For the love of god, don't start with 'why'
Sinek's golden circle doesn't address a key point of innovation
It seems like you enjoyed my previous rant on startup bullshit. There’s something I need to get off my chest about Sinek’s golden circle: why.
Every month, I encounter founders who start their entrepreneurial journey by asking ‘why?’ to reveal their purpose. Why? Well, Simon Sinek once gave a TED Talk where he told companies to start with ‘why’: to frontload their purpose.
Therefore, hoards of people begin their startup journey by asking themselves that purposeful question. This is especially popular among recent university graduates who disliked their studies, or people whose souls were slowly crushed after working in corporate for too long.
Their "why" often comes from a superficial ikigai exercise, revealing a purpose like making an impact or doing good for society. It usually focuses on social or sustainable causes.
Here comes my warning: starting a startup journey this way is a recipe for failure. Here’s why.
Snake-oil Sinek and Apple
In Simon’s 32M-view hit video1, he talks about Apple. They don’t just make user-friendly computers (what + how), they challenge the status quo and think differently (why).
He ‘proves’ his point by constructing two sentences. First, in a rather weak delivery, he says:
‘We make great computers. They are beautifully designed, simple to use and user-friendly. Wanna buy one? Meh’
Then, in a grandiose delivery, he goes:
‘Everything we do, we believe in challenging the status quo. We believe in thinking differently. The way we challenge the status quo is by making our products beautifully designed, simple to use and user-friendly. [Simon gives us a particular look] We just happen to make great computers. Wanna buy one?’
Simon claims that now, by reversing the order of information, you want to buy a computer of him. ‘People don’t buy what you do, but why you do it’.
I often buy bananas. I do that, according to Simon’s reasoning, because I like the purpose of the Chiquita banana company. Sure buddy. Which share of your purchases in a year is done because of alignment with the company’s purpose? I doubt it’s more than 5%.
Sinek’s story is aimed at leaders who need to communicate clearly. And for that reason, he feels starting with why can help to be authentic and create deeper connections.
But is it a good starting point for startups? I don’t think so.
Did Apple start with why?
Today, Apple indeed makes great computers and combined with great marketing, they have an incredible position in many markets. But did they start with the ‘think different’ mindset?
The company was founded in 1976, yet that marketing slogan took another twenty years. In 1997, a marketing firm pitched this ‘think different’-slogan to Steve Jobs for a SuperBowl ad.
Apple’s started with the Apple 1, not with why. I couldn’t find much evidence of ‘think different’ in materials of that time.
In their 1981 business plan for the newer Macintosh, I can only find words such as ‘affordable’ and ‘convenient’. A 1978 document about Apple shares mentions ‘quality products through superior customer engagement’. Nothing about thinking differently.
But, by that quality focus, and customer engagement, they figured out their why: they know how to do things differently and make great computers as a result—I’m typing this on a MacBook.
And even when you would say: ‘But they started with the intention to do something different’, sure buddy.
Show me a startup that claims: ‘We just copy our competitors’. A startup is a group of people in search of a new, replicable business model. By definition, every startup is doing something different. Otherwise, they would just copy a business model.
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The wrong purpose
Simon says that doing things with the wrong purpose sets you off the wrong track, even though Apple clearly didn’t start with blazing the ‘think different’-slogan.
He highlights a story of a competitor of the Wright brothers—the aeroplane inventors. That competitor also was working on inventing a working aeroplane, but didn’t get there first. Simon’s reasoning: because he was driven by money.
This is where Simon takes off his communication consultant hat, and puts on his innovation guru hat. He basically makes the claim that you are destined to fail if you have monetary incentives in the pursuit of innovation.
Startups inherently have a monetary incentive. Entrepreneurship is taking risk for a potential monetary reward. Otherwise, it’s a hobby or charity2.
In the case of a startup, you aim to successfully launch your product, in the hopes you can make a living out of it. That is a monetary incentive because you won’t do it for free: it takes too much time to build a startup.
By highlighting that your purpose should be right from the start, and not have any monetary component, Simon has directed millions of people in the wrong direction.
How? Simon ignores how people find purpose.
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Purpose emerges over time
To explain how purpose emerges, I draw from my experience in design as a researcher and product designer. If we simplify what design is, it’s a process that determines the shape of objects to be produced.
