Robust principles for small startups in a big world

When the world is much bigger than you, focus on fundamentals instead of strategy against other people.

Big-world heuristics work when your actions barely affect the environment. Nothing you do is large enough to change what anyone else does, so calculating reactions is pointless.

A small startup, for example, should mostly serve its customers well.

If you make a mistake, own it. Offer a refund. Make cancellation easy.

I really hate services that hide the Refund or Cancel button so deep that you can barely find it. Please, oh please don’t do that.

The underlying principles: do good work, create value, act honestly, share knowledge, build capabilities, protect your reputation, and avoid unnecessary manipulation.

These are low-regret strategies under uncertainty.

You may misunderstand the market/your competitors/your own importance, but behaving like this tends to work across many possible worlds.

@nntaleb describes a similar idea through the "silver rule": Don’t do to others what you wouldn’t want them to do to you.

He prefers it to the golden rule because the negative form requires less knowledge. You don’t need to know what is good for someone. It is often enough to know what is harmful.

But be aware that this changes once you have real power. Second-order effects matter. Strategic and consequentialist thinking becomes much more important.

The difficult part is recognizing when you’ve crossed that line.

Your sense of your own scale usually lags behind reality.

... and the heuristics you’re least likely to question are exactly the ones that worked so well while you were small.

Act on robust principles while the world is large relative to you.

But periodically ask yourself whether the world has become smaller.