Natural moguls
In 2024, I skied US National Championships and then retired from freestyle mogul skiing. Despite what my friends and teammates consistently say, I wasn't that good. But mogul skiing did teach me a lot about building companies.
In mogul skiing, competitive courses are built for consistency. Sixty hard-packed moguls, each a few feet high, are placed 3.5 meters apart on a 28 degree slope, alternating in layout across four lanes for 250 meters. Two aerial jumps are set in between, each with a 30-degree takeoff angle, and a landing so fast that you have fractions of a second before you're back charging through a mogul field.
The result of these conditions is an extremely precise sport where rhythm is dictated upfront. You fly through 3-4 moguls a second, with a precise "left-right-left-right" in your head like a metronome, only interrupted by aforementioned jumps with aerial maneuvers involving twists and flips we call a "back double-full" or a "cork 10." A pure display of execution.
But when you're younger, you don't start on a course where falling means a torn ACL or broken lumbar vertebrae. You start on natural moguls, formed by the natural shape of the mountain, rocks, and other skiers that came before you. Every turn you make represents an active decision to commit to one path over another. Here, you learn to find a line through unpredictable terrain and navigate uncertainty. Nobody watches natural mogul skiing, but all great mogul skiers first learn here.
When you build a company, your growth stage is when the world starts paying attention. Customers, metrics, funding. Over and over, like a metronome. By the time you hear about a company, it often sounds like an overnight success, where everything went right from the get-go. Going from $10M in revenue to $100M to $1B, it looks like a competitive mogul course, pure execution.
But long before that, often not written about, you're learning in natural moguls. The small ways you accumulate advantage rarely show up in the story. Learning how to pick the right market, the right team, the right wedge, the right customers, the right product. You realize some distribution channels feel like pushing uphill, whereas others build upon themselves. Some features feel important, but never get used, while others, while seemingly small, seem to win hearts and minds.
You pay attention to what scales, and more importantly, what doesn't. You see where energy naturally compounds, and more importantly, where it dissipates. Every proverbial bump you successfully navigate gets you further and further down the hill.
Over time, patterns emerge. You begin to recognize where the good lines are, where energy flows naturally, where market dynamics begin to pull you ahead. More importantly, where they compound. You feel it in hiring: the team starts to attract people almost like a talent magnet. You feel it in customers: demand begins to outweigh how fast you can scale. You feel it in the product: every feature begins to reinforce your core, and shipping velocity compounds.
By the time a company looks like it's working, it often abstracts away the complexity of all those training runs, when there was no obvious path and no one watching.
But all this is downstream of something more fundamental: when you were navigating your mountain, learning how to choose a line worth skiing down in the first place.
Throughout my career, I've learned that it is equally as important to execute your 0->1 as it is to execute your 1->100. And while it may feel that all hypergrowth is an overnight success, every company has a past of finding their own lines.
Scaling a company is exciting. When everything flows and it's pure execution mode, things often feel rhythmic and easy. But there's also a delight in charting your path through the natural moguls. Because if it's not this mountain, there will always be another mountain. Most companies can be excellent at one or the other. Natural will be world-class at both.
