my friend just left their $50M series A healthcare because they knew it wouldn’t scale.

the year is 2026. the only question that matters is for founders is: what scales.

O(N^2)

As a system grows, the number of connections between its nodes grows $O(N^2)$.

The best way to manage this scale is through protocols.

Instead of having to understand every other node, they only need to understand a shard interface.

e.g.
the internet : TCP/IP
biology : DNA/RNA
shipping : shipping containers

superlinear scale

systems either scale sublinearly, linearly, or superlinearly.

for example, animals scale at $O(N^{3/4})$ because volume scales faster than surface area (skin). bad companies scale like animals.

for example, cities scale superlinearly $O(N^{1.15})$ - walking speed increases by 15% per capita. so does innovation and wealth creation.

scaling requires platform/ecosystem where nodes interact freely, instead of command-and-control (which bottlenecks)

Most objects are rivalrous, meaning they can’t occupy the same space simultaneously.

Non-rivalrous goods include algorithms, information, media and brand.

anti-fragile goods are even better; they get better the more they are consumed. E.g. language, open-source codebases or money.

A system that needs a new architecture at 10, 100 and 10,000 will never scale.

systems that are self-similar do scale. The structure of $n=1$ is identical to $n=10,000$

e.g.

Figure out what scales.