The Entrepreneurial Philosophy: Why Do Ideas Fail?

On the Connection Between the Business World and Romantic Relationships - and on Talmudic Sexuality

Is philosophy made of ideas? Is the economy made of ideas?  (Source)

Surprisingly, the insight that exists today in the world of entrepreneurship and start-ups is that the primary goal of any venture is not to execute an idea, and that this naive approach has led to countless failures. During the first decade of the millennium, a question that troubled entrepreneurs, investors, and governments became increasingly prominent: why do about 99 percent of startups fail? After all, these are talented, highly motivated, creative people who are also funded (meaning they're burning our money). The astonishment and dismay at this statistic depressed the best experts: our finest, the best of the best, shoot and shoot and shoot and miss. Are our ideas really that bad? And the one-in-a-hundred statistic was still from the startups that received funding, and the claim was that only one in a thousand ventures reaches an exit. An astounding figure by all accounts.

The answer to this question that was accepted in the industry is no less amazing. Entrepreneurs fail, in fact, because they have an incorrect philosophical perception of the world. Philosophy is to blame! Once, in the era of classical entrepreneurship, an entrepreneur was considered someone who stuck to executing an idea despite all obstacles (including those trying to discourage and dissuade him, like his mother-in-law). This was an entrepreneurial ethos, because ethos focuses on the ethics of action, and therefore it was almost Greek entrepreneurship, beginning with a hero. The fearless entrepreneur clings to the goal even after twenty years of hardship, like Odysseus, and has a variety of virtuous qualities, such as courage, diligence, and perseverance (hence the epithets in Homer: when ethos is the essence - the trait is you). This ethical conception of entrepreneurship turned it into a moral act, and was especially nurtured in the naive version of the American dream. The story was: I built this business with my own hands from scratch.

Subsequently, following the gradual rise of inventions based on advanced science and knowledge and technological complexity, and less on simple technique and intuition and manual labor, entrepreneurship shifted to an epistemological conception, which emphasized the I-D-E-A, and its peak was in the golden age of "discoverers and inventors" and patents. The entrepreneur is one who discovers an idea, for example, a scientist or a creative person, and the idea he grasps for the first time - which often penetrates his mind in a moment of epistemic illumination - is the main thing (I saw a cat on the street and then it occurred to me...). Entrepreneurship is an epistemic act, and therefore the idea must be protected and valued as intellectual property (the recognition itself becomes property, meaning the idea becomes the economic object) - and therefore "creativity" should be encouraged (and not just creation). The concept of "discovery" then connected almost inseparably to the concept of "invention", with no essential difference between Columbus and Einstein, precisely because of this epistemological turn. Edison discovered the incandescent light bulb - and to this day it shines above every idea.

During the last half of the previous century, with the degeneration and corruption that the philosophy of language brought upon America, the conception gradually shifted emphasis: it's not the best idea that wins, but the one that is best marketed. The entrepreneur is the one who succeeds in convincing, selling, giving a winning elevator pitch, and preparing a presentation that opens all doors. The story changed again to a new script: How did I convince the investor with my own mouth to give me money in a fiery speech or a heartwarming joke or a witty question? How did I convince America to buy this with a good slogan? How did I conduct negotiations with dreamy results? How did I manage to conquer (key person) in conversation and make them cooperate with me? And the rest is history. Road show. And show. How many times have you been taught that it's not the best mousetrap that conquers the market, but the one that captures more buyers? The communication of the idea became more important than the idea. Ideas are like garbage - but a good talker is worth gold. The entrepreneurial act became an act of language.

But then came the catastrophe that created a paradigmatic crisis, known to us as the dot-com bubble burst. It turns out that many people made a lot of hand gestures and spoke with enormous, convincing, sweeping enthusiasm, and sold terrible ideas, a lot of air and little oxygen, and websites for selling cats. This was the moment of the postmodern crisis in the world of entrepreneurship. It became clear that the connection between the signifier and the signified had been severed. A well-known anecdote tells of the investor who said he doesn't understand what the entrepreneur is saying, but no one else understands this technological mumbo-jumbo either, so all he checks in the venture is how fast the entrepreneur talks and how incomprehensibly he babbles, so that he can sell the venture to others quickly, before it crashes. The result was an economic crash that the Twin Towers were only a metaphor for.

