When we talk about founding companies, we use the language of markets and products, of TAMs and PMF, the dead language of a materialist orthodoxy that has forgotten the sacred dimension of creation. We are living through the great forgetting. The institutions that once embodied transcendent purpose now serve only their own perpetuation.
They are glimpses of alternative ontologies, perceptions of latent potentialities within the structure of reality itself. The prophet perceives the pleroma, the fullness of what could be, breaking through the veil of the merely actual. But mere seeing is insufficient. The prophet must also speak these realities into existence. Here we encounter the profound mystery of logos, the word that creates. When the founder articulates their vision, they are not merely describing a future state; they are participating in an act of creation ex nihilo
People stay hidden until a medium exists in which they can express themselves. The founder’s responsibility is to make legible a new medium that empowers what would otherwise remain latent — not just building a product, but creating the conditions for others to become visible.As prophet, they perceive the future that must be brought forth. As priest, they must offer up the present reality as sacrifice for this future’s manifestation. This sacrificial dimension is crucial and undertheorized. Every act of creation requires a corresponding act of destruction, an abolition of the given in favor of the possible.
But the prophet-priest founder knows that reality itself is plastic, subject to reformation through sufficient will and vision. They do not iterate toward product-market fit; they bend reality until it fits their product.
The question is not “What do customers want?” but “What latent potentiality in the structure of being must be actualized?”
The deeper question for founders is not what’s broken and needs fixing — a utilitarian, “plumbing” view of building — but what latent abundance exists that no one has yet made accessible. The shift is from repair to revelation.The greatest companies of the coming decades will not be built by entrepreneurs who seek to serve markets. They will be built by prophet-priests who understand themselves as participants in the ongoing creation of the cosmos, technologists who are simultaneously mystics, founders who are simultaneously philosophers.
