About 50Folds
Startup takes an incredible force of will to drag your idea kicking and screaming into something that works, and then years more to scale it to the point you can live comfortably or sell your company. The thing is, you overestimate what you can achieve in the short term and underestimate what you can achieve in the long term. And boy I believe you can achieve amazing things!
searching
Startup is the Same
What I always found funny was that 80% of startups are exactly the same for everyone. You just keep doing the same things repeatedly in steps, following well-trod steps, and with luck, you are in the promised land.
You don’t start doing customer success, you start building a product.
When you have customers, you need to do customer care. You need to build ops, scale marketing, decide on expansion options, and then whether to acquire companies.
All this felt like steps to me, and founders needed different kinds of help at each step of the way.
Discovery
Finding the Name
When I started a venture builder to help startups, I wanted to come up with something emotive that would reflect the amount of effort and toil that went into building a startup, but also the incredible things that founders can achieve too.
Since I was working on figuring out how to build multiple startups at once, the sequences and steps mattered. I was studying math and went down a rabbit hole and learned something interesting that was a eureka moment!
How many times would you have to fold a piece of paper in half for it to reach the sun? It turns out it is 50 times. 50 folds or 50 steps and you are at the sun- wow, right?
I read a lot of books and ironically was reading a book called The Tipping Point, and there was a passage that explained this well. It cemented it for me.
I checked WHOIS and found that the name was available! I bought it, and 50Folds was born.
I give you a large piece of paper, and I ask you to fold it over again, and then again, and again, until you have refolded the original paper 50 times. How tall do you think the final stack is going to be? …the real answer is that the height of the stack would approximate the distance to the sun
Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point
meaning
Why
I’ve always valued setting almost unattainable goals since I was a kid. The main one I had as a child was to be a banker.
I’m not the brightest, and you need great grades to get into that line of work, so I made myself accountable to my goals and not to those around me. My logic was that I was going to work for more because even if I didn’t achieve that goal, what I would achieve would be a lot more than if I didn’t have average aspirations.
To you as a founder, this means I want you to aspire to reach the sun, but hey, if you fail and only hit the moon, that’s still flaring awesome right? 50 folds and 50 steps to achieve more than you ever could have believed.
Math
Let’s Do Some Math to Understand 50 Folds of Paper
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Let’s not get too scientific on the thickness of the paper. Let’s assume it is 0.1 mm thick.
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The core principle is the power of exponential growth (Which is why a scalable startup is so key). Each time you fold it in half, you are doubling the thickness. 1 becomes 2, 2 becomes 4, 8, 16, 32 and so on.
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At 9 folds, the folded paper would be thicker than a printer ream of 500 sheets. At 10 folds, there are 1024 layers of paper. At 20 folds, it is more than 10 kilometres high, which surpasses Mt. Everest. If you keep going, you’ll be in outer space after 24 folds, you could catch the Hubble Space telescope after 28, and after 41 folds, you’d finally be closer to the Moon than the Earth.
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After 42, you have passed the moon. Only 8 more folds get us to 50 which is 1,125,899,906,842,624 folds, or over a quadrillion layers.
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At our 0.1mm width that multiples to 112,589,990,684,262.4 mm or 112,589,990 km. The distance to the sun (on average) is close to 150,000,000 km.
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94 folds get you to the size of the entire visible Universe if you really want to set your goals high!
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Typically, the max you can fold one sheet of A4 printer paper is 7x. In 2001, high school student Britney managed to fold speciality toilet paper that was 1.2 kilometres in length 12 times. She first succeeded using thin gold foil and alternate directions of folding. She was beaten by some students who hit 13x, but they Sellotape the bog roll, so some don’t think that counts. Nerds.
What Does 50Folds Mean to You?
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Set big, hairy, audacious goals for yourself and work to achieve them
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Set OKRs with your team to help them seek to achieve more
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Work with me to make this happen
Book a Call With Me
Let’s work together.
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