From the ashes and smoke arose a new entrepreneurial philosophy, which in retrospect can be seen as part of a broader philosophical shift: the philosophy of learning. In that period at the beginning of the century when learning began to climb for the first time to the top of the scientific-technological world, with the rise of brain research and computer learning as central spearheads, and in which the Netanya teacher [Translator's note: likely referring to a specific, well-known educator from Netanya, Israel] formulated for the first time the first sentence of the philosophy of learning ("The role of language in the 20th century - will be replaced by learning in the 21st century"), in Silicon Valley a new conceptualization conquered hearts and wallets (and in between them in a sandwich - even minds). Because necessity is the mother of invention - and failure is the father of learning.

Today, it's clear that the conceptualization of the lean startup, and other terms associated with it, should be understood as part of a broader conceptualization, which turns them from a useful collection of business practices and processes into a comprehensive entrepreneurial perception from which everything stems, namely into a philosophy: the business fox turns into a learning hedgehog. The new entrepreneurial philosophy denied both the idea of the "idea" and its "marketing". Your goal as an entrepreneur is not to execute the wonderful idea that came to your mind or even to market it. In fact, your idea is likely much less wonderful than you think. Your goal is not to do something, for example to make a product, or to sell it. All these are fatal business and methodological mistakes that stem from a wrong philosophical picture of what an idea is and what a venture is and what a product is. Because what is a product anyway? The product is your way of learning about the world: learning what the market wants, what customers are willing to pay for, how factors in your business environment react (investors, regulators, advertisers and desperate housewives on Facebook), what's important to them, which features they use, what they search for on Google, which pages they enter, which buttons they press, which sequence of actions leads them to open their wallet or give a like, what they share, what feedback you receive, what they complain about, what suggestions they offer (and often - the best suggestions come from them and not from you). In short, you're not building a company - you're building a huge learning machine. You're not "doing" something, or selling something, or building something, or marketing something - you're learning.

Because what is an idea anyway, that thing over which a light bulb shines? It's just a starting point of a method - a first hypothesis from which to start learning. A learning aid. Your genius and so "logical" idea? It's a trigger. Yes, your precious idea is just an initial opening for learning, a learning tool, the beginning of a long learning process - so don't fall in love with it, because you'll still abandon it and change it until you yourself won't recognize this child (and your "logic" you'll throw in the trash twenty times). You'll discover that the "great idea" is not good, not mature or just relevant to a different market segment than you thought, or for a different use. The world will surprise you. The market will reveal things about your idea that you didn't imagine. You'll discover through it that something else might work entirely. You'll discover that they want something slightly different and are willing to pay in a completely different way. You'll do a lot of experiments. Yes, all these terms that you read about in guidebooks for the beginner investor, their purpose is to force you to learn, to put you into a method, into a structured learning process. You don't "know" what needs to be done. You didn't receive the Torah from heaven: instead of "marketing" self-confidence - start developing humility (a super-important trait for any investor and entrepreneur). You are required not only to "not know everything" - but to "know nothing". There's no more epistemology, only learning. Skepticism is a way of life. Ideally, every beam in your building is an experiment, which you test against future or potential or current residents (your users). Every turn at every junction on your long road is a check - and you receive feedback. Your goal is to close as many fast and efficient feedback loops as possible. Because the number of entrepreneurs who developed a product that the market doesn't need, and invested in premature over-optimization, and burned money on a perfect product (in their eyes of course, not in the eyes of the market) - exhausted the patience of investors.

And forget about the world of linguistic entrepreneurship. You think your babbling works on them (ha ha ha)? The most serious problem is that it works on you. You're selling to yourself and believing yourself (it certainly helps you convince - but it's destructive to the core of your activity, which is learning). You're not a marketing genius who will sell ice to Eskimos if you explain to them what they need (and you know it better than them, right? The market is stupider than you and that's why you're the entrepreneur, right?). You'll go to the Eskimos and ask them what they want, including what color, shape, taste and engineering structure they like their ice in (they'll explain to you that they actually want to buy an igloo). Don't talk - be quiet and learn. It doesn't matter how you wrap a bad idea - the idea will remain bad. You want to know how to wrap things? In what language to address? Learn that too. Not only is epistemology subject to learning - so is language.

