Welcome to Pattern Breakers

The Pattern Breakers book is now available wherever you buy your books.

In all my years as a seed investor, the notion that VCs should be adept at “pattern matching” has bugged me. You see it everywhere, like here, here, and here. I even ran across a dedicated site, Venture Patterns, all about this idea. 

Patterns hold a quiet allure. They give us a way to make sense of a world that’s already too complicated. Seeing patterns of success should help VCs choose better startups. Recognizing patterns should help founders embrace best practices in building their startups. It should lead to what markets are worth entering, what makes a business solid and defensible, what risks to watch out for, and how best to hire and grow. 

Yes…But.

An over-reliance on pattern matching makes me uneasy. In some cases, it does more harm than good. It clouds judgment and creates unhelpful biases, even among the best. Yes, experience and analysis are valuable, but to conflate them with “pattern matching” is to misunderstand what truly makes a startup founder great, as well as what makes a startup idea revolutionary.

Great startup founders don’t fit a pattern. They are Pattern Breakers.

They pursue pattern-breaking ideas that pose a bold departure from familiar routines and habits. They challenge the status quo and offer new insights and solutions that wouldn’t have been possible by strictly following existing patterns or rules. 

Pattern-breaking ideas offer something radically different from anything that’s come before. At first, these ideas can seem crazy. Why would anyone stay in a stranger's home? Yet, Airbnb proved they would. Why would someone catch a ride in a stranger's car? Uber and Lyft, having dispatched tens of billions of passenger rides, answered that question. How could 140-character tweets ignite the most explosive media revolution of the last two decades? X/Twitter, with its simplicity, transformed the media and the public square.

Despite their initial strangeness, the very uniqueness of these transformative companies gave them enormous strength. They eluded the comparison trap, for there was often no precedent to measure them against. Instead of besting their rivals, they stood alone.

But ideas aren’t enough. Founders must also act in pattern-breaking ways that pull others along to make their ideas real. They don't accomplish this by blending into the crowd. They pose a stark dichotomy between the world as it exists and the world as it could be, urging us to embark on the journey with them. 

Brian Chesky initially funded Airbnb by selling cereal boxes because he was willing to act in ways that broke the mold. The ridesharing companies refused to cave into cease-and-desist letters from local city governments or dirty tricks from the taxi lobby. They bear the brunt of critics who defend the status quo -- critics who would like them to fit in with the existing rules because they have a vested interest.

Some of you are rightfully thinking –isn’t it too extreme to say that pattern matching is never a good thing? Isn’t the fact that you think breakthroughs come from pattern-breaking a sort of recursive type of pattern recognition? To which, I would say, you have a point. But here’s the thing: All human beings are hardwired to find patterns. 

It goes back to caveman days and how we stay alive. We have way too much input flooding at us every moment of every day, more than our conscious brain can process. So our unconscious brain elevates what it’s seen before as a shortcut. But our conscious brain is focused on survival, not upending old industries, creating new ones, and changing people’s reality. We’ve got to learn to question when pattern-matching serves us and when it holds us back. And we must be careful not to miss the larger point, which is…

Pattern-breaking is the path to breakthroughs that change the future.

I’ll use this Substack to stay connected with kindred spirits interested in this topic and these ideas. 

The typical weekly installment will include updates to recent work like my podcast, what I’ve been thinking about in observing pattern-breaking in life around us, and counterintuitive fly-on-the-wall stories of my own attempts to find new pattern-breaking founders. I’ll also be writing long-form pieces that will originate here. 

If you are a founder who wants to change the future, I hope you’ll find these ideas helpful. I want to learn from you as well. Feel free to ask me to go deeper or zoom out and explain myself better.

I hope you’ll stick with me on this journey. And if you resonate with this thinking, I hope you’ll forward this email to fellow kindred spirits. The more we can understand pattern-breaking and its potential for positive impact, the more effectively we can co-create the future we want.