An ecosystem is never the starting point. It's the result
Originally written in Chinese. Translated with AI, reviewed by Gary. Read the Chinese original →
The Renaissance wasn't planned by some group of artists and thinkers sitting down together.
The Black Death battered Europe's existing social order, population structure and established authorities. Many things that had seemed unshakeable began to loosen, and humanism, art and new ideas slowly grew in those cracks.
In fact, many great things aren't designed. They grow slowly out of chaos, failure and accident.
Startups especially.
In PowerPoint, everything connects
Over the years I've seen a lot of startup projects, and there's one kind I now look at especially carefully.
The kind that starts as an ecosystem.
Integrate upstream and downstream, solve the problems of suppliers, merchants and consumers, add AI, data, payments, logistics and community in the middle, draw a beautiful flywheel, then tell you that once everything is connected, we'll change the whole industry.
Every time I see one, I put a question mark in my head first.
Because in PowerPoint, everything can connect.
A brings B, B generates data, data optimises C, C brings more users, more users bring merchants, more merchants create a network effect.
Every line sounds perfectly reasonable.
But does it really happen that way?
I think most startups that want to "build a whole world" from the start end up struggling to get off the ground.
Often it's not that the founder isn't smart. It's that they're too smart and think it through too completely.
Customers haven't validated your first product yet, and you're already thinking about the fifth business model. You haven't made your first dollar, and you're already discussing platforms, marketplaces and ecosystems.
Founder and entrepreneur
I actually prefer the word entrepreneur to founder.
A founder has just "founded a company".
But entrepreneur feels different to me.
What an entrepreneur faces every day is a heap of chaos, uncertainty, scarce resources and sudden events. Things outside keep changing, the original plan keeps getting disrupted, but they're still clear about what matters most right now, and keep moving forward.
When a startup really happens, it's usually not as pretty as the case study written about it later.
It's actually quite clumsy.
You see a real problem and solve it first. If someone really uses it, you continue. If someone really pays, you continue.
As you go, you discover that much of what you originally thought was wrong.
The feature you thought was most important, customers may not care about at all. You thought customers wanted A, but what they ask you about every day is B. You thought you were building a product, and only later realise the real business may be somewhere else.
That's closer to reality.
Google is huge today, with Search, YouTube, Android, Chrome, Cloud, and now AI. But the early Google didn't start by designing today's Google. What it did first was simple: make search better.
Facebook is the same. Look at Meta today: Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, AI, VR, an entire social ecosystem that seems to have everything. But the earliest Facebook started from one small social use case: letting college students find each other online and look at each other's profiles.
Entrepreneurs easily make one mistake: seeing how great a company is today and then believing, looking backwards, that its founder saw all of it more than a decade ago.
I don't really believe that.
Reality is more often like this:
You make something, the market reacts, you change it. You hit a wall, you change again. You see an opportunity, you go in. You thought A was the business, and after a few years you find B is the real business.
Then ten years later, when the company has succeeded, a third party looks back, strings those ten years together, and writes a beautiful strategy story.
It looks as if every step was planned all along.
Often it's just hindsight.
Vision can be big; execution must be small
So should an entrepreneur have a vision?
Definitely. A vision can certainly be big.
But execution must be small.
How small? Small enough that you can do it tomorrow and get feedback from the market right away.
The world is full of uncertainty. Chaos isn't the exception; chaos is the norm.
So a startup may never have been:
"I already know what the future will bring, so I'm going to build it."
A startup is more like:
"I roughly know where I'm going, but I'm willing to let reality keep revising me."
Of course we need a plan, and we need a strategy too. Those matter. Just never trust your plan too much.
Because a plan is only a hypothesis. The market is the answer.
So these days I really do prefer a simpler way of starting a business.
Find a real problem first. Solve it well. If people use it and people pay, keep going.
You really don't need to rush to build a world on day one.
If the problem is big enough and you solve it well enough, the market will take you to the next place on its own.
And if, in the end, a platform or even an ecosystem really does grow out of it, that's great.
But an ecosystem should never be the starting point. It's only the result.