https://www.notboring.co/p/the-company-as-a-machine-for-doing

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Hi friends 👋 ,

Happy Tuesday! Short one for you today, about something I’ve been thinking about.

On a recent episode of Jack Altman’s Uncapped podcast, now-former Sequoia Steward Roelof Boetha said that there are too many startups: “There’s a lot more talent than really interesting companies to be built. And I think we’re spreading a lot of that talent thin right now.”

Another way of putting this is that a lot of people are starting startups because they can, not because they can’t not; building startups to win the lottery instead of building the thing they would build if they’d already won it.

This essay is on something I’ve noticed about the really interesting ones.

Let’s get to it.

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A couple of months ago, I was down in Medellín, Colombia visiting Forrest Heath and his company, Somos Internet, in which Not Boring Capital invested last year and about which you’ll learn much more soon.

We were sitting on a couch on the third floor of Somos’ new office. As often happens when I spend time with Forrest, the conversation turned to how he would build certain things better, cheaper, and faster.

He could mine uranium from Colombia’s mountains and shovel it pretty much right into imported Canadian CANDU reactors to create tremendous amounts of power cheaply, with no enrichment required, for example. If Colombia was going to take advantage of flying cars, he’d need to build landing pads for them. Medellín is mountainous; he had a plan for building more metro cables throughout the city to unlock more land value.

At one point in the conversation, I said something like, “I hope you make billions and billions of dollars from Somos, because you would make a great billionaire.”

He looked at me kind of confused, like I’d missed the whole point of what he was doing down there, and said something like, “Why would I take money out of Somos? This is the machine I’m building to do all of that stuff.”

Forrest loves building infrastructure. It is the thing that he would do if he could retire tomorrow. But if he retired tomorrow, he would have to start over from scratch; he would be less able to do the things he wants to do. He is building the company to do those things, bigger than he could alone, with other people who want to do them, too.