PMF to OS

The transition from product-market fit to creating an operating system is a necessary and difficult step to cross over. It’s what we’re currently doing at Zero.

I picture a lot of startups at their Series-A level as being bicycles. They work but their speed is capped and they require a lot of human effort to keep moving. This transition involves taking that bicycle, engineering in the complexity involved with execution and building an engine that can take more fuel and translate it into growth.

When I joined Zero, I was too happy to engineer systems and processes left and right to fix the places I noticed bottlenecks. It became clear, however, that I could spend infinite time doing this. The more important question wasn’t how we could engineer better processes but rather where to spend time and focus to engineer those better processes.

For someone who is largely impatient to take action and wants to have impact from day zero, this was and is an adjustment for me. It’s involved taking a step back, building the systems to deliver the right context to the right people at the right time and then diving into the tools that transform Zero from a bike into an engine.