Startups are street racers: you never know who you’re racing next to. They might have bigger sponsors than their sleeper suggests. A NASCAR analogy would therefore apply to traditional VC centers like SF, NYC, etc. It’s hard to pass someone before a turn at 200 MPH, but if you don’t do it, plenty of other people can and will.

Practically anyone can build a racecar, or a startup. The race puts proof to the lie: not everyone can compete, and not everyone wins. The first issue is systemic; the second: hard work, capital, and dumb luck.

Life, like business, hopefully doesn’t have a checkered flag, but it’s a fact of life all the same. All anyone can do is race their best to win, for whatever your own personal winning conditions are. Choose your racing team wisely!

But... you are not competing with Lewis Hamilton if you stay at the local go kart track! Plenty of room for small fish. He’d love to come and beat you but he can not afford to, his time would cost millions.

And yet I bumped into a childhood hero of mine, Leo Laporte of tech broadcasting fame, at an impromptu meetup he did at a bar in SF I heard about on his Twitter. So as I lived in SF at the time (~2012 I think?), I just went and met one of my role models.

Sure, you don’t know if you don’t go. But you also don’t know if you don’t know to go. Can going be taught? Isn’t that what startups do?

Sorry I’m lost in a spiral of metaphor now! Say what?

I did the thing. I’m still in the race. Am I winning? I know I am because I never raced you. Or maybe I am right now? If I lost, would I even notice? Should I care to win? At what cost?

The post was factual, as are all of my posts, in my own overwrought efforts to be satirical, witty, clever, or argumentative, in the spirit of debate of course.

My point is, I guess if I could even find a common thread, is this. Don’t stop racing. It’s what makes you want to be who you’re not. If that doesn’t inspire you, go meet your heroes and their friends and associates and nearby hackers, and get back to me.

Shout out to Noisebridge.

The trick isn’t to build a faster car. The trick is to build something more fun across the street so going to the race is less interesting than your thing.