Startup culture loves the 0 to 1 concept popularized by Peter Thiel. Global developments remind me of the more extreme opposite outcome — 20 to zero.
This morning’s news about the Taliban encircling Kabul will surely go down as one of the haunting failures of 21st century American foreign policy. As helicopters evacuate the embassy of the Afghan capital, an area that even our intelligence services said should be secure for at least 18 months just a month ago, comparisons with Saigon will be inevitable.
I was in high school when September 11th happened. I watched it live on TV like many others and shared in the collective grief and desire for revenge. But never could I have imagined we would spend 20 years and untold blood and treasure over those decades. Now we are on the verge of 20 years amounting to zero.
This is not a political statement or justification for what happened over the course of 4 US presidents or whether it was worth it. But progress was being made. Safe havens for terrorists were slowly eroded. Women were allowed to go to school and to work, and some of the vestiges of brutality so commonplace in Afghanistan over the decades were disappearing.
So how did all that get wiped out in just a matter of weeks? It’s often shocking to see something like this, but there’s probably a more universal lesson here.
It’s not just wars. Whether a project, company, or any other pursuit worth investing in, I always have to remind myself that it’s relatively easy to start. It’s harder to sustain and maintain. But in the end, it’s how we choose to end and exit something that determines whether it was all worth the trouble or not.
Or for that matter, worth anything at all.
