The Startup in Superposition
A startup isn’t born the day you incorporate.
It isn’t born when you raise your seed round.
It isn’t even born the day you ship your first product.
Until the founder collapses the wave, the company does not exist.
Superposition: The Illusion of Possibility
Think of Schrödinger’s cat. The cat is both alive and dead until the box is opened. That’s how startups exist in their earliest (and often longest) stage.
They are simultaneously unicorn and failure, acquisition and irrelevance, revolution and vaporware.
The deck you send investors? That’s probability amplitude.
The demo day pitch? Probability amplitude.
The Slack workspace buzzing with half-formed plans? Probability amplitude.
From the outside, everything looks like forward motion. From the inside, founders convince themselves they are “building optionality.”
But in truth, they are floating in superposition—where nothing is real, and everything is still reversible.
Collapse as Violence
Here’s the part no one likes to hear: collapsing the wave isn’t some elegant act of alignment.
It’s violent!
Because collapse doesn’t mean you simply “choose a path.” Collapse means you murder possibility. Every other future where your company might have been something else—dead.
The bootstrapper path? Gone.
The acqui-hire fantasy? Gone.
The billion-dollar unicorn hallucination? Gone.
What remains is the one you’ve chosen to manifest.
This is why most founders hide in superposition. It feels intoxicating. As long as you haven’t collapsed the wave, all futures still feel available. The fantasy is intact. Reality hasn’t yet ruined the dream.
But reality always arrives. And when collapse happens late, it’s brutal.
The Cowardice of Optionality
Optionality is one of the most misused words in the founder vocabulary. Keeping doors open feels smart. It signals prudence.
“We’ll test the waters.”
“We’ll pivot if needed.”
“We’ll raise when the time is right.”
But what looks like wisdom is often cowardice in disguise. A refusal to own just one path. A refusal to kill the fantasy and step into the brutality of reality.
Because collapse demands courage. It requires you to torch 99% of your imagined futures so one can compound. It forces you to lose the comfort of maybe.
Collapse as Conviction
This is why conviction isn’t motivational fluff. It’s physics!
When a founder collapses the wave, they don’t just change their own mindset—they change the system around them.
Authority: Collapse gives the market something solid to believe in.
Scarcity: By killing infinite paths, the surviving one becomes rare—and rarity is valuable.
Consistency: Teams stop drifting in fog; they finally see a road worth walking.
Social proof: Investors and customers rally behind clarity, not probability haze.
Collapse is persuasion in its rawest form. It forces alignment because it makes hesitation impossible.
The Purgatory of Drift
What most founders never realize is that superposition isn’t neutral. It’s purgatory.
In physics, superposition is elegant—an elegant uncertainty, a beautiful potential.
But in startups, superposition rots.
Teams lose urgency.
Customers hesitate.
Investors sniff blood.
And the founder’s own identity drifts, stuck between infinite imagined futures and zero manifested ones.
The longer you wait, the harder it gets. Every day in superposition strengthens the illusion that “everything is possible,” and weakens your capacity to kill what must be killed.
The startup dies not from bad ideas, but from refusal to collapse.
The Founder’s Real Job! The Only Job!
So here is the paradox at the heart of founding:
The founder’s job is not to keep options open. The founder’s job is to close them—ruthlessly. To slam 99 doors so one can compound. To torch the map so the team has only one road to walk. To collapse the wave and, in doing so, accept the grief of killing futures that will never be.
That grief is the price of reality. And the willingness to pay it is the mark of a founder.
Because until you collapse the wave, you don’t have a company.
You just have potential.
And potential never built anything.