Sequoia's David Cahn argues that the best founders never think sequentially. Published February 11, 2026, the essay maps startup development onto chess: Opening (inception to early team), Midgame (post-product-market fit scaling), and Endgame (the infinite vision that justifies existence). Most founders fixate on whichever phase they are currently in. That fixation kills companies. A strong opening with no endgame story can't raise without traction. A compelling endgame with no midgame momentum produces deep tech's notorious valley of death. A startup that nails the opening risks hubris, mistaking early buzz for durable progress.
The essay's real value is in its specific diagnostics. Cahn identifies why certain startup archetypes are structurally biased toward one phase: a Stanford AI spinout coasts on the opening, a vertical SaaS company earns its advantage in the midgame, a defense or deep tech company lives or dies by endgame conviction. He uses Clay, nearly ten years old but still radiating early-days energy, as proof that opening-phase culture can be engineered to persist. RunwayML's open-source growth before Stable Diffusion made it famous is his example of midgame momentum appearing at the opening. Anduril gets cited for manufacturing inevitability early. Alex Wang at Scale AI and Crusoe's pivot from crypto miner to AI infrastructure builder illustrate founders who hold all three frames simultaneously under pressure.
The practical instruction is direct: apply all three lenses to every product decision, every hire, every investor pitch, regardless of where you are in the lifecycle. The framework is not new territory for chess or strategy writing, but Cahn's application to specific named companies and failure modes gives it operational weight. Read the full essay for the failure mode taxonomy, which is more precise than the summary here suggests.
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