Rocketships and Slingshots

Non-obviously great startups

The dominant metaphor for a successful startup these days is the rocketship. The not so humble brags are all over x and the press, founders and VCs saying - “0-100m in ARR faster than any company in history” and “idea to $1m in revenue in a month.” I get why these are exciting. The stories are simple, the progress is amazing, the pull of the market is irresistible. Sometimes these will be the biggest and most interesting companies of the future.

Then again, as with most stories, the realities of startup success are more interesting and varied. There’s a different kind of arc, a different kind of company that I find more fascinating. Let’s call these companies “Slingshots.” I don’t mean slingshots in the Dennis the Menace sense. Slingshots in the astrophysical sense. These are the companies that just…took a long time to get where they needed to be. The founders and the early teams built and built and seemed to just get further away from everyone and everything interesting.

Most of the time, these founders get written off. The companies - which may have done the rocket ship thing first - lose their appeal, stop raising money, can’t get the cool meetings or the articles or tweets. But something interesting happens for the slingshots after a few years. They finally hit the gravity well they’d been aiming for and come back in the other direction faster than anyone had thought possible.

One reason I love these companies is that they are often extremely hard to copy. The teams have built hard earned technical moats, they understand a set of customers everyone else has ignored, they’ve muddled through contracting or procurement flows that no obviously fast company would bother understanding. Sometimes they’ve created markets from scratch.

Another reason to love these companies is that they sit outside of the standard silicon valley consensus/non-consensus conversation. They’re not even in the conversation unless you’re following along.

Then again, most of the companies that follow the first part of this pattern, the part where initial excitement fades into irrelevance, never come back. Initial market traction turns out to have been a mirage, a set of trials, the setting for terrible retention.

To be sure, not every great company is a slingshot, but some of the most interesting are.

Figma famously spent years building and building and building. OpenAI was a research lab project, a hybrid non profit company thing, and then it become OpenAI.

If you want to find slingshots, look through the set of companies that seemed exciting because of the ideas and the founders that then seemingly vanished…but didn’t actually die. You have to look for companies that didn’t radically pivot again and again, but doggedly chased down increasingly complex challenges and found ways to survive out in the space between the stars.

If you are a slingshot, you have a strange set of challenges in front of you. You’re going to find that investors won’t pay attention to you as you start to accelerate. They’re going to ignore you because of how long you’ve been around or because of how little they’ve heard of you. There are, to be sure, investors who will pay attention if you tell the right story, but you’re going to have to work extra hard to find that story and to find those investors.

The potential payoff is big. The slingshots tend to be the interstellar travelers while the rocketships sometimes put their payloads into orbit, and fall back to Earth.

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