I've spent years watching the same thing happen. A founder shows me something genuinely brilliant — a new approach to data synchronization, a novel compute primitive, something that makes me lean forward — and then they show me how they're planning to ship it. And I can feel it before I can name it: the container doesn't fit the thing inside it. Not the technology. The technology is usually beautiful. The shape.
Shape is the negotiation between the product and the world that determines whether a genuine breakthrough reaches the right people or dies in a form nobody asked for. Who encounters it first. What it looks like when they do. The story it tells about itself — and what the market makes of that story. We sometimes call this packaging. That undersells it. Packaging implies a finished product placed into a box. Shape is the form a technology takes when it meets the world.
Venture has built real infrastructure on the demand side — introductions, networks, talent pipelines, customer access. But the supply side is almost entirely absent. The work of shaping what gets built and in what form — what to build first, for whom, in what container — doesn't have vocabulary. It doesn't have tools. Most of the time it doesn't even get named. It gets filed under “execution” and left to the founder to figure out along the way.
I think that's exactly backward. In frontier tech, shape is the load-bearing decision. It determines your adoption ceiling, your go-to-market motion, your expansion path. Get the shape wrong and nothing downstream works — not because the technology failed, but because the container didn't fit the thing inside it. And undoing a shape that's already been shipped, sold against, and built around is one of the most expensive things a startup can do.
In the work I do — pre-seed, the earliest stages — the shape problem goes deeper. The forms haven't been established. The technology doesn't know yet what it becomes when it meets the world. I'm in the space before the market exists, where the shape has to be found — not chosen, found.
And shape doesn't get figured out along the way. It gets negotiated. Continuously. The founder's vision presses against the technology's constraints. The first customers bend the product into something nobody planned. Capital reshapes what's possible. Communities place your product before you've finished your docs. The memes write themselves. The founder is one actor among many. The negotiation doesn't end.
I keep coming back to a question: what gets valuable when execution gets cheap? When ai can write the code, research the market, draft the positioning — when all of that compresses toward commodity — what's left?
I think it's judgment about shape. The ability to sit in the negotiation between what's possible and what's adoptable, and feel which form holds. I don't think you automate this. It's built through years of watching what works, what breaks, where the mismatches show up.
Better technology isn't enough. Frontier tech needs people who can do this work deliberately. Shape workers.
I've started calling this shape work. Not a framework — I think you've had enough of those. A discipline and a technique. An ongoing practice of attention to the forms a product takes, where they align, where they pull apart, and what to do when they collide.
Everyone does shape work. Every founder, every time you package your technology, choose a first customer, decide what to call the thing — you're shaping. You can't not shape. The question is whether you're doing it with your eyes open.
This series is my attempt to open them. I want to make the case for why shape is the load-bearing question in frontier tech. I'll name the shapes every product holds at once — imagined, founder, made, measured, felt, ruled, enacted — and show what happens when they collide. I want to show why the friction between them is where taste gets made. And what good shape work produces when it compounds.
I don't have it all figured out. But I think these questions are too important to leave unnamed. And working through them honestly, in public, is how I think best.