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Run like he'd starve next week
The starvation years
Before Uber, Travis Kalanick spent four years on a startup with no salary. He ran out of money several times and lost friends. He had to be epically precise and hardcore just to pay the bills and go to the grocery store next week. The company eventually sold, and that precision and intensity made Uber what it was.
The same intensity ran a $70 billion company the way somebody who thought he was going to starve next week would run it. The result was a company that ran too close to the line in too many situations.
Staying off the line
A lawyer framed it with a sports analogy: do you have chalk on your shoe, meaning did you step out of bounds? There never was any chalk, but proving that would take a scanning microscope and a reverse-angle slow-motion replay. When a company is big and important, the scrutiny and the expectation are to stay far from the line, even when the move is correct.
Fear of failure feeds the same habit. It can push a founder from behind and get them places, but it bogs down progress, and nobody becomes truly world-class on it.
Why does fear limit performance?
Psychologists Robert Yerkes and John Dodson reported in 1908 that performance rises with arousal up to a point and then falls. Their experiments used mice learning to avoid a shock, and the pattern held across tasks of different difficulty. Anxiety also narrows attention, which crowds out the flexible thinking that hard problems need. The finding is known today as the Yerkes-Dodson law.
Why is chalk the line in sports?
Early field markings were drawn with powdered chalk or lime, which is why a chalk mark came to stand for the boundary itself. In American football, a runner is out of bounds when any part of him touches the sideline, so chalk on a shoe is evidence of a step over the line. Officials rule on those plays at full speed, which is why replay review exists. The NFL first adopted instant replay review in 1986.
Why do big companies face stricter scrutiny?
Competition law in the European Union treats dominant companies differently from small ones. In its 1983 Michelin ruling, the European Court of Justice held that a dominant firm has a special responsibility not to impair competition. Conduct that would be unremarkable from a small business can be challenged when a market leader does it. Regulators in many countries apply a similar logic to firms whose size makes their decisions matter to millions of people.
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