The Opening, Midgame and Endgame in Startups
Why the best founders are “time travelers” who play all three phases simultaneously
In the Prod community, they talk about founders as “time travelers” rather than visionaries. Founders don’t see the future, they teleport there.
I think this is true in more ways than first meets the eye. To extend the analogy of a chess game (which I recently used in an essay on the AI race and which Will Manidis also articulated beautifully in his essay on “Endgame Play”), outside observers see startups as temporally sequential, with a beginning (inception/ seed stage), middle (product-market fit/ growth stage), and end (IPO/ scale-up). However, the best founders actually live in all three of these phases simultaneously.
Opening: The opening phase of a startup involves the “magic” of transforming from a few people with an idea into a “startup.” Silicon Valley excels at this magic, and Paul Graham is the prophet of the opening. There are many opening strategies, but the lean startup model has proven itself to be the most repeatable one. The ecosystem around company formation is important because foundational decisions made at this stage are difficult to change later, and so wisdom pays dividends.
Midgame: The midgame of a startup begins once product-market fit has been reached. Many startups fail before ever reaching this stage. Product-market fit requires deeply understanding a customer’s need, and building a solution. Once product-market fit has been reached, you need to build a company — figure out how to hire people, manage people, and improve the product. You need to achieve some type of takeoff, forward momentum that will allow the business to grow from something tiny and irrelevant into something meaningful and important. Board members exist to transmit inter-generational knowledge on midgame play. Since the nature of the midgame is always evolving, founders need to filter this through their own prism to arrive at truth.
Endgame: The endgame of a startup is the infinite future — it’s never really reached. The endgame is important, because without a vision of the future, the present has very little value — see the recent SaaSpocalypse. Elon Musk is the prophet of the endgame, he has always focused on the hardest problems, knowing that ambitious problems attract excellent people and unleash them to do their best work.
Some startups seem uniquely engineered for the opening, some for the midgame, and some for the endgame. A hot AI company from Stanford students is engineered for the opening game — they will easily be able to recruit friends and a bike ride to Sand Hill road easily yields capital. A vertical SaaS company is engineered for the midgame — getting off the ground is hard and recruiting the early team is challenging, but once you unlock PMF, there’s a clear path for how to scale it up. And a deep tech company is engineered for the endgame, it’s always clear from the moment of inception why that company should pass the “who cares?” test.
Every startup has a different set of challenges depending on what parts of the game are structurally easier and harder. For example, a startup with a weak endgame story will struggle to raise funding without immense traction. A startup with a strong opening story is at risk of hubris, employees thinking the company has reached the promised land, when nothing substantial has been achieved. And the “valley of death” is famous in deep tech, precisely because a strong endgame story is always preceded by a long, fatigued midgame. The #1 piece of advice I give friends who are starting companies is to be aware of these biases, and explicitly combat them.
What is so incredible about the best companies, and the best founders, is that they appear to be playing the opening, midgame and endgame simultaneously. In the best companies, it is always early days and there is a big dream ahead (the opening vibe), even many years in. This is how Clay feels, even though the company is almost ten years old. Similarly, the best startups often have midgame characteristics at the opening — within a few months, they can show traction and improvement, creating a sense of forward momentum. For example, RunwayML’s incredible open-source growth, years before Stable Diffusion. And finally, the best companies create a feeling of inevitability early, such that employees genuinely feel like they are moving the world forward. For example, Anduril pioneering modern defense tech.
One phrase I’ve often used to describe the best founders is, “No matter what happens, they are going to win.” Alex Wang’s incredible journey at Scale from strength to strength was an early and illustrative example of this concept for me. The journey of Crusoe from crypto miner to AI factory builder is another great story of grit and judgement. What has crystalized for me now is seeing a superstructure that makes this possible — these founders are constantly holding the opening, midgame and endgame in their minds at the same time, and hence they are able to create a flexible, nimble culture that is always reinventing itself, and they are much quicker in adjusting their business strategy when the times are changing.
My advice to founders is therefore this: No matter where you are in your journey, don’t think about your business sequentially. Force yourself to play all three games at once — when planning product decisions, when making hires, when pitching investors. If you are in the midgame, you still need to care about opening style hires that could change the business. If you are in the opening, you need to think about the endgame, because that’s what will inspire others to join you and help turn your vision into reality. And if you are in the endgame, you should still care about midgame momentum and opening creativity — that’s how you will become absolutely massive. As you build your company, each of these narratives should be getting stronger — you can’t just focus on the one that seems immediately in front of you.