And the technological world is just ripe for this philosophy. You can measure how many clicks, how many views, how many shares, how many transactions, and how many didn't return to you, and where they're from, and from which page and when and who and how - and in the end understand: why. Even if your product isn't on the internet - it has a presence there, and advertising there, and you can also embed digital measurements in it, and track the information, summarize and analyze it, and reach deep insights (ask a data analyst). With tremendous ease compared to the past, you can conduct surveys, ask questions, and receive feedback from people on the other side of the world. The smartest ideas you'll have - will come from your customers (and not from the light bulbs shining above your head). They know what they need, and even if not, at most you're together in a shared learning process: it's not that the customer is always right, but the seller always learns. And yes, sometimes the customer learns too. Everything is learning. There isn't some knowledge that exists somewhere, or (worse) with someone - this is an epistemological and therefore incorrect picture of learning (which creates knowledge within itself in a process of becoming "within the system", and doesn't discover something external "outside the cave"). And when everything is learning - there's no magic formula or amazing advertisement. There are only countless cycles of refinement, checks, measurement, and evaluation. Each such cycle, which begins with a hypothesis, continues with an experiment, and ends with a result, is just an opening for the next development cycle - and not the end of the story. And again technology comes to your aid, with the ability to create infinite variations and A/B testing for controlled experiments. The scientific method? It's a learning method, not an epistemic method (philosophical mistake!). The world is not accessible to you except through learning.

If so, what is the new story of the learning entrepreneur? Well - you won't believe what I learned, how much I was wrong, and how the world surprised me, and then I changed the product, and then I discovered something again, and then I was wrong again, and then with this we understood that we need to do this, and then we learned a new field, and then someone did a stupid experiment and suddenly that succeeded, and we started to receive a lot of positive feedback, or negative, and so on and so forth. It's a never-ending story. Its narrative is very convoluted. Question, answer, counter-argument, difficulty, initial assumption, forced answer, better answer, practical difference - well, we understood the literary pattern it's built on (according to the changing seasons in the world of literature itself). No longer the heroic story of the ethical entrepreneur, not the discovery story (i.e. one that has a punchline or turning point or clarification: namely an idea) of the epistemological entrepreneur, and certainly not the story with the unreliable narrator, the narrator who is part of the story, of the linguistic entrepreneur. Yes, this is a narrative without multi-plot heroism, but the plot is replaced by the learning story, which marks a new type of literature, and of literary entrepreneurship (here, a start-up!).

Therefore, the startup that the investor should bet on is not the one with the best idea - but the one with the most learning team. Yes, learning is not a masculine trait like self-confidence, aggressiveness and arrogance - but as we know, the real man is not the Greek hero, but the Jewish man - the Torah scholar (he's also better in bed, precisely for this reason - scholarship). Jews are better at startups not because they're more insolent, or smarter, or maybe greedier - but because they come from a culture where learning is the supreme value and the categorical imperative. Because Jews in their innermost essence (meaning what remains of them in the most basic version - namely precisely the secular one!) are not the people of Halacha and action (ethics), or of knowledge (epistemology), or of the book (philosophy of language), but the people of learning. And if the idea itself does serve to filter startups for investment - it's only because it shows the learning ability that has already been done (and also the ability to hypothesize important and deep hypotheses, as an opening for examination and as research questions). Because according to the same statistics of startups, even before the era of the learning startup, an entrepreneur who didn't reach a state where he was forced to change his initial idea is 99.9% an idiot, and another 0.1% lucky (he's not a genius).

