When scaling an organization from 2 employees to 1000, a startup operates like a tower defense game where problem creation rate is outside your control but problem-solving rate is what you control; when problem creation exceeds solution capacity, the company fails even though individual problems are manageable.

causalpending

Speaker

Patrick Collison

Evidence Quote

there's a category of uh sort of flash games um desktop tower defense games uh where you're sort of building little towers that shoot missiles and all these little critters uh sort of scampering uh across the board uh trying to sort of break into your fortress or whatever the case might be and a startup feels a little bit like that where you fundamentally don't control the sort of the rate of you know problem appearance um you just control the sort of the other variable of the rate at which you're you know building defensive or mitigatory or mechanisms to to deal with those problems and sometimes the rate of the problem creation can outstrip the rate at which you can solve them even though in principle any one of them uh is uh is is relatively manageable right

Source

Patrick Collison: Philosophies for Running Stripe, Hiring, Decision Making, and ReadingThe Knowledge Project Podcast
Created: 8/10/2026, 11:17:01 PM

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