I hope I never lose the drive to build.

If I have one superpower, it's the interest and ability to build over a long period of time. This is what it takes to make a durable business.

A durable business takes time. If it's built fast, it can end fast. A business put together quickly can be replicated; others can do it too, and that impacts its durability. It's very unlikely that a unique insight will remain secret for long. I believe the world has a way of surfacing these thoughts to anyone who is out there listening, and there are plenty of curious people, but not all of them are builders.

The insight is shared. It's in the ether. It doesn't like to or want to be owned by one person. I believe this. Others will find it, and even if they don't have the stamina to build for a long time, they will take the insight and work with it. If that's all the business is based on, you'll find yourself sharing the insight with many other entrepreneurs and you'll have a lot of competition. A lot of competition impacts the durability of the business.

On the other hand, if the insight requires long-term work to fully realize, the competition will be less in number. The likelihood of durability will increase with your own ability to keep working at it. The best businesses are not built overnight; they're built over years. Steve Jobs once said that doing anything of magnitude takes at least five years, more likely seven or eight. I believe this too.

A great business doesn't need to have a great vision. The vision can be small, but the durability of the business can still be great if it requires a lot of work to realize the small vision. I believe this is an important distinction: the size of the vision doesn't correlate with the amount of work to realize it.

I also believe that durable businesses cannot be built alone. It goes back to the main principle -- long-term work. Two people working for years on a business will win over one person working for years on the same business. I extend this to AI and point to the fallacy of the one-person "unicorn". Yes, it's probably possible, but it's not durable. A two-person unicorn will beat the one-person unicorn. A three-person unicorn will beat a two-person unicorn, and so-on, until the profit margin catches up to the market. I think of this in basic economic theory: in a competitive market, economic profits converge to zero as price converges to marginal cost. Just as more companies will enter a market until price equals marginal cost, companies will keep hiring until that extra labor cost meets some equilibrium profit line (which will, no doubt, be influence by our new AI leverage).

Shovels today has 18 people. We have competitors with two people. We're eating their lunch. We have others with a hundred or more. We're targeting them. Someday I hope Shovels has two hundred employees. They'll all be very busy. I know it.

Shovels will stagnate when the building curve tapers off. The best companies, the trillion dollar enterprises, never stopped building. They accelerated into new markets, building faster than they did when they were young. Other business stop building and go into grinding mode, trying to squeeze as much profit out of their existing business as possible. If Shovels gets to this point, I'm probably out. That's not the kind of CEO I am. I won't be good at it. It's not my superpower, so we'd need to find a new CEO who's great at it.

I don't think that's in the cards, though. Our vision is large and it will require a lot of building. Endless! So long as there are new data to get, new combinations to explore, new interfaces to ship, new tools to use, I'll keep building.

Looking back, my urge to build spilled outside of my first venture-backed company. Scripted was starting to stagnate. I didn't see a way for me to contribute as a builder. It started to grind. That was the beginning of the end. I built Toofr, B2G, and other little web apps parallel to Scripted because I felt and saw the writing on the wall. I remember that feeling.

I don't have that problem at Shovels. I see Shovels as a long, long tapestry of interesting concepts and ideas. Endless building opportunity. We're at a size now where I can start exploring again and for the last two months, that's what I've been doing. I basically built two new startups inside of Shovels. I'm incubating them myself, eager to learn as much as I can about these data and the customers who want to buy them and find the perfect place to merge them into Shovels itself. It's a funny concept. I'm building new businesses inside of Shovels so that I can "sell" them to Shovels. Something like that.

This is how I know, three years in, that we're onto something. It's obvious. We just have to keep building!