protect the eyes from the potentially damaging inflammation that can accompany a full-blown immune response. This reduces the risk of damage to delicate structures necessary for vision. Immune privilege in the eye is not absolute though. Inflammation and immune responses can still occur within the eye, especially in cases of severe infection or trauma.

With VC funded startups, you end up having massive levels of autoimmunity. Because the running thought it that you just let it be for now and rush over to the next round. Founders say “ I’ll just surgically operate the entire set of bad actors later.” You see how terrible this sounds?

Immune tolerance is important but you also want a strong response against an antigen you want gone. Especially if detected early. The stronger the response the more likely the organisation learns that this is a problem and isn’t tolerated. This is reflected in antibody levels. If the company sees the problem again, like a vaccine booster, it gets even more codified in the rules. A long time without seeing the problem makes the company forget the problem.

Nowadays, I have started to talk about a problem that can happen later, again and again – this is like a form of vaccination. One example is a young employee who sees our agency business and thinks “I’ll go start my own agency now”. We now have a list of 4-5 people who have done this and gone nowhere. But they were very talented. We now tell their stories to new talent, to show them that while this seems like a good path, it may not be because running an agency is not about skill on the job, it’s people and capital management. We can avoid losing good talent who do not recognize this and go out and waste time.

So sometimes it may make sense to overreact on certain things to make a point and set the level of autoimmunity to certain events. And remember, the cost of you mounting an exaggerated response is a fever. The benefit is long term immunity to a problem. Which means more nutrients in the short term. Sometimes, I’ve seen companies go through a coup. These are akin to cancers — some cells will band together and form a “movement” to replace current management. As a founder, you should be watchful of these – we most recently saw this with the entire OpenAI board drama fiasco. Weak immune systems cause cancer.

Closing thoughts:

1. Brain and eyes find fertile, low competitive ground.

2. ⁠The founder pumps glucose (leads) and oxygen (cash) to the team.

2. ⁠Organs consume oxygen and food. The central nervous system tends to consume the most resources.

4. The company’s immune system prevents autoimmunity and cancers

5. Pick battles wisely. Battle always takes a toll on you. Find lands with lower competition.

6. ⁠You want the founder’s time and effort into the company to reduce over the long term – you need to reach “economical heart zone” a.k.a “orbit” to do this. In fact, the goal of a company should be to get into this orbit.

7. Beware stiffness of arteries at scale.

8. Beware things leaking across BBB.

9. Don’t do fraud — it’s like smoking cigarettes, makes the entire oxygen system tarnished.

10. Remote work tends to slow down the feedback loop of the peripheral to central nervous system.

11. Learn to run lean – capable of sinking lots of glucose on low amounts of oxygen. This comes from exercise and building muscle (cells are warm due to momentum).

12. Learn to grow crops. Distribution based businesses are sort of a revolution in business because they are the equivalent of an agricultural civilisation. Until now, most civilizations were hunter gatherers or eating at Facebook advertising’s restaurant. They may be stronger and faster since they’ve been around longer. But they don’t grow their own food. They hunt (outbound sales). You might lose some fights to them because they’ve been around for a while but you can make them starve if you have a long term horizon. And without growing their own food, they will die in some fight or the other.

13. Chop wood carry water after your farm is made. Build processes that do not require too much manual intervention.

14. Partner with allies. Weak monkeys partner with other weak monkeys to take down an alpha. You can only afford to have no allies if you are #1, and nobody is really #1.

15. Avoid revealing your territory map to others.

16. Immature cells differentiate into specialised cells based on their microenvironment – if you want to train some new employees, pair them with seniors.

17. Constantly reset the level of autoimmunity. Eliminate pathogenic antibodies. Introduce antibodies to bad behaviour.

18. PR is not real distribution. You don’t own it. Grow crops.

19. Don’t become a foodie, but love farming. Don’t fall in love with the distribution or the fame. You are here to build an institution. Fame evaporates.

20. Government is like a chieftain. Big, burly, strong. Better to play at one arm’s distance in case he wants the farm later.

21. Study those who own farms and are fat. Most content creators are vain, self absorbed and know no end to their ego, but they are genuinely good at farming. Learn from them. They work because most have very low costs (they can run on very low oxygen).

22. Adipose tissue is the cost of high glucose levels and lack of exercise. It makes it very hard to run when there’s an emergency and of course increases glucose levels and worsens oxygen requirements. Google is struggling to do battle because they’ve put on weight.

23. You can tolerate some inflammation at organs like skin. You cannot tolerate it at the heart or the brain. Inflammation at the brain level causes multiple sclerosis.

24. In many hospitals, hepatology (liver) and gastroenterology (stomach and intestine) sit out of the same office. If the liver is the final sales system, gastroenterology is pre-sales: the ability to extract glucose from food. First the stomach pours in acid and burns bad leads (you need a good way to filter leads). Then the small intestine extracts nutrients (first sell). Then the large intestine extracts more value (upsell/cross-sell). Many companies lose money on the first sale of product A but make money on derivative product B, C and D. The intestine has a large surface area – every part extracts value. But the intestine also has a “motility” – i.e, how fast or slow it moves. Move too fast and you are selling too hard (or irritating customers). Move too slow and the downstream value will be taken by someone else. Set early autoimmunity to mis-selling. Several companies like Byjus have died because of it.

25. If you can’t make heat get out of the kitchen. When muscles are warm they are flexible and move better. A cell with heat transfers heat to another. Motivation and inspiration is infectious. A hot cell can make even the coldest cells warm. Get too cold and you die. Companies are delusion bubbles. If the delusion ends, the company dies.

26. The goal is to get into the “economical heart rate zone”, also known as “orbit”. When you have enough momentum (product market fit followed by leads, process, value delivery and capital extraction), you get into orbit. Because orbit keeps you spinning even when you do less work, the heart rate requirement is very low, like an athlete. This thought evades most people because most people prefer work life balance so they do 20% work every day. They never get into orbit.

27. Love what you do and remember all humans die. Your company will die one day too. Stay humble and stoic.