Startup Success Stories Are Flawed

In his book on mapping business strategy, Simon Wardley makes an observation that struck me hard recently.

You cannot learn chess from a list of moves. Even with access to every grandmaster game ever played, simply studying the sequence of moves will not make you a strong player. Without understanding the board position, the strategic context, and the invisible forces at play, these move lists are merely shadows of the actual game.

This observation triggered a thought that has been bothering me about how we approach startup knowledge and learning.

The Invisible Board

Here is a typical chess game move list:

1. e4 e5
2. Nf3 Nc6
3. Bb5 a6
4. Ba4 Nf6
5. O-O Be7
6. Re1 b5
7. Bb3 d6
8. c3 O-O
9. h3 Na5
10. Bc2 c5
11. d4 Qc7
12. Nbd2 Bd7

Without understanding the position, these moves tell us very little. If we try to learn chess just by reading lists of moves, we will never truly understand the game. We will always lose against someone who can read the board and see the deeper strategy at play. Was the bishop retreat on move 7 brilliant or desperate? Did castling on move 8 create safety or vulnerability? Without seeing and understanding the actual position, we cannot know.

What we learn from is not the notation you have but …

1. Pawn Pawn
2. Knight Knight

Startup Success Stories are a Move List

We consume endless articles, case studies, and advice about startup success:

• “Talk to 100 customers before writing any code”
• “Run a landing page test with £500 of ads to validate demand”
• “Price high and work backwards to find your ideal customer”
• “Don’t raise money, bootstrap your way to success”
• “Reverse trials are a waste of time”
• “Don’t hire developers, use AI”
• “Build an email list of 10,000 people before launch”
• “Focus on SEO from day one”
• “How to get featured on Product Hunt and get to #1”
• “Tools to cold email 1000 potential customers”
• “How to create viral TikTok content to drive signups”
• “Build in public and document everything”
• “How we got featured in TechCrunch before launching”
• “Hire only senior engineers at first”
• “Ignore the enterprise market”

Each piece of advice represents a “move” that worked for someone else. We dutifully collect these moves, attempting to replicate them in our own ventures. Yet something is missing.

Just as a chess move list cannot convey the full strategic situation, startup advice often fails to capture the invisible forces that shape success or failure. Network effects create resistance or momentum. Technological constraints form boundaries of what is possible. Timing determines whether an identical strategy leads to breakthrough or bankruptcy.

We can take this further: startup business advice is even worse that the chess move list above, because at least the chess list has positional information that helps you infer the board. Our business advice is directly parallel “Pawn Pawn”, “Pawn Pawn Knight Knight”, which is even more difficult to interpret.

An example: in the early 2000s, I worked at a gaming company called Elixir Studios that attempted to simulate an entire country. The idea was brilliant. The team was capable. But the hardware of the time created an invisible wall. The moves were right. The wider environment made them impossible. (The company did not survive, although the games were great, and our founder went on to do great things, so perhaps it was for the best.)

Beyond the Move List

We talk about headwinds and tailwinds in business. About going uphill or downhill. These metaphors hint at forces we can feel but cannot see. Forces that no case study or advice article fully captures. Forces that determine whether copying someone else’s “moves” will lead to success or failure.

Perhaps what we need is not more move lists. Not more step by step guides or success stories. Perhaps we need new ways to map and understand these invisible forces.

Wardley gives us one type of map, showing how components evolve over time and create strategic positions across the value chain.

What other dimensions are we missing? What other forces shape the game we are trying to play?

How do we learn to see these invisible forces? How do we develop an intuition for timing, for resistance, for possibility? How do we move beyond copying moves to understanding the board?

The next time we read a startup success story or piece of advice, we should remember that we are seeing only the moves, not the board. The real question is not “what moves led to success?” but “what forces made those moves possible?”

And perhaps most importantly: what forces are shaping the board for us right now?

Thanks to Simon Wardley for feedback on an earlier version of this article, and for the original observation that sparked this one.