Great post by Casey
There's huge difference in the strategies to get to a minimum viable loop, and those to strengthen an existing loop.
And conflating these is source of so much confusion in advice given and taken in tech
Casey is probably person I've spent the most time in a room discussing these things with. And wish we could still do it weekly.
Much of the time in tech people complain about advice given and how it's useless or even worse contradictory. But they come ot wrong conclusion
advice isn't intrinsically bad, it's that we often lack the important axes that make the situation and relevant advice needed very different
One of the most important of these is what companies do before they hit their core loop and after they hit it
Kindle strategies are pre-loop strategies. And that changes everything about them. They are not about stability--they are about hitting minimum viable scope of the core loop
Like paddling on your surfboard until you can catch the wave and stand up.
This means that expenditure on a per capita basis on pre-loop strategies can be high. It means that they tend to be very focused on hitting a specific metric. It means that they can be very centralized. it means that they tend to be generalized and easily used across companies
Randomly, people good at identifying pre-loop strategies tend to be very identifiable. Watching them meet each other is like watching a shibboleth test. There are certain ways they poke and trade strategies to identify each other.
But there's still a lot we haven't agreed on
about pre-loop strategies. We don't yet have strong views for example on how much you must understand about the core loop's unit economics in order to justify your pre-loop strategies. After all implicit in the over investment in pre-loop strategies is that assumption that payoff
curve is very high on long time scale due to leverage of the core loop. Intuitively we get this is distinction between pre-loop strategies and just bad use of resources
In this sense venture itself is a *pre-loop* strategy. And more generally it ties back into sense of PE ratios
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