The most useful way to think about building a company might be the simplest one:
A company is just a patch.
Something in the world is broken. A workflow is painful. A process is slow. A tool is missing.
Most people work around it. Builders ship a fix.
The logic is identical to software:
| Software | Company |
|---|---|
| Find the bug | Spot the pain in the real world |
| Write a patch | Create the product or service |
| Test locally | Prototype with a small circle of users |
| Ship quietly | Bring it to market without fireworks |
| Observe feedback | Watch adoption, friction, failure |
| Iterate | Improve, refactor, rebuild if necessary |
There’s no need for myth-making around "vision" or "revolution".
Most great companies didn’t start as empires. They started as bug fixes.
A broken onboarding process became Stripe.
A slow payment interface became PayPal.
A messy internal note system became Notion.
Every one of them started as: "This shouldn’t be this painful."
So build the way you’d debug:
Trace. Understand. Patch. Iterate.
Ship when it works—not when it looks impressive.
Companies don’t need to start as movements.
They can start as commits.