On The Lindy Effect

2025.09.21

CXVIII

[Trad Bro; The Lindy Effect; Faster Horses; First Principles; Sales Research is Lindy; A Thoughtful Luddite]

Thesis: The best way to innovate is to solve ancient problems by any means necessary.

[Trad Bro]

There are two contradicting ideas that can be combined to change the world:

1. Tradition is in place for a reason

2. Challenge the status quo

On the surface, these two concepts seem like they couldn't be more opposed to one another than they are.

If you look a layer deeper, and consider the power of first principles thinking, you can see how taking them together might reveal more truth than either