Startups hate history
Why startups can't create good history and why ignoring it is a competitive advantage
Startups have shaped the world, changed global culture, and created trillions in enterprise value in the last 30 years. For having all this impact, the detailing of startup history and “the startup canon” is surprisingly weak.
Why? It’s partially because startups can’t have a good history and partially because they won’t. There are structural reasons for it not existing, but even when it does, startups often treat history as a liability and historical amnesia as a competitive advantage.
Here’s how it got this way.
The book is not the medium of startup history
When you think history or canon, you think “book.” Any discussion of the startup canon is no different. It revolves around books:
But books are not the medium of startups. Startups invented their own mediums of communication like the tweet, blog, podcast, newsletter, and YouTube. Only the film industry is in a similar situation.
It is unsatisfying to say a vague collection of Paul Graham blogs, YC talks, How I Built This podcasts, and Naval tweets are key parts of startup history, but it is true. This is where the culture is formed from. It’s where myself and thousands of others learned about startups.
Books fail startups in multiple ways:
They are too slow. It can take years to write a book, longer than some startups lifetimes.
Best practices change faster than books can capture. For example, the Google algorithm might change and make SEO best practice completely out-of-date (we’re onto AEO now). It is often these cutting-edge trends that books are too slow to capture that are where the alpha is. Is a book about Google in 2011 really relevant now?
If the idea from a book was so valuable, a startup could capture it better. Many startups are just an idea created into a company, this gives the idea leverage that a book nearly always can’t match.
Startups reinvent themselves
Startup history is only as valuable to startups as it is right now. If what has happened in the past isn’t convenient to the current narrative, it gets dropped.
An important culture of startups is “the pivot,” basically keeping the people and capital you have built but completely changing your product and positioning. Slack was a video game company. YouTube was a dating app. You don’t make any more money being consistent and failing.
A big part of that pivot is that the company history gets erased. The history gets condensed down to “we pivoted” and companies are praised for this. They never talk about the fact that their founding story was much messier than the “official” version.
There is another aspect to this, even when companies aren’t doing something as dramatic as a pivot, they still reinvent their positioning. They rewrite their history and any official version is a mythologized version of it. You see this often now in companies becoming “the AI platform for X.”
When you look at how startups talk about their history, there is an inevitability to the current position they are in. Everything was building up to this. They then pour marketing dollars into making this new history a reality. The real but inconsistent parts of the history are removed, skewing history further.
Startup history rots fast
Related to the above point, the startup industry prides itself on getting over failure quickly. A business failing and investors losing money happens. Dwelling too much on this is not a way to move towards future success. Time spent looking back is not time spent looking forward.
Many startups that failed in history just timed themselves wrong. If you cared too much about history, you might read into it that “this idea sucked” but it was really the context around it. Because of this, startup people learn that something can fail but that doesn’t mean it can’t succeed in some other context.
For example, an investor tried to convince Apoorva Mehta, the founder of Instacart, not to do the startup because a similar business, Webvan, failed. The investor literally gave him a floppy disk of the business plan trying to dissuade him. Although Webvan failed, Instacart is an $11B business 25 years later.
There was so much history saying it was impossible to build another huge social network to compete with Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Snapchat, etc. Many were saying their network effects were too strong. And then, TikTok came along like history didn’t matter. Same thing for Google and ChatGPT.
Another way startups history rots is that much of it exists online in blog posts, tweets, news articles, emails, internal memos, Slack messages. Something as simple as an employee leaving or a website changing can destroy it. A company moving from Slack to Teams or getting acquired or even going through new security or privacy changes erase a significant amount of history. If you’re looking for a specific number:
Pew found that 38% of webpages that existed in 2013 were no longer accessible by 2023, and a quarter of pages that existed at some point between 2013 and 2023 were inaccessible by late 2023.
The startup industry is just too young
Maybe I am asking too much. The recent generations of founders are young and still in the game.
The best books about startup history are about the computer industry, which is slightly older than the startup industry. You could point to Sequoia and Kleiner Perkins founding in 1972 as the start of the modern startup era. We actually have some good history for companies like 3 generations ago like Apple and Microsoft.
The best parts of the history of other industry didn’t develop until much later. Alfred Chandler wrote the definitive history of railroads as businesses in the 1970s, almost a century after the formative period. Daniel Yergin’s The Prize came out in 1990, nearly 150 years after the beginning of the oil industry.
Many of the current and past generation companies were started by people in their 20s and 30s meaning it will take time before they are in a position to reflect on everything. Like I mentioned earlier, they probably have better things to do than writing history.
Critiques are more popular than praise
Startups cause change and disruption. They said “move fast and break things” and meant it. This is painful to many people and causes them to distrust startups at best and dislike them at worst.
Because of this, a lot of the most popular writing about a given company is critiques of it. For example:
The most popular pieces of “startup” history overall are ones about failure like Bad Blood and WeCrashed.
On basically every startup, there are huge Wikipedia sections on “Criticisms and controversies” or “Legal issues.” OpenAI’s “Governance and legal issues” section is 2,462 words, huge compared to the 4th biggest company in the world, Saudi Aramco, and their 327 word “Controversies” section.
This creates an antagonistic relationship between startups and the people who would be writing history, which makes a “positive” history harder to develop.
Why startups should care a bit more about history
Everything above makes ignoring history look rational, but “ignoring history and “being historically ignorant” are different things and often mixed up.
Startup history produces weather reports rather than laws. As law, Webvan failing means grocery delivery is dead. As weather, it tells you why Webvan failed and what changed since.
The edge history provides becomes more valuable as execution becomes cheaper thanks to AI. History can give you a stronger idea of what to build. Much of the “taste” people talk about is built from history.
History is also part of how an industry earns society’s trust, which continues to be a challenge for startups, especially recent AI startups. Creating positive history creates a positive reputation. Beyond making business easier, this also helps attract talented people to the industry.
The good news is that this is improving. There’s more pro-startup media than ever: Founders, Acquired, TBPN, Substack, Stripe Press, YC. Today’s coverage becomes tomorrow’s history. Do it well enough and the next generation won’t have this complaint.
👏👏👏👏