(2024-07-24) Troynikov Telescoping Ambition

Anton Troynikov: Telescoping Ambition. San Francisco is delusional, and has been for a long time. This is occasionally a good thing; San Francisco is one of the few places capable of taking big ideas seriously when they’d be laughed out of the room anywhere else, and in tech SF provides the funding and social infrastructure to let people run with them. For this reason SF tends to attract people with big ideas, and people drawn to big ideas.

The status hierarchy in SF tech circles revolves around big ideas; when every tenth person you meet has a couple million bucks lying around between their couch cushions, and when everyone dresses like shit, your social standing is proportional to your ability to think up or appropriate some vision of a fundamentally different world, and your ability to convince others that the ideas are important and that you’re serious.

Unfortunately, it’s much easier to become a preacher of grandiose visions than it is to actually execute. This leads to a lot of LARP. You can live off a seed round for a long time, even with SF rents, and if your vision is big enough it’s assumed that executing will take a long time too - you don’t need to show results anytime soon.

In SF, the existence of the LARP is a cost of business. Some of the big ideas turn out to be important, and it’s morally good that VCs burn piles of money to find out which ones they are.

It’s easy to treat any sufficiently big idea as bullshit on its face.... But for an ambitious person, this basic bullshit filter isn’t good enough, because the most important ideas are big ideas which happen to be true.

What should ambitious people do to avoid falling into either of these traps? How do you tell the real from the fake, especially in San Francisco?

I’ve spent the last year and a half or so building my company, Chroma. About six months ago, I realized that I was doing my co-founder and my team a great disservice because I didn’t really have a clear ambition for what the company could become. I found that I had a mental block when I thought about Chroma as a sufficiently big idea.

I had to find a way to think about my company’s future that wouldn’t just feel like a LARP, but would actually connect with what we were doing concretely, every day. I needed to find a way to take my own ideas seriously.

When I want to understand something deeply I read about its history - a technology, an idea, a company, a nation, etc. In particular I try to get a sense of the people involved, understand their perspective, try to feel out their personalities. Chroma is a data company, so I started by reading the history of giant data companies from when they were baby companies like mine. Softwar, a (pretty entertaining) history of Larry Ellison’s Oracle.

Softwar didn’t give me a blueprint

But it did give me a sense of what it was possible to think about. (framing)

Understanding the moment in time we’re in let me tell a story to myself that I could find plausible, and therefore take seriously.

I find that I can lay out in considerable detail what we need to do over the next several years for Chroma to be everything it could be, what the risks really are, and how we’re going to overcome them. (strategic context)

I do think there’s a lot of merit in understanding the history of what you’re doing to a much deeper level than average.

Being able to tell a story to myself, and really believe in it, has had an interesting “telescoping” effect on my personal ambition; small things I do today connect to big things in the future.

We have an engineering team, but I still write code. Lately I have the sense that I know the purpose behind every line I write

I can make better decisions, and be a better leader for my team.

I’ve started looking at other things in my life in the same way, trying to generalize taking my ideas about Chroma seriously to taking other aspects of my life, and its future, seriously in the same concrete sense.