If you have ever discovered a word that describes something you knew but couldn’t express, you know how useful a name can be. It makes a thing more understandable, more tractable. It helps you understand why you might do something and why it’s worth doing well.
For the first few years after founding South Park Commons, I didn’t have precise language for what we were doing. I had gone from rocket ship rides at Facebook, my own startup Cove, and Dropbox to… nothing. I wanted to start something new but didn’t have any direction beyond ambition. I felt unmoored.
The thing that would eventually become SPC was my answer to that experience. I gathered talented, technical peers around my kitchen table to help each other navigate a shared stage of ambiguity. And eventually we developed language for what exactly we were helping each other through.
This is not about SPC, but about the problem it was built for. We call it -1 to 0. Ten years in, it’s what we know best.
The Squiggle
-1 to 0 is when you figure out what you want to work on next—what problem is worth the next decade of your life.
In isolation, -1 to 0 is overwhelming. We affectionately call it The Squiggle. This is not because it is fun to feel lost. For a year after I left Facebook to start my own company, it felt like I was banging my head against a wall. My friends were solving important problems and I was looking for a problem to solve. I struggled every day with self-doubt.
Sitting in the unknown is uncomfortable, so most people don’t sit in it for very long. Most founders—and especially first-time founders—underestimate this part of the journey. Too few dedicate enough time and energy to the search for conviction. They think ahead to the glass-eating reputation of later stages and get caught off-guard when things get squiggly.
Some people convince themselves their talent or experience or hustle will let them skip it. This is wrong. If anything, talent makes the task more daunting, because everything you’re capable of is one more thing you have to rule out. Your goal at -1 is to tame the chaos of everything you could do into conviction in what you will do. From many paths, pick one.
Discarding good in search of great
-1 to 0 is an intentional reference to 0 to 1. These are distinct stages of the same effort. A rocket’s mission to space doesn’t start at the moment of launch. What happens before 0 sets the trajectory of what happens after.
If 0 to 1 is about Product-Market Fit, -1 to 0 is about Founder-Market Fit. PMF is extremely difficult to find, so don’t weigh yourself down with all the prep that could have happened earlier. Figure out what you really want to build before you build it.
For a long time the prevailing wisdom in Silicon Valley said talented founders can take some funding and throw things at the wall until something sticks. We celebrated when great teams beat bad markets and mythologized successful pivots. Ideas are abundant, so don’t worry too much about what you’re building. Just build.
This may have once been true, but no longer. You are less likely than in the past to discover a venture-scale idea while working a full-time job or tinkering in your garage. Your goal is category creation, not digital co-option. It’s harder to stumble upon low-hanging fruit when the lower branches have been picked. Software has already eaten.
AI makes this problem worse. It’s easier than ever to build and easier than ever for a little traction to lure you down a dead end. Capital is a commodity. It’s easy to raise money without conviction and then spend years falling short of the much higher bar for a Series A.
A low-conviction fundraise is more likely to leave you without a clear path to Product-Market Fit or your next round of financing. You should be more afraid of local maxima.
My friend Anurag Goel avoided this trap. He was employee #8 at Stripe—enough on its own to raise a seed round—and had a good idea for an AI product that investors were interested in. But he didn’t have conviction, so he took his time and joined the early group at SPC. He helped define our culture of constantly iterating and testing hypotheses with the group, until eventually he built conviction in the need for a new kind of cloud services provider. That insight became Render. Anurag did in -1 to 0 what the venture ecosystem encouraged him to do in 0 to 1.
Go slow to go fast
How do you build conviction in a great idea before setting out to build a company around it? Ask us about it and we’ll have plenty of opinions. The first step is a small one: understand what you are trying to do, and commit to doing it. Value your time. Spend a bit of it upfront so you don’t waste more of it later. If at the end of a dedicated period of ideation you haven’t built conviction, you’ve likely saved yourself years of frustration.
It is easier to generate and validate an idea—to build conviction for yourself and proof for others—if you think of -1 to 0 as a discrete stage of company-building and take it seriously. That is the core takeaway from my time in Silicon Valley. Treat ideation like your job. You will not have a eureka moment while meditating on top of a mountain. Your career sabbatical full of interesting travel will not unlock your ambition. Sit down and do the work on purpose.
-1 to 0 shouldn’t be an afterthought or a stage you rush. It’s the part of the journey that affects everything else. You only get a few shots at building your life’s work. Make them count.
An earlier version of this piece was published in 2023.