I’ve had better years.
A long chapter of my corporate career ended. My real estate business encountered the sort of construction delays that make the word “schedule” feel aspirational. A few things in my personal life got more complicated than expected.
And then, a couple of weeks ago, I added another item to the list.
I blew up a consulting pitch.
Not it could have gone better.
Blew. It. Up.
It was one of those conversations where you hang up and immediately know exactly what you should have done differently.
How bad?
Have you ever over-researched a prospective client to the point where your preparation somehow becomes a liability?
Asking for a friend.
I did what any rational person would do afterward: replayed the conversation in my head approximately 400 times, making small adjustments to each version until eventually I had delivered one of the finest consulting pitches in American history.
Unfortunately, the client was only present for the first one.
And for some reason, this made me think about George Washington.
September 11, 1777
The United States wasn’t really the United States yet.
It was an idea with an army attached to it, trying very hard not to get killed.
On September 11, 1777, George Washington faced the British at Brandywine Creek, outside Philadelphia.
Washington was already the underdog. The British had a larger, better-trained professional force, more resources and more artillery.
But Washington still had an army. He still had cannons. And he could still meet the British in something resembling a conventional European battle.
Then he got flanked.
Badly.
The Continental Army was forced to retreat. Philadelphia would soon fall.
That’s an especially unpleasant kind of loss.
Because you don’t just lose the battle.
The other guy gets stronger.
And Washington did what human beings frequently do when confronted with evidence that their strategy isn’t working:
He tried again.
A little more than three weeks later, at Germantown.
He lost again.
History rarely gives us the clean turning points we assign to it afterward. Washington did not wake up after Germantown, slap himself on the forehead and announce that he had finally figured out the Revolutionary War.
The Americans continued fighting conventional battles. They adapted in other ways. The war changed slowly, unevenly and with considerable help from circumstances, allies and a British opponent facing its own constraints.
But something important was happening.
The Americans did not need to become better British soldiers than the British.
They needed to become better at fighting their war.
Different terrain. Different economics. Different incentives. Different definitions of success.
Survive.
Adapt.
Choose where to fight.
And, perhaps most importantly, refuse to disappear.
If your mental image at this point involves Mel Gibson emerging dramatically from a field in The Patriot, congratulations: we apparently received roughly the same American history education.
The real history is considerably messier.
The lesson is better.
America didn’t survive because someone suddenly discovered a brilliant strategy.
It survived long enough to adapt.
Losing the Wrong Path
Which brings me back to blowing up my consulting pitch.
Because after replay number 400, I was still left with the same inconvenient fact:
I hadn’t won the work.
And there is something clarifying about having one fewer option.
You eventually have to do something with the options that remain.
For me, one of those things was StoinNet.
I’ve spent an unreasonable amount of time thinking about ownership, Synthetic Intelligence, data, money, networks and a basic question:
Why does the Internet create extraordinary amounts of value while so little of that value flows back to the people who actually make the networks valuable?
StoinNet is my attempt to explore a different model—something closer to universal basic ownership than universal basic income.
The longer explanation is…
Well, that’s probably another article.
The relevant part here is that StoinNet had spent a long time in a dangerous stage of development:
Almost real.
It had ideas. Architecture. Research. Data. Pieces of software. Lots of conversations.
It was perpetually about three weeks away from becoming something.
Then necessity showed up.
Necessity is supposedly the mother of invention.
It may also be the father of finally getting your shit together.
I stopped asking how to build the complete version someday and started asking what we could make real now.
That changed everything.
We focused on the smallest version that actually did something useful.
We built a working prototype astonishingly quickly.
Then we put it in front of people.
They responded.
There is still an enormous distance between an early working system and the thing I ultimately imagine StoinNet becoming. But for the first time, it wasn’t merely an idea about something we might build.
It existed.
And it was moving.
Then I had an uncomfortable thought.
Would I have pushed this hard if I had won the consulting pitch?
Maybe.
But probably not.
I probably would have taken the win, focused on the engagement and continued carrying StoinNet around as something I was definitely going to finish someday.
That’s the strange thing about success.
Success has a nasty habit of convincing you that your strategy is working.
Failure doesn’t have that problem.
Failure Is Information
I’m not going to pretend losing is secretly wonderful.
It isn’t.
The consulting pitch would have been better to win than lose.
Construction projects are better when they finish on time.
Major life transitions are easier when they aren’t major life transitions.
And I’m fairly certain George Washington did not walk away from Brandywine thinking:
Excellent. Everything is proceeding according to plan.
A loss is still a loss.
But sometimes losing eliminates an option you would never have had the courage—or the necessity—to eliminate yourself.
And that can be extraordinarily useful.
When the old path disappears, the question changes.
You stop asking:
How do I get back to where I was?
And start asking:
How do I win from here?
Those are very different questions.
And I think businesses are about to be forced to ask the second one a lot.
Synthetic Intelligence is changing the cost of building software, conducting research, analyzing information and operating companies at extraordinary speed. Strategies built around constraints that existed five years ago increasingly make no sense.
The temptation will be to use new technology to become slightly better at doing things the old way.
That is the equivalent of trying to become better British soldiers than the British.
The more interesting question is what you would build if you stopped assuming the old constraints still existed.
That’s increasingly the question behind the work that became Stoin, and it’s the question I’m confronting directly in the businesses and systems I’m building myself.
Not:
How do we improve the old strategy?
But:
Given the world as it exists now, how would we design this from scratch?
Fewer Cannons
A funny thing happened once StoinNet started moving.
Other things started moving too.
I started writing.
I had talked about writing for years. There was always a reason not to begin.
Now you’re reading the first article.
I started building the work that became Stoin around the kind of problems I actually want to solve: complicated systems, technology transitions, new business models and things that don’t quite exist yet.
I started looking at my other businesses differently.
None of this means I suddenly know how the story ends.
I don’t.
StoinNet is early.
Stoin is early.
There are plenty of unanswered questions.
But unanswered questions bother me considerably less when I’m moving.
Washington walked away from Brandywine with fewer cannons and a war that still needed to be won.
I’ve lost a few cannons lately too.
But for the first time in a while, I have momentum.
And I’m starting to think I don’t need all of them back.