The Snowball
How One Yes Compounds Into Everything
She had ignored four of my phone calls.
Rebeca was the best sports nutritionist in the country, and she knew it. She booked appointments nine months out and ran her athletes like a drill sergeant. One slip in the regimen and she would politely show you the door, for good. I did not have nine months. I had a marathon coming and a body carrying too much weight to run the time I wanted.
So I cold-called her. Once. Twice. Nothing. On the fifth ring of the fifth attempt, she finally picked up, audibly irritated.
I had ten seconds, so I did not sell myself. I sold the goal. I told her I wanted to run a 2:40 marathon. Silence. Then her tone shifted. “Be at my office tomorrow at seven AM.”
Here is what I missed at the time. It was not my résumé that moved her. It was the size of the mountain. The goal was the magnet. Rebeca got me leaner and faster. Those faster times caught the eye of a coach who only worked with elites. A better coach made me faster still, fast enough to earn a sponsorship. The sponsorship opened doors to better training camps, and better camps made me faster again. Each gain made the next one easier to attract.
One audacious goal. One yes. And that is how the snowball began to roll.
When it gets real
In a recent interview, Marc Andreessen gave a crisp explanation of the snowball effect.
“You’re either a snowball rolling down the hill, picking up resources, scale, power, credibility as you go, or you’re a snowflake stuck at the top of the hill, not going anywhere.” Marc Andreessen
Marc Andreessen argues that a startup wins by getting into a loop where it keeps accumulating the resources it needs to succeed: strong executives and engineers, future financing, customers, revenue, brand momentum, and public credibility. Either you become a snowball rolling downhill, gathering size, scale, and power as you go, or you stay a snowflake stuck at the top, going nowhere. The whole game is figuring out how to start that accumulation.
Economists call this preferential attachment, or cumulative advantage: the rich get richer, the idea the Bible’s Parable of the Talents captures as “to everyone who has, more will be given.” It is what drives the power law in startup outcomes, and your job as a founder is to get your company to the point where the next resource you need attaches to you rather than someone else. A top-tier investor speeds that up by acting as a “bridge loan of credibility,” lending the personnel, money, and brand a young company has not yet earned but needs to get rolling.
You can see this clearly happening in AI right now. As Anthropic leaves every other frontier lab in the dust, all the best researchers gravitate towards it.
Only in the last few weeks, Andrej Karpathy, the brilliant co-founder of OpenAI and John Jumper, who shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry working for Google DeepMind, both left Open AI and Google, join the Anthropic ranks.
Worth your time
If you want the playbook for getting the snowball moving, read The Cold Start Problem by Andrew Chen of Andreessen Horowitz. It is the clearest book on why momentum decides everything early on, how products, networks, and careers stay frozen until they hit a tipping point, and exactly what it takes to shove them over it. The hardest part is always the first roll downhill.
Final thoughts
Momentum looks like luck from the outside. It is not. The snowball never starts big. It starts with something, sometimes a single decision bold enough to make the first resource, the first person, the first yes attach itself to you. After that, each win recruits the next.
Thanks for reading.
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