The Founder Puzzle

A lesson on company building from the man who invented the Rubik’s Cube

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been reading Cubed: The Puzzle of Us All by Erno Rubik, the guy who invented the Rubik’s Cube. As a fan of the Cube, I found Rubik’s personal reflections on his process creating the Cube—rather than solving its puzzle—to be particularly interesting. Mostly because it reminded me a lot of what it takes to build a company, especially as a founder.

I’ll start by saying that founders have a strange job. They require a worldview that is not broadly shared or understood, and founders are often solving puzzles with no known solution. To be good at this type of work, you have to enjoy the discomfort of not inherently having all the answers, as well as the free-falling feeling that there might not ever be an answer (Rubik felt this when he first created the Cube). Because in that process of working towards a solution, a new puzzle—often more urgent and valuable—will reveal itself.

When you are surrounded by problems (as most founders are), you see them all around you. Maybe your engineering team is struggling to hit milestones, the killer sales leader you hired is slower to ramp up than you hoped, or some customers have churned. The problem is clear in one way—the result is not what you wanted—but the problem to be solved is less obvious. This is the puzzle to focus on as a founder.

Is the slowdown in engineering a symptom of a larger management process breaking down? Is the sales leader struggling to ramp because they lack familiarity with key value drivers in the product or because customers still want to ‘speak to the CEO’? Is customer churn driven by a specific type of user?

A startup is a puzzle, but the solution lies in problem definition. Founders are creating the Cube, not solving the Cube. The Rubik’s Cube we experience as players has a set of rules that define the game, as well as a very well-defined solution. “Cubers” figure out how to solve the puzzle with algorithms. The more algorithms you know, the easier it is to identify how to solve the puzzle. Execution is critical, but as a founder, you have to choose the right puzzles to solve. You need to ask “why?” instead of “how?”

The founder doesn’t pick up the Cube and try to solve it with an algorithm. The founder is creating the puzzle from the elements of the company. The ability to see this metaphorical game board differently is a creative skill, but it comes from 1) understanding the current rules and 2) knowing that the rules themselves are a puzzle to solve. “How?” will lead to solutions within the existing rules. “Why?” is the abstraction—it’s the weird theory founders can test in order to see if a contrarian perspective leads to the right answer. Why does the world operate a certain way? Can I operate under a different set of rules? What is my way? Why does that create an advantage for me?

This is not just about industries and approaches, but also applies to how you run a company. It applies to how you access the best resources to amplify your gift to see the world differently. How you challenge the rules. How you reject defined constraints and best practices, knowing that best practices are the fastest path to average results.

Find the answer to your “why?” question and you will have the whole world wondering “how did they do that?”