Every object made by a human has a purpose3. A Coke can, a car, your earpods, an airport: they all have a purpose. You know exactly what they are used for, which job to be done to achieve, and which function they should perform.
There’s much research, however, that shows that designers discover the function of what they are designing while they are designing.
This is not a sequential step-by-step process: they define the problem, design a solution with a function, redefine the problem, redefine the function, redesign the solution, redefine the problem, and so on. The purpose emerges over time in an interactive process, just like what I believe happened at Apple.
A huge portion of the startups I mentored have pivoted on the purpose of their company. They start with a different idea of why they want to change something about the world than they settle on.
This is an inherent aspect of how innovation works, that Simon for the sake of his argument ignores. Sinek puts purpose at the forefront and makes people believe they should focus on this and get it right immediately. This is harmful.
Fixed purpose hinders flexibility
Without the acknowledgement that why emerges over time, founders get stuck on the why. They select social impact, sustainability, inequality, you name it, and lock in on that purpose, using that as a criterion for finding startup ideas.
Locking in on these criteria is like having a super specific Cinderella slipper that will fit very, very few startup ideas. As a consequence, these aspiring founders are selecting ideas that are not best solved by startups. For instance, income inequality is not a startup problem.
Because they’re fixated on that purpose, they jump at any problem that vaguely aligns with it, setting themselves up for a tough journey.
A big portion of these ideas are tarpit ideas. This is most commonly caused due to lack of money in the customer segment, extremely low margins, low problem urgency and distributed problem ownership.
The added downside is, that because it’s so purposeful and impactful, the egos of these entrepreneurs are tickled because they are doing the right thing that feels right. Therefore, they don’t listen carefully to the negative signals they are getting from the market, stretching the journey longer than needed.
You can recognise some founders like this by the glaze of superiority for doing something good, they throw around many abstract words such as revolutionise, impact, and whatnot. I try to stay away from them.
So ‘why’ is not important?
No, that’s too black and white. It’s fine to have your purpose, it’s just a terrible way to find good startup ideas. If you want to do a startup, be open to a broader set of problems to solve.
And Sinek? Well, basically, Sinek seems to be absorbed by Apple’s powerful brand marketing. He retrospectively shows how Apple’s why makes a compelling argument in a sales pitch, and perhaps that for some commercials, one can start with that why.
Having a clear why in your communication can help. For early-stage startups, however, often it’s better to focus on the outcomes of your product, and not abstract brand marketing. So for startups, it doesn’t make a lot of sense. But then, why is Sinek so popular?
Sinek’s clients often are corporates that can pay his hefty fees—up to $400.000 per speaking gig, I envy him. Most corporates with thousands of employees are so overmanaged that their why has evaporated.
People in these organisations feel purposeless, because nobody has a why, which makes sense if you have 10 layers of management and very low customer engagement. Identifying a why might help these companies to direct themselves and improve morale.
Yet for startups, fixating on a why is problematic. Fixation is a topic that has been researched broadly in research on how people design things, and it can block the identification of truly valuable ideas.
Why is an important thing to reflect on, but not to lock in on too early. A startup is an organisation trying to figure out, among many other things, their why. Fixating it at the start will minimise your chances of finding an idea that creates value.
If you are okay with that, go for it, but don’t go post on LinkedIn crying doing a startup on a tarpit problem is hard because you were so happy with your ikigai.
There are multiple videos circulating, easily adding up to over 30M views, wouldn’t be surprised if the total is in the range of 50M-100M accounting for all Instagram, TikTok and LinkedIn streams. He also wrote a book about it. The video is what most people have consumed.
An interesting outlier is aspiring artists. They do it professionally, beyond a hobby level, recognising that they never might make any money, but are very open to the idea of making money from their art.
I would make an exception for works of art because their function is form, rather than the reverse.
Start, and find the why
I love your perspective. However… it’s ‘start’ with why not ‘fixate’ on why.
“If you want to do a startup, be open to a broader set of problems to solve.”
Isn’t the ‘start with why’ approach focused on that? Ie, why are you in a position to solve that? Why that problem? (Why you can solve that better than anyone else is the thing that emerges).