What Would You Build If You Had Nothing to Prove?

How might Facebook have been different if Zuckerberg had built it from a beautiful inner state of love, abundance and security?

I've been exploring this question for my book, so I asked ChatGPT.

We can't know what was actually going on within Zuckerberg. But imagine two hypothetical versions of Facebook, with the same genius and ambition but a different inner state.

The version built on scarcity asks:

"How can we extract the maximum economic value from the attention we have captured?"

That question leads to an advertising machine: infinite scroll, outrage in the feed, status metrics, anything that keeps you on the app longer.

The version built on abundance asks:

"Given that billions of people trust us with their relationships, how much new value can we create for them?"

You might assume that version would be a smaller company.

It might have been bigger.

As ChatGPT put it: "A founder's inner state eventually becomes its architecture."

The same is true for your company. Your inner state shapes the question your company is answering, and that question shapes what you build.

Change the question, and you may find yourself with a bigger company than you'd expect.

We Create As We Are

This idea is at the heart of the book I'm writing. Our technologies and companies mirror the mindsets of the humans who build them. We create as we are.

The scarcity question rests on an old assumption: that business is zero-sum, so for me to win, someone else has to lose.

Buckminster Fuller, the architect and systems thinker, challenged that assumption decades ago. He argued that, in the 1970s, humanity had crossed what's been called the "sufficiency point": for the first time, we had the technological capability to support 100% of human life on Earth. Survival no longer had to be a zero-sum game.

What made it possible, he said, was ephemeralization: doing more and more with less and less. That's more true now than ever thanks to AI. One of my clients measured a 30x productivity gap between engineers fully using AI and those who aren't.

So why does the scarcity question still feel so natural? When you're below the line (operating from a state of threat), you see zero-sum and think in terms of win-lose. When you're present, you bring creativity and curiosity about what people really want, and you can find solutions where everyone wins.

Zero-sum is how a threatened mind sees the world.

Two founders can face identical circumstances yet create completely different outcomes, all because of their beliefs. One founder believes AI is an exciting, massive opportunity, and motivates his employees to reinvent their product and workflow. Another believes AI is a threat, gets defensive with his board, resists cannibalizing their existing product and spreads fear throughout his team.

Can you see how business results mirror our beliefs?

What an Abundance-Built Facebook Could Have Looked Like

Facebook fused two things that didn't have to go together: creating enormous value from a social graph, and monetizing attention through advertising.

It needed the first to become enormous. It didn't necessarily need the second.

ChatGPT laid out a few models it could have run instead:

1 - Subscription. Keep the core free and charge about $8 a month for premium. 300 million subscribers would be roughly $29B a year.

2 - Identity. Facebook Connect becomes the trusted identity layer of the internet, with businesses paying for verification.

3 - Payments and commerce. It runs through Marketplace, payments between friends and creator payouts. If trillions of dollars flowed through it, even a small take rate could mean tens of billions.

4 - Communities. Facebook Groups becomes Shopify for communities, free for basic groups and paid for organizations.

5 - Business communications. Messenger and WhatsApp become how people talk to companies, with businesses paying. Meta has actually moved substantially in this direction with WhatsApp Business.

In each one, making people's lives better is precisely what makes the money.

The flywheel becomes:

Identity → relationships → communities → communication → transactions → payments

Instead of:

Relationships → attention → engagement → ads

We'll never know for sure. Meta's advertising machine became one of the most successful businesses ever created, so beating it is an extremely high bar. But advertising monetizes a relatively narrow resource: attention. A trusted network potentially sits in the middle of something far larger: human economic activity.

How to Change the Question Your Company Is Answering

Here are four places to start.

1. Name the question behind your decisions.

Try both versions on your business:

• How can we extract the most value from what we've already captured?
• How much new value can we create for the people who trust us?

Then look at your last pricing decision, your product roadmap, or your last big strategy meeting. Which question was driving it?

Are you operating out of lack and scarcity, making choices to squeeze more money from others for yourself? Or are you operating out of sufficiency, genuinely trying to create value in the world? Customers can sense the difference.

2. Check what your north-star metric measures.

ChatGPT made a useful distinction. A mission like "Connect everyone on Facebook" measures success by how big and active the network is. "Help humanity become more genuinely connected" measures success by what happens to people because the network exists.

Which one is your main metric measuring?

When your main goals are only revenue or valuation, the work can start to feel heavy, and the mission gets lost. A client once told me he felt like he was "fighting for the soul of his company" as his board pushed for revenue and margins. He realized his job was to remind his team why they were playing the game.

3. Make your customers' win as important as yours.

Win-for-all means you each make the other one winning as important as you winning. Ask it about your customers: what would your business model look like if their win mattered as much as yours? Look for the model where their win produces yours.

4. Catch zero-sum thinking about competitors, and look for the collaborative move.

Notice when a strategy starts to sound like the scarcity version of Facebook: "We need to own social networking before somebody else does." The abundance version: "There's plenty of value to create. We don't need to capture all of it."

When winning feels like it has to come at a competitor's expense, ask what the collaborative version would look like. You having more doesn't require someone else to have less. It's a positive-sum game.

Listen for stories of scarcity, which aren't facts, like "The market is too competitive."

What Would You Build?

So imagine your own company built from a beautiful inner state of love, abundance and security.

We know you can build a big company from fear, lack and stress. But let's raise the bar and build the kind of company where making people's lives better is what makes it great.

People often wonder if it's really possible to build a multi-billion dollar company from a place of love and presence. I believe that the answer is a resounding yes.

What often gets in the way is the need to prove something. In my experience, the most common form of motivation in Silicon Valley is an intense desire to prove one's worth. But you can never have enough success to prove you're worthy, because you were never unworthy in the first place.

And when you have nothing left to prove, you're free to build from abundance.

So the question I'd like to invite you to consider is:

What would you build if you had absolutely nothing to prove?

With love,

Dave Kashen

P.S. When you imagine your company built from love, abundance and security, what's one thing you'd change? Hit reply and let me know.

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