Last week’s International Startup Festival was a blow-out success. 1,200 people packed into a pier in Old Montreal, and in between listening to industry luminaries like Paul Mockapetris and Dan Bricklin, thronged the row of tents that lined the event.
Somewhere in the middle of all this managed chaos, I presented a 20-minute session on coefficients of friction. In it, I argued that new companies must focus on reducing the inherent friction in a system (lube) rather than trying to scale to overcome it (thrust.)
I wrote up my speakers’ notes in an earlier blog; then I put them into slides, which are embedded here. The latter are a bit more casual—maybe even risqué—than the comparatively dry notes I’d written up.