I recently reflected on what separates the most effective founders from the rest—and one conclusion I reached is that exceptional founders learn to engineer “10× moves” again and again.
What do I mean by a “10× move”? It isn’t literally about multiplying any metric by ten every time. Rather, it’s a mindset of probing deeply for opportunities to improve something not by 10% or even 2×, but by an entire order of magnitude. You force yourself to ask: “What’s holding us back? And if that constraint didn’t exist, how could we explode this metric tenfold?”
This reminds me of what I hear from founders who’ve been through Y Combinator. If you show up to office hours aiming to recruit 100 new users this week, the partner will lean forward and ask, “Why not 1,000?” That simple challenge exposes invisible bottlenecks—manual processes, marketing channels you haven’t tried, product hooks you haven’t optimized—and compels you to dismantle them so you can scale in leaps, not steps.
So the real work of a high‑velocity founder isn’t just execution—it’s relentless constraint analysis. First, you pause to identify the current limiting factors in whatever you care about most: user growth, engagement, revenue, whatever it is. Second, you imagine what an order‑of‑magnitude improvement would look like if those constraints vanished. Finally, you marshal every resource and ounce of creativity to make that exponential jump a reality.
If you’re building something, carve out time each week to zoom out and ask yourself: “Given where we are now, what’s the best 10× move we could make this week?” Over time, that discipline of aiming for exponential, rather than incremental, progress becomes the hallmark of truly exceptional founders.