use Salesforce, do accounting, fire people, hire lawyers, fire lawyers, hire these lawyers to fire those lawyers, pay all the lawyers, make Powerpoint presentations, post on LinkedIn, cold call customers, pitch customers, support customers when they call you in the middle of the night, convene board meetings, create a brand, create OKRs, write white papers about digital transformation, change the OKRs, change the brand, set up one-on-ones and pipeline reviews and roadmap syncs and sales kickoffs and quarterly offsites, and fix the office wifi. Building websites with friends is a fairly common hobby; arbitrating disagreements about sales territories is not.
That’s the rough arc: A phase of youthful freedom, when you really are the boss; and everything after, when the business—including its customers, its board, and the choices you made yesterday—are the boss.
They skip the loose part—the expansive part, the entrepreneurial part, the fun part—because, in a world where every news story is about a new startup going straight up, that part seems like an immature distraction.
. That’s the irony of Cluely, and often, of startups in general: In their eagerness to do something big, they let the urgency of building a business distract them from the time it takes to do something truly ambitious. The potential to end human thought, now trapped in a company that sells sales software.
