The purpose of building a company is for scale and impact. It’s to create something that doesn’t exist. More than that, to progress civilization, one should create something that wouldn’t exist. It wouldn’t exist without the concentrated efforts of the people involved in an unnatural mission.
Natural Progress
Around the same time, different people worldwide discovered the telephone, light bulb, steam engine, and radio. The same goes for calculus, logarithms, boolean algebra, and the theory of evolution by natural selection. Modern historians love this narrative.
It’s comforting to believe progress is inevitable. If you don’t build, others will.
However, the inevitability narrative diminishes the accomplishments of others to make the non-contributing person feel better about themselves. It takes away agency and is only true in the cases throughout history where multiple civilizations had the incentive, knowledge, and ability to innovate. They had equal knowledge and were rowing in the same direction.
Unnatural Progress
Not every discovery was inevitable. Not every breakthrough was fated to happen. It’s false to assume that if one person didn’t build, another would.
The American Revolution was unnatural and unlikely to succeed. Even after the successful revolution, most timelines had George Washington becoming king; instead, he let America become a free, innovative republic.
Natural Startups
If you’re a natural startup, you’re the 18th search engine, the thirtieth social network, or the hundredth plus blogging or microblogging site, and if you get it right, you win the new market. Think Google, Facebook, and Twitter, respectively. They were bound to happen as competition was happening worldwide for the same mission.
Unnatural Startups
If you’re an unnatural startup, you change an entire industry stuck in its ways. Tesla, SpaceX, and Palantir were unnatural. They went against the grain. Electric cars weren’t and wouldn’t have been a thing. Innovation in space travel wasn’t and had no reason to be a thing.
To do an unnatural startup, you face hurdles other companies don’t face. Palantir had to spend years suing the US government to simply run a fair procurement process to compete for contracts even after their software that was already proven to save more American lives by avoiding IEDs and would save billions of taxpayer dollars.
Unnatural startups go against the trend and grain of society and thus have had a much larger impact on human progress.
Competition
Being unnatural doesn’t mean a startup lacks competition. Competition gives energy and proves there’s a market. There’s existing spend. An unnatural startup should go after a market where there are already billions of dollars being spent to solve the problem. Similarly, there was already massive spend in the markets Tesla, Palantir, and SpaceX went after. What makes a startup unnatural is the mission.
Given the current state of the world and the incumbents, what Ender is trying to build won’t exist unless we do it. Institutions use an average of 20 single-point solutions, meaning with their PMS, they have 21 sources of truth. There are ways to pull the data out to do high-level analytics, but the current systems make it effectively impossible to drill down and automate workflows and processes.
Ender’s Mission
To change this–
First, groups need data in one system. A database for all real estate data.
Second, it needs to be interoperable, thus the operating system. With an operating system, users define KPIs and have integrated best-in-class apps, anomaly detection, predictive insights, and small and large language models to augment and automate workflows. That’s it. That’s what Ender is building towards.
At the highest level, it’s simple.
Ender’s goal is to democratize the experience of the highest level of service to everyone else. We accomplish that by building high-end and then going low-end. This is true of any technology– microwaves and refrigerators were first only for the very wealthy, the same with computers and TVs. Think of the cost of TVs going down over time. This is how innovation works.
Ender starts with institutions because they’re high-end clients, and we build to support their workflows. It’s how we change the industry.