• The Opening, Midgame and Endgame in Startups Why the best founders are “time travelers” who play all three phases simultaneously In the Prod community, they talk about founders as “time travelers” rather than visionaries. • Founders don’t see the future, they teleport there. • I think this is true in more ways than first meets the eye. • To extend the analogy of a chess game (which I recently used in an essay on the AI race and which Will Manidis also articulated beautifully in his essay on “Endgame Play”), outside observers see startups as temporally sequential, with a beginning (inception/ seed stage), middle (product-market fit/ growth stage), and end (IPO/ scale-up). • However, the best founders actually live in all three of these phases simultaneously. • - Opening: The opening phase of a startup involves the “magic” of transforming from a few people with an idea into a “startup.” Silicon Valley excels at this magic, and Paul Graham is the prophet of the opening.
Article Summaries:
- The article frames startup development as a chess match, with founders acting as “time travelers” who manage the opening, midgame, and endgame simultaneously. It defines the opening as the formation phase where ideas become a company, the midgame as the product‑market‑fit and scaling stage, and the endgame as the long‑term vision beyond IPO or scale‑up. Different startups are naturally suited to one phase: AI start‑ups to the opening, vertical SaaS to the midgame, and deep‑tech to the endgame. The piece highlights how each phase presents unique challenges-funding, traction, or sustaining vision-and warns that imbalance can lead to hubris or failure.
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