Start-ups Are PIGS (and That’s Not an Insult)
A mentor of mine sent me a note recently that made me laugh out loud. He said startups are P.I.G.S.:
P - Poor
I - Ignorant
G - Grandiose
…and he was looking for an “S.”
Before anyone gets offended, let’s unpack this.
Startups are poor — multidimensionally poor. Yes, they lack money. But they’re also poor in time, space, equipment, talent, and margin for error. They don’t have enough of anything. Every decision is made under constraint. Every allocation is a tradeoff. Scarcity isn’t a bug in startups. It’s the defining feature.
They’re also ignorant. Not stupid. Ignorant. What they don’t know massively exceeds what they do know. They don’t know the full competitive landscape. They don’t know how customers will actually behave. They don’t know what will break in production. They don’t know what regulatory nuance might ambush them. And perhaps most importantly — they don’t know what they don’t know. This is not a character flaw. It’s the nature of invention. If they fully understood the odds, most would never start.
And then there’s grandiosity. Startups want to be everything to everyone. They talk about billion-dollar markets before they have a paying customer. They describe platform visions when they haven’t validated a single use case. They assume someone will buy them, or fund them, or validate them.
There’s irrational exuberance embedded in the system. But here’s the uncomfortable truth: without a degree of grandiosity — without unbridled optimism — nothing new gets built.
You don’t jump into the arena with sober, actuarial probability tables. You jump because you believe. That brings me to the missing “S.” In our back-and-forth, I floated words like “sequestered” or “self-important.” He dismissed “stupid.” Fair enough. The word I keep coming back to is “Solitary.” Startups make decisions in a vacuum.
Even when surrounded by advisors, investors, and coaches, the founder ultimately bears the weight alone. They operate in information silos. They lack historical data. They don’t have the benefit of large organizational memory. They must decide with incomplete inputs. That solitude amplifies the other three traits. Poverty sharpens risk. Ignorance magnifies uncertainty. Grandiosity compensates for doubt. And solitude makes it personal.
Interestingly, this maps to the old four stages of growth:
Unconsciously incompetent
Consciously incompetent
Consciously competent
Unconsciously competent
Most startups begin in stage one with enormous confidence. They quickly enter stage two — painful awareness. Survival requires pushing through to stage three. Very few ever reach stage four at scale.
So, are startups PIGS?
Yes. And they must be:
The poverty forces prioritization.
The ignorance drives learning.
The grandiosity fuels ambition.
The solitude builds resilience.
There may indeed be a business school lecture in this. Probably a book. But I’m less interested in polishing the acronym than in acknowledging the reality: startups are fragile, messy, under-informed, overconfident experiments. And that’s precisely why they occasionally change the world.
If you have a better “S,” I’m all ears.