Why Is Zero to One Harder Than Scaling?

Jesse Zhang says the zero-to-one phase is by far the hardest stage of a company, and he calls it awful. Every stage has challenges, and none of the later ones match the early stretch.

The work does not feel different from one day to the next, the way getting taller does not announce itself on a single morning. The feeling changes once, when a company leaves the idea maze and starts scaling. After zero to one, the tasks are different and the general feeling stays about the same. A fast-growing company is still not easy every day, and he treats the pace as the work they wanted. At his last company he stayed in the first phase for maybe three years. He was about 20 and a new graduate, and the team worked hard on ideas that a little more thought would have shown were bad. The later stage is easier to appreciate because he already lived through a long first phase.