There is no such thing as business sense, or marketing instincts - the entrepreneur becomes a scientist. The developed sense of smell is the dog's best friend, not the businessman's - data is the entrepreneur's best friend. You must not rely on smell, not on external appearance, and not on what you hear and what people say - naive empiricism is dead and reborn in the learning version: don't believe any sense or anyone (including the "experts"), not even what "seems" to you, only what you have learned and measured, that is, what was built through learning. You are not a machine that collects information - but a learning machine (and there is a huge difference, especially: in experimental activity, you are not actually acting in the world but only trying). Even the linguistic conceptualization of the world as built on communication, and especially one-way mass communication, has taken a hard hit. All the words and concepts you use - mislead you and work against you. Don't conceptualize in language, but learn. The relationship between you and the customer is not based on communication and marketing, but on learning: you are in direct contact with him, and this constant learning itself is your main marketing tool, it is the communication between you. There is no more distance gap between you, which language bridges (your explanation about the product, or the girl who sells it) - you don't seduce with your smooth tongue, but you make love with the customer. You constantly receive feedback from him about what he wants and what he enjoys, and you are sensitive to every hint from him, and adapt the product in real-time, all the time. You never have a final product that you have finished learning and that you are selling - what a gap between the previous entrepreneur, for whom the final product was the goal and the peak of his epistemological achievements: I discovered the winning formula! This type of entrepreneur is similar to a man who thinks the same thing works on all women, and that he has deciphered "the woman". No wonder he's so bad. This is the lover who doesn't learn, and then when the customer changes and renews and the same thing no longer works mechanically on the market, he is frustrated that all women are crazy. Because for their craziness, you need to be a wise student. You always need to court the other side, even after twenty years of marriage, and therefore there is a comprehensive analogy between the entrepreneurial situation and the male situation.

And this is exactly the reason why it's better to learn and specialize in one woman - what's called "marriage" - and not chase after all the women in the world, after "the woman". There is no such thing as a general sense for business - there is no Casanova (sometimes there is luck, meaning if there are a million entrepreneurs who gamble, you will find in the list of billionaires a few people who had much more luck than brains or learning). The same person who was lucky and attributes it to instincts and his innate, Greek qualities, is the one with hubris whose upcoming fall in the next gamble you will read about (he didn't learn). The good entrepreneur is one who is in close learning cycles with his customers, or users, and therefore creates a relationship with them, which is a learning system. This committed system creates commitment from both sides, and it is a thousand times better than any short-lived marketing gimmick, which does not respect the other side. The woman knows how to quickly identify who is a player and who can be relied upon, and treats accordingly. Not your "messages" to the woman are important (in the spirit of the philosophy of language), not what you say - but how you learn. Because only your (and your mutual) learning ability predicts the success of the relationship in the long term, and bringing that child who is the product of mutual learning and is entirely made of learning (this is the material from which he is created) - that is the product. And he always grows and never stops learning, and there is no gap between his growth (your business growth) and his learning. It's not two different things - increasing sales and product development. And certainly not two different stages - but intertwined tools, learning tools.

The educational, or sexual, dance is infinite. A dance of experimentation, creativity, responsiveness, what works and what doesn't, proposals for innovation and responses, challenging and counter-challenging the partner. Ain? And they said, the question returns to its place, what is it?, obviously. It is necessary. What does it come to teach us? We learn from this, on the contrary, there are those who say, what is the practical difference?, it comes to teach us... This is an accurate description of sex, more than all the "literary descriptions", which don't have a language at all to refer to this mutual learning dance. The language of learning is the royal road to conceptualizing the entrepreneurial dance between the outside (the market) and the inside (the venture), that is, between the customer and the entrepreneur, which generates learning. Similarly, learning is a substitute for knowledge also in the literary dance between reader and writer. For example, just as it allows a plot that is not intended for reading but for learning (a Talmudic move), so it also allows an alternative literary model to the story of the discovery of sexuality, the epistemological story of "knowing" a woman (which therefore emphasizes the first time, experience, excitement, stealing a moment and water, daring, butterflies, etc.). This is the reason that the old and outdated epistemological story of sex, which was characteristic of the novel, almost always revolved around concealment, betrayal, repression, and other failures of knowledge (sexual knowledge also belongs to this paradigm). But when the literary text is no longer built on an artificial knowledge gap that the writer creates between himself and the reader (in which the writer always hides the true way of creating the text), and not on the artificial linguistic gap between writing and reading (which allows abuse and flaunting in language), that is, not building on structural power gaps - then it allows learning in partnership between the two sides of the text. The Talmud does not hide its ways of creation, it does not know more than you (for example, at the opening of the sugya), and it also does not beautify itself or play with language in the excess time invested in the writing table compared to the reading table. It's simply together with you, and doesn't look down on you - it's a documentation of learning. When was the last time we read such a book that is contemporary - a book that is a method?

