The Case for Talent Density in -1 to 0

Applications for the $1M Founder Fellowship close Feb. 2nd. Apply here.

Going from -1 to 0 isn't an engineering problem. Building something you want to spend the next decade of your life working on doesn't reduce to a simple formula or playbook. The notion of being pre-0, by definition, presupposes a sense of unspooling, of unbecoming. It's vulnerable. It's new. It demands curiosity. Both research and the entrepreneurial act share this sense of fundamental openness.

You don’t go from -1 to 0 to build something good or marginally better. You do it to build something generational, something iconic. You do it to aim higher and crazier in pursuit of your life’s work. You do it to build AGI (and understand it), to build new clouds (for engineers and ML), to rethink language learning, to create the next generation of engineers, to fight global fraud, to build foundations for upward mobility, to usher in new business models.

As in fundamental research, building something great comes from asking the right questions, surrounding yourself with incredibly talented people, and learning with urgency. It doesn’t come from isolation. You need to meander alongside people who are driven by the same sense of hunger, curiosity, and agency.

To ask a good question implies that there is something you do not already know. It may take a career to formulate a question worth asking, but that quest — to find questions worth living — is the critical path. Over time, exploration and company-building diverge, but in the earliest innings, they make similar demands.

Questions, not answers

Curiosity infects and organizes. You notice it immediately at SPC – the curious embody a kind of tension that feels almost like an infection, up close: no matter what they’ve achieved in the past, there’s a gnawing intensity that pulls them into new orbits. There’s a direction – and a magnitude – to their attention. 

These are the kinds of members – intense and spiky – we’re drawn to at SPC. Ashton Eaton, who joined SPC after winning back-to-back Olympic gold medals in the decathlon. Trisha Kothari, who was obsessed with fighting fraud. Scott Wu, who joined as a 20 year-old competitive programmer and is now building Cognition. Bill Chang, who built Tesla’s Dojo supercomputer. Tom McGrath, who led LLM interpretability at DeepMind. Arda, Tuhin, Kanjun, Avichal, Nish, Andrew, and – literally – hundreds more.

Imagine each of these people’s adjacent possibilities as a magnetic field:

Though the field is pervasive, it’s not actually legible unless there’s a ton of iron around the magnet. Being around other curious, spiky people helps you map out the field. The reality is that “mapping” involves spending time in both structured and unstructured exploration (mostly the latter).

We organize many of these “structured” motions at SPC: forums, squads, roundtables, etc. These change frequently (by design) as our areas of talent density evolve. Combined with the “unstructured” time – lunchtime conversations, introductions to customers and potential team members, intermittent shoulder taps – these are how members help each other make sense of the nature and direction of their own field. 

The shape of our programming emerges naturally from the fact that curiosity and talent density are organizing principles.

Variance (in terms of what people are working on) is actually useful here because it promotes serendipity and first-principles thinking. A curious, thoughtful person asking an earnest question about something they’re not an expert in forces you to actually clarify your thinking. You’ll drift away from jargon and toward substance.

When Tom Brown – who, five years later, would co-found Anthropic – joined SPC, he was exactly that beginner tapping people on the shoulder (see here). He was a former founder and engineer, but not an AI researcher. But he wanted to learn. “I joined SPC, blocked off three months to see if I could make progress, and made a plan to teach myself machine learning … starting down a new path is hard. For me, SPC provided an environment where I felt comfortable putting aside my armor of expertise. It gave me a community where I could be a novice again.” 

A common question you’ll hear at SPC is: “what are you curious about?” Not, “how much have you raised?” Nor, “hasn’t that already been done?” That’s intentional. At -1, what matters are the questions, not the answers. Finding the axis of curiosity that’s worth a decade of your life is the high-order bit.

You don’t learn to build a company in a class. Your career, your taste, the questions you ask customers, your intuition for good markets – these are the relevant inputs. Founder-market fit doesn’t just fall from the sky – it emerges out of deep obsession and curiosity. And, for each of these, the right environment – one that helps you toggle between modes of research and modes of engineering – can help bring the vision into view. No one builds something generational alone.

We draw inspiration from environments that encourage and incubate out-of-distribution ideas.

Think: Bloomsbury Group, not “English 101.” Applied Physics Laboratory’s cafeteria, not “Intro to Physics.”

Take GPS, for example. 

In 1957, two physicists at APL argued about the microwave signals emanating from Sputnik (which recently launched the weekend before). Individually, they were curious. But through their environment – namely, other intense and spiky researchers – they found the energy and support to build conviction. They scrambled around and locked onto the signal later that day and realized that the Doppler effect was at work because of the satellite's motion and distance. Over the next few weeks, they found out how to determine where Sputnik was in orbit based on its radio waveform. Frank McClure, director of APL, then asked them to reverse the problem — i.e., pinpoint an unknown terrestrial location based on a known orbital one, which gave birth to GPS. Sixty years later, satellites blanket the earth with navigation. 

Guier and Wiffenbach, the two physicists in question, discovered GPS. But APL – with its talent density, intensity, and culture of curiosity – made it possible.

Community, not isolation

Why is it that generational ideas so often emerge from networks of intense talent density? What ties together founders who build massive companies from their dorm rooms and hackers from Xerox PARC and artists in 15th century Florence and the early members of the Junto Club? What makes their environments different?

For starters, interruption and interrogation are features, not bugs. That tap on the shoulder, the general air of specific curiosity, the earnest question that only someone with broad context (and care) can ask – these are the ingredients for creative and fertile environments. Of the original iPhone team’s culture, Ken Kocienda writes, “our iterative working method was like the air — something all around us all the time, something we were always aware of on some level, something it didn't make sense to question … programmers and designers on the [iPhone] project were in and out of each other's offices all the time. We exchanged frequent feedback on our work, and all of us were expected to field questions.”

In the right magnetic fields, you can feel a thrumming in the background because peers are primed for the productive entropy that surrounds them. Each day, each week may bring something completely new: the electronics club; a co-worker hacking on a side project in the cafeteria; a potential cofounder knocking on your dorm room door. They compress, publicize, and celebrate experimentation and learning.

When Anurag Goel left Stripe after joining as the eighth employee back in 2016, he found himself at -1: he had driving ambition to solve hard problems but didn’t know what they’d be. He is, in many ways, the canonical SPC member: deeply technical, polymathically curious, and eager to learn by building. As he hacked with other members on ideas around healthcare, deep learning, and real-time communication, he kept finding that deploying to production was much harder than it needed to be. Amidst the iron filings of others’ curiosity, Render was born.

Exploring new ideas alone – or in some anonymous WeWork or in a fund’s fancy office – is not the way. Optimize for openness, curiosity, and rigor. Find your field of iron filings as you trek through -1 to 0.

Be around people who you want to learn from and whose feedback you actually trust. Surround yourself with unknown unknowns. Building something important requires the courage to actually learn something new. Having a tribe of fellow adventurers, each on their own quests, makes the journey more joyful, interesting, and likely to lead you somewhere worth going.

To end at the beginning, with Hamming: