Gravity
The most important but least understood phenomenon in business.
This is the first blog post of my life. It’s something that feels more permanent and traditional. My hope is that it’s a good medium to convert my inner dialogue into a corpus of memories that will serve as a reflective tool for Camera Search and the years to come. I’ve always spent time thinking, creating, and simulating ideas in my head, likely to a fault. When they become recurrent, like a dream that revisits you every year, I’ve decided that I should write them down. There’s also just so much AI slop right now, that the dead internet theory feels more like a weather forecast. -Pete
Outliers create their own gravity. It’s a notion I’ve been thinking about a lot as I build Camera Search.
Systems in society overweight for signal. This causes humans to optimize for signal. Its starts early in life, and as I’ve aged I have watched parents and now individuals dedicate their lives to harnessing these signals. They breakdown life decisions like a grocery list, and shmooze surface level connections at country clubs for internships and ladder rungs at some_corporate_firm. It’s why status and societal tiers are used as investment filters, often blindly, in private markets.
But much like racing sailboats, you can always just bang the corner instead.
Investors majorly overweight for certain filters, which goes against the very power laws and fundamental VC models that rely on such outliers. Some investors do this knowingly to play the game of institutional fee collection, justifying investments by hiding behind the veil of these filters. However, investing only in Ivy League founders backed by YC and based in SF means you miss out on 90% of the universe.
I believe founders should focus more on gravity. This could mean starting your business in a mid-teir city, where innovation and modern jobs are high in demand and where potential for gravitational generation is high (Portland, Maine). This could also mean starting a business in a sector with 35 million customers in the United States that have never been sold SaaS before (Tradesmen). This could also mean leveraging a technology(AI) that enables users to accomplish tasks today that were previously impossible with earlier technologies.
Investors should pay attention to gravity and deeply understand its rumblings and precursors. This is something that we knew as guides in Yellowstone during my days observing and navigating the geysers of a giant ecosystem.
Generating gravity will pull customers, employees, and investment dollars into your orbit, which is a remarkable and irreversible phenomenon once it’s created.
Gravity has become a symbolic north star for me and is top of mind as I start this project alone here in Maine. I’m emulating to the best of my ability the creation of a star in the Universe.
- Pete
