Elegance

I asked a tech founder what makes him happiest about building his company.

He paused for a moment. Thought about it. Then smiled. "Solving complex problems with elegant solutions."

Not revenue milestones. Not user growth. Not even the thrill of closing a big deal. Elegant solutions.

And yet. Most founders I meet are obsessed with complexity. More features. More integrations. More options. They think sophistication means complication.

Wrong mindset entirely.

The best founders I speak with don't just solve problems. They're obsessed with elegant solutions. They spend weeks reducing a ten-step process to three steps. They throw away months of work if they find a simpler approach.

They understand that elegance isn't about making things pretty. It's about making complex things feel effortless.

Ask any user about their favorite products. They'll describe them as "intuitive" or "just works" or "I don't even think about it." That's elegance in action. That's complexity hidden behind simplicity.

I know a founder who rebuilt her entire onboarding flow because new users had to click through seven screens. She spent three months getting it down to two screens that accomplished the same thing. Revenue per new user went up 40%.

Another founder I know spent six months perfecting a single algorithm. His team thought he was overthinking it. But that algorithm now processes millions of transactions with zero human intervention. What used to require a team of analysts now happens automatically.

Here's what elegant solutions create that brute-force solutions never do. They scale effortlessly. They're easier to maintain. They create better user experiences. They're harder for competitors to replicate because the elegance itself becomes a competitive moat.

But elegance requires discipline. It means saying no to features that would make the product more complicated. It means iterating until you find the solution that feels obvious in hindsight.

Most founders add complexity to solve problems. Elegant founders remove complexity while solving problems. They ask "how can we make this simpler?" not "how can we make this more powerful?"

The difference shows up everywhere. In their code. In their user interface. In their business model. In how they explain what they do at dinner parties.

Here's what I've learned watching category-defining companies get built. They don't just solve problems better than their competitors. They solve problems more elegantly than their competitors.

That elegance becomes their signature. It becomes what customers remember. It becomes what employees are proud to build. It becomes what investors bet on.

Here's to those who refuse to accept complex solutions to complex problems. Patient enough to keep iterating until they find the elegant approach. Smart enough to know that the best solutions feel like magic, even when they're solving the hardest problems.

Stay elegant!

This post was first published on my Substack publication. If you liked this post, consider subscribing to get more such posts in your inbox.