And in learning marketing, like in Rabbi Arush's couple guidance, you don't need to convince the other side - when you simply do what they want. And this is exactly the root of the seemingly strange resistance to Rabbi Arush's method to the idea of communication within the couple, because communication is not the essence of couplehood and sexuality and courtship - but learning. Between the fantasy that the other side "knows exactly" what I want (inside my head), and the demand that "they tell me exactly" what to do (or what not to) - lies learning. And communication? It's both not enough and not satisfying, and it has a built-in manipulative and deterrent component, which creates the aversion to "talking about" as an especially artificial narrative technique, and on the other hand the poetics of fake honesty (autofiction for example). Instead of preaching about talking about feelings, expressing the inside (which acts as a spring, that is, brings out also what isn't there - and also gives it an aura of the most authentic and deepest content), and all the evils of the "I" (in literature, in couplehood, in entrepreneurship, in sex - and in marketing), one should focus on directions (the third Nathanian principle of learning).

Therefore marketing, which as a mediating medium is naturally deeply in the other side of communication and media (from the word medium), was transferred in the world of learning entrepreneurship into learning itself, as an integral part of it and within it and not as a medium - that is: organic marketing. Such promotion happens from within the network itself, for example in search, or in sharing, meaning marketing performed by the customer himself, who is as mentioned our learning partner. There no longer exists that mediated separation between the "talk" about the product, its communication to the environment in the media and the buzz around it, and the market itself and the thing in itself (production, product) which was the idea of language. The mediating medium of language fell from its greatness when this gap, between the entrepreneur and the user, was erased - and turned into a close learning dance in fast and tight circles of eye-hand connection, that is, transitions from insight to change and back to new insight. The thing in itself is the buzz. Marketing - viral.

And so we were freed from the tyranny of manipulative (and between us - not sympathetic) salespeople. It's not the salesperson who is the compass of the company - but the data scientist. There isn't some one big, epistemic insight, which is the idea in the entrepreneur's head and the goal for the way, but a million small insights, which are the way (directions, and not the author's intention). What the entrepreneur builds is not the realization of an idea in the head - but a head. A learning system. And an organic part of its learning is how much it is shared, and why, and how it is distributed, and by whom, and why, and how to increase this, that is - there is no more separation between the production stage and distribution. And it's the data scientist who analyzes marketing as well with data tools, including advertisements. He constantly asks: what works? And not: what will work on them?

But what happens with the traditional business world? Is the learning shift also taking place in it? Maybe we can ask this differently: what is actually the reason companies die? Why surprisingly is the average life expectancy of a limited company close to that of a person (about 75 years)? And maybe we'll ask this again differently. After all, if at the beginning of philosophy man was presented as a reduced and homomorphic Platonic model for the state, we saw how the startup is a homomorphic model for the man (or the courting side) in a relationship. And so if we translate the question again from the capital letters of the limited company to the small letters of the person, we'll ask: what is the reason people die at all? Kant is so smart, isn't it a waste that he won't live forever? The Breslov Rabbi explains this in an innovative and daring way as usual (and with him perhaps it should be said - as his method), in identifying the root of intellectual evil precisely in the great ones of the generation (!), who live too long:

And know that this snake's forehead draws its nourishment from the elders of the generation, from those who live long in the generation... When the elders, those who live long in the generation, damage their days and do not add light of holiness and knowledge every day... From the falling of the days of the elders, whose minds do not settle as mentioned above, from this damage to the knowledge of these elders - the snake's forehead draws nourishment... "Short of days" this is the aspect of the elders who are not as they should be who do not add holiness and knowledge every day, which is the essence of old age and longevity as mentioned above, and when the elders damage their days and do not lengthen their days in holiness and knowledge as mentioned above this is the aspect of "short of days" and from this the snake's forehead draws nourishment.

