I spent years terrified of the business world.
It looked like a black box. An unpredictable mess of handshakes, intuition, and risks I couldn’t calculate. The people who succeeded seemed to operate on vibes and connections—things I didn’t have and didn’t know how to get.
Then I had a realization that changed everything: I already knew how this worked. I just hadn’t recognized the math.
Business isn’t chaos. It’s a high-dimensional optimization problem. And the goal isn’t climbing to some mythical top. It’s finding a minimum—the state of lowest friction, lowest energy, highest efficiency for a given value exchange.
You know how to find minimums. You’ve been doing it your whole career.
The Reframe: Descent, Not Ascent
We’re taught that starting a business is an uphill battle. A climb to the top. A struggle against gravity.
This framing creates paralysis. The mountain looks impossibly tall. The void below looks terrifying. Better to stay put than risk the fall.
But here’s what I’ve learned: business is gradient descent.
Capital, talent, and customers are like particles in a physical system. They flow toward states of lower friction. They want efficient solutions to their problems. They’re already rolling downhill—your job is to be where they land.
You don’t force success. You identify the gradient of value and remove the noise—the inefficiency, the friction—until the market settles into your solution because it’s the lowest-energy state available.
This isn’t mystical advice. It’s literally how markets work. Every successful product exists because it reduced friction for someone. Every failed product failed to find a minimum deep enough to be stable.
The entrepreneurs who seem to have magical intuition? They’re just reading the gradient. They feel which direction is downhill.
Discovery Protocols
Networking used to terrify me. The word felt slimy—like I was supposed to pretend to care about people so they’d help me later.
Then I reframed it as service discovery.
In distributed systems, services announce capabilities and listen for requests. No manipulation. You broadcast your manifest—what you can do, what value you provide—and listen for what others need. What problems are they solving?
Networking is just mapping the adjacency matrix of your industry. Who connects to whom? What capabilities exist at each node? Where are the gaps?
Sales follows the same pattern. A pitch isn’t persuasion—it’s a type compatibility check. You describe your value: “Here’s what I do. Here’s what it solves. Here’s who it’s for.” The customer has needs: “Here’s my problem. Here’s my budget. Here’s my timeline.”
If the types don’t match, drop the connection and move to the next node. No hard feelings. No desperate convincing. The connection simply wasn’t valid.
This reframe removed all the emotional weight from business interactions. I’m not schmoozing. I’m not selling. I’m running a discovery protocol.
The Search Problem
Product-market fit is often described as a feeling. “You’ll know it when you find it.” This is useless advice.
Product-market fit is a search problem. You’re exploring a high-dimensional landscape, looking for a minimum deep enough to be stable. Most of the landscape is flat or has only shallow dips—ideas that might work a little but won’t sustain a business.
Most developers approach this wrong. They try to pre-calculate the path. Spend months planning, architecting, preparing—waterfall on a problem that needs exploration.
The right approach is breadth-first search. Sample the landscape. Try multiple directions. Don’t commit too early to a path that might lead nowhere.
A pivot isn’t failure. It’s expanding the search. You found a local minimum that wasn’t deep enough, so you inject energy to climb out and explore further.
Success in business correlates more with sampling rate than luck. The founders who try more things, explore more landscape, iterate faster—they’re more likely to find the deep minimum everyone else missed.
AI makes this easier than ever. You can parallelize the search. Test messaging across multiple channels at once. Generate variations and see which resonate. Use the machine to sample faster than any human could alone.
The Local Minimum Trap
Here’s the uncomfortable part: you might already be stuck.
A stable job is a local minimum. It’s efficient—you know the work, you get the paycheck, the system hums along. Low friction. Comfortable.
A small profitable niche is a local minimum. Customers come in, value goes out, the system sustains itself. You could stay here forever.
But local minima aren’t global minima.
The landscape has deeper valleys. More efficient configurations. Opportunities that would dwarf what you have now. But you can’t see them from where you’re sitting. They’re over the hill, past the uncomfortable climb out of your current stable state.
This is the hardest part: sometimes you have to inject energy to escape. Take on risk. Make yourself temporarily less stable. Climb out of the comfortable valley so you can roll into a deeper one.
Most people never do this. They find a local minimum and stay there, never knowing what was just beyond the ridge.
I’m not saying stable is bad. I’m saying stable isn’t the same as optimal. Know the difference.
The Network Effect
Here’s where it gets interesting: the economy itself is a distributed computation.
Think about it. Billions of nodes—people, companies, institutions—processing information in parallel. Each taking inputs, transforming them, producing outputs. The whole system coordinating without central control, finding efficient solutions to incredibly complex problems.
Products are what this network outputs. Crystallized information. Someone figured out how to transform raw materials and effort into something people want, and the network routes resources to make it happen.
Ideas are executables that run on this network. A compelling idea spreads node to node, reshaping how people think and act. A brand is code that runs in customers’ heads, influencing decisions even when you’re not there.
The content you create? It’s designed to spread. Not manipulative—useful. Ideas that help people see something they couldn’t before.
Every piece of content is a routing instruction. “If you have this problem, route attention here.” The better your content, the more the network sends opportunities your way.
This is why developers have such an advantage in modern business. We understand distributed systems. We understand protocols and message passing. We understand the network isn’t a black box—it’s a system with predictable behaviors.
The Verification Key
I used to think business success required charisma, connections, and luck I didn’t have. Successful people seemed to operate in a different reality.
They didn’t. They just understood the optimization landscape better.
The business world is a search problem. The network is a distributed computation. Successful outcomes are minimum-energy states that emerged because someone removed enough friction for value to flow.
You already know this math. You optimize systems for a living. You find bugs and fix them. You identify friction and remove it. You search for solutions in spaces too large to enumerate.
The skills transfer directly. The intuitions apply. The patterns are the same.
Nobody told you they were the same. You were taught business is a different game with different rules, requiring different abilities. It’s not. It’s the same game in a different domain.
Stop being afraid of the black box. It’s not black once you see the math.
Identify the gradient. Remove the friction. Let the market descend into your solution.
You know how to do this. You’ve been doing it your whole career.