Negative One to Zero

South Park Commons led the pre-seed round of Artifact, the first company I built, and one of their partners, Aditya Agarwal, gave me a phrase during that period that we've since borrowed at Philo. He calls the phase before a company exists negative one to zero, the deliberate work of going from no idea what to pursue to a problem worth pursuing. Aditya paired the phrase with some sobering math. If you're serious about entrepreneurship, you'll make somewhere between three and five decisions in your entire career about what to build, because each one commits somewhere between five years and the rest of your working life.

The typical founder story skips this phase. Inspiration strikes, the solution feels obvious, and within days the founder is writing code or sketching prototypes. I understand the impulse, and I'd never argue against a bias for action once you're building. What I've come to believe is that the choice of what to build deserves as much rigor as the years of execution that follow it, and it almost never gets that rigor.

Problems, not ideas

Part of the reason is language, because we describe businesses by their solutions. Say Airbnb and everyone pictures the elegant app that rents you someone's home for a weekend. Almost nobody describes the problem the founders identified, a gnarly multisided marketplace where supply was constrained, pricing was inflated, and the experience of staying somewhere was commoditized and sterile. When solutions dominate how we talk about businesses, they also dominate how we generate ideas for new ones, and we end up chronically underinvested in whether the problem matters at all. The reorientation I push founders toward is away from ideation and toward problem identification.

A 1964 study at an art school made this concrete for me, and it has held up across subsequent replications. Researchers gave 31 students sixty minutes to create a still life from a shared table of twenty-seven objects. One group picked a few objects quickly, stuck with them, and dove straight into painting. The other group swapped objects out, rearranged them, and in some cases spent fifty minutes of the hour on the objects before touching a canvas. The students who invested in problem definition produced work judged more original, and years later they had more successful careers as artists. Of the eleven students who rushed selection, eight had withdrawn from art as a profession entirely.

Time spent understanding a problem pays you back twice. It tells you whether the problem deserves years of your career, and it creates clarity about how to execute once you commit. Sitting in that ambiguity is uncomfortable, because becoming an expert in a problem doesn't immediately produce anything you can ship. The second and third-order questions are worth the discomfort, why the problem occurs, who it happens to, and the conditions it becomes clear in, because those answers tell you whether you actually want to spend a decade on it.

Seeking white-hot risk

Once you've identified compelling problems, the next filter is risk, and you want more of it than feels comfortable.

Howard Marks laid out the underlying model in a 1993 memo called The Value of Predictions. Every investment decision sits on two axes, consensus versus non-consensus and right versus wrong. Being consensus and right is comfortable, and the returns are usually already priced in. Superior performance comes only from being non-consensus and right, and the reason so few investors achieve it is that non-consensus forecasts are hard to make, hard to make correctly, and hard to act on. The same grid applies to selecting a problem.

A friend of mine, also an investor, told me something close to a decade ago that has stuck with me since. Great investors underwrite the performance of a stock, and exceptional investors underwrite risk. Founders make the equivalent mistake. They select ideas with the profile of a performing stock, popular and trendy and legible, when enduring businesses tend to be aligned to some white-hot risk attached to a deep pain point. Those businesses succeed not because they reduced the risk in the idea, but because they aligned themselves to it.

Go back to Airbnb. The hypothesis that travelers would sleep in strangers' homes, and that enough homeowners would hand their keys to strangers without their property getting destroyed, was genuinely risky. It could have been completely wrong. It was also falsifiable, which is what made it useful, because the team could test it inside a small part of a big market, and being right about it created extraordinary value.

That points to the practical discipline I'd encourage for every problem statement you generate. Treat it as a falsifiable hypothesis and go try to prove it wrong. Doing so keeps you from getting precious about the idea you formed the quickest emotional attachment to, and it forces whatever conviction survives to be earned. The problems that pass this filter tend to feel a little punk rock, a little weird, maybe divisive, the kind where your peers consistently disagree with you about whether it's the right direction. Contrarianism for its own sake is easy to manufacture, so the disagreement has to trace back to an earned, unique insight about the problem.

Utah's clarion calls

I'm increasingly convinced that Utah is positioned to produce globally impactful companies solving problems that exist right here, because our geography and geology create challenges that are either unique to this place or dramatically more acute here than anywhere else. Solving them well carries implications far beyond state borders.

Start with air quality. Utah's problem is specific. Inversion events trap PM 2.5 in our valleys, and for a handful of days each winter our air rivals Beijing's. I've spent real time in the state's air quality data, and the days that matter are exactly those build-up events, the long tail of the distribution rather than the average day the attainment metrics celebrate. Almost no companies in this state are technologically attacking that problem, and more entrepreneurs should be.

The Great Salt Lake holds one of the most interesting brine systems in the world, rich with lithium and magnesium. Extraction has been ecologically damaging and technologically stagnant for decades, and responsible processes now exist that could pull critical minerals out of the brine without compromising the lake itself. The opportunity is enormous, and it sits in our backyard.

Enhanced geothermal fits the same pattern, because our impermeable rock and subsurface conditions make Utah nearly unmatched as a testing ground for the technology. Our density of critical minerals, from beryllium to tellurium to uranium, feeds supply chains the country increasingly treats as national security priorities.

Each of these is a globally significant problem where a founder working in Utah holds an unfair advantage, because the conditions that make a solution testable are in their backyard. Almost nobody is building against them, and that's the non-consensus half of Marks' grid waiting for someone to be right.

Why are you in such a rush?

Mike Dempsey once tweeted a question that cuts against the breathless pace of startup culture: if this is your life's work, why are you in such a rush? Speed of execution still matters, and I'd never counsel a founder to move slowly once they're building. The decision of what to build is a different kind of decision. You're choosing where years of your attention will go, and you don't get those years back, so the deliberation should be proportional to the weight.

At Philo we're building a venture motion specifically for this phase. We want to work with founders while they're still selecting the problem, testing hypotheses, and building conviction, before a company even exists. You'll make a handful of decisions like this in your whole career, and some of the best unclaimed problems in the world sit in this state. If this is your life's work, the time you spend choosing it is part of the work.