The snake's forehead draws nourishment precisely from the wisdom of the great elders of the generation, and why? Because it does not renew itself. Because when there is no addition of knowledge and constant learning every day anew - the greatest wisdom is the number 1 enemy of innovation (with which Nachman identified himself), and it is the root of fixation (and ultimately - death). Nachman's innovation was mistakenly explained in common error in existential or psychologistic or biographical terms, instead of in learning terms. Nachman, as a paranormal phenomenon, is what happens when scholarship is transferred to the realm of personality. Provocative statements that gained popularization in versions like "I am a wonder - and my soul is a great wonder" or "An innovation like me has never been in the world" are not just boasting or a manic display, and not some inflated existentialist slip, but a natural internalization of Talmudic innovation into personality: a learning soul. "Whoever wants to be a Jew, that is to go from level to level"...

If so, why do people and companies (and even cultures) die? Because they stopped learning, stopped rising every day from level to level - and then precisely from the great wisdom they accumulated the snake's forehead draws nourishment, which brings intellectual death to the world. Learning begins in a frenzy, every baby is a startup, but there is a natural mathematical phenomenon of erosion of the initial learning rate (also in computerized learning systems), and deterioration to stagnation. If Kant's mind were operating today, he would be dogmatic of all dogmatics (even dogmatism in criticism is dogmatic, as today's critics well prove). Therefore death is a phenomenon that stems from learning, and precisely it prevents the state of spiritual death. Every innovative philosophy needs to die - because it ages and becomes a dogma, instead of an example, anti-learning instead of learning. Not infrequently we see how precisely the death of a great sage and leader of the generation - is what brings spiritual flourishing. Therefore if the entrepreneur wants to prevent the death of his company, and turn into another failed startup, he must learn and learn, in order to be: "An innovation like me has not yet been in the world". Thus the startup founder became a business scientist - and entrepreneurship became an experimental method, and the internet - the largest laboratory in the world. And so learning also gained the status of a leading - and innovative - business philosophy. The rate of exchange of ideas in this system is so dizzying, and innovation has taken root in it as such a deep ethos, that we are living in a rare renaissance in the history of entrepreneurial ideas in spirit and matter - in a period that will still be remembered as a model and as a golden age that will arouse longing in the future: the Learning Renaissance. Entrepreneurs exchange and play again and again with ideas and experiments, dance in an attempt to crack desires, reinvent conceptions every day - and move away from the snake's forehead.

But what happens when there is no feedback and no market and no experimentation - and therefore no learning? There the old philosophy still celebrates - and is celebrated, as the last word in language. Who in the intellectual world even notices that he is living in an ideational renaissance? If we return from technology to philosophy itself and to the world of ideas, we will be surprised how few intellectuals and intellectuals (unlike actual entrepreneurs) change their opinions and replace their conceptions, or heaven forbid are open to a new philosophy or paradigm, or just to ideas that stem from their time (that is - from new learning in the world), and not from the last century. For precisely a change of opinion and paradigm is an indication that it is not a donkey (who as we know is always right, and reality always proves to him that he is right). It's amazing how little these people err (that is, learn), and how much their scholarship is epistemological (oh, knowledge!), or based on fluent writing (oh, language!) - and not creative (well, they have no profit line... and no wonder there are no customers). If you read a typical text of these, you discover that they confuse in an almost grotesque way between scholarship and learning, and between the position of the teacher and authority to the position of the curious student. Instead of referring to references and arguments as aids to understanding the idea and demonstrating it, that is, as scaffolding, they refer to them as support and proof, as stages in a knowledgeable structure, and not as supports for a climbing plant upwards. There is an inverse correlation between how much the typical product of these unlearned scholars is packed with name-dropping and quotes that supposedly establish it as knowledge (as if it's possible at all to substantially establish ideas of real importance, beyond that they are interesting, that is, arousing learning), to how much it is very very poor in new ideas and spiritual creativity, that is, in real new learning. We will not be surprised then that these are very uninteresting texts, which always speak some stale conception, that the moment you identify it behind the writer - the whole text becomes transparent, because it is created from it in an almost mechanical way, in an intellectual baking mold. Because precisely among "people of ideas" - the spirit of entrepreneurship is dead, while in the entrepreneurial world - philosophy is experiencing a revival. In the world of action the spirit flourishes and develops, and in the world of spirit there is very little action - and therefore no learning. And the snake still celebrates the victory of the philosophy of language.