Guy Reams (00:01.378)
This is day 86, learning to extract value. My grandfather kept some odd things on his desk. Perhaps he had a sense for objects that carried a story in their shape, a sort of patient gravity. Today I'm sitting here where he used to work. In front of me is this rough paperweight. Looks like someone welded a river to a mountain.
A heavy glob of copper ore fused with some stone, born from the cavity of an old smelter and saved because it looked weird. It is pitted and rough in places and sharp and precise in others. A reminder that heat reveals what is hidden, but only after the rock has already had a very hard life. As I turn it in my hand, I keep thinking about startups. People love to imagine that great startups invent value.
That is a convenient myth. It feeds our appetite for novelty and lets us believe that the right idea will leap formed into the world. But the best founders work more like old miners. They do not invent copper. They discover it, prove it, separate it, refine it in that order and with discipline. The work is systematic. The work is not glamorous. The work respects the sequence.
Most of us, especially in our early enthusiasm, mistake rock for ore. We hold up pretty stone and convince ourselves there is enough metal inside to build a business. We confuse our solution with the presence of ore. Ore is not a solution. Ore is validated pain with economic weight. It is the specific repeated measurable suffering of a customer who will trade money to make it stop.
Until the paint is confirmed and priced, we are caressing river rock and recalling it copper. In mining, you do not roll whole boulders into a furnace and hope for ignits to spill out. You crush it, you grind it, you concentrate the mineral. You increase the ratio of valuable mineral to waste. This is where strategy begins. Strategy is not a presentation.
Guy Reams (02:23.094)
Strategy is the act of concentration. It is the honest decision to reduce the mess, to pick a vein, to ignore the glitter in the tailings, and focus on the grade that will carry the operation. Most startups skip this step and try to melt the whole rock. They rush to build platforms and ecosystems and roadmaps before they have a bucket to concentrate to justify the heat that they would want to apply. Heat being money.
Once concentration is absolute, extraction can actually begin. Extraction is the process of separating a metal from its ore. It is the stage when value actually becomes tangible. You can now hold it. You can weigh it. In a company, this is the proof that a specific customer segment pays you actual money for a particular outcome, not a promise, not a pilot that never ends. Real trade.
At this point, you know that the metal is in there and you have a repeatable way to pull it out. Refining then follows. Refining is purity and consistency. Raw metal is still not ready for use. It bends when it should not. It breaks when you put it under stress. Refining removes what does not belong and builds the properties that do belong. In the business, this is where reliability is born.
Processes stabilize. Edges get smoother. Support becomes predictable. The numbers stop shouting at you. Then finally, you reach usable metal, which in our world means a product that moves money. Not likes, not downloads, not subscribers, not vanity charts, money. The clean signal that the market values the thing that you made enough to change hands for it.
If you accept this sequence, you build differently. You prospect for pain and you prove it with interviews, field notes and transactions. You crush the problem into smaller pieces until you can see the useful pattern. You concentrate by discarding clever distractions and choosing a single grade that matters. You extract with the simplest mechanism that produces cash payback. You refine by grinding down variability
Guy Reams (04:51.19)
and raising quality until customers would be inconvenienced to switch away. Then and only then can you really talk about scale. There is a humility to this, I think. You stop worshipping ideas and start respecting geology. You stop trying to convince the mountain to be something it is not. You stop melting everything you touch. You learn to listen for the dull ring of waste and the clear ring of ore.
You develop patience with the order of operations because you have learned the cost of getting it wrong. Most startups die because they try to refine before they extract or extract before they concentrate. The flame is real, but the fuel is just missing. I put the old copper stone back on the desk here and I think about my grandfather's journey as he worked each day in this very office. He did not chase heat for its own sake.
He worked the sequence in front of him and trusted that the truth would show itself as he honored the process. That is the discipline that I would like to achieve, to discover, to separate, to prove, and to refine with respect for the order of operations. To remember that OR is not a slide or a slogan, OR is validated pain and economic weight. And to keep going until the metal is ready to do what metal does, carry current
bear load, move value from one place to another. In our world, that means a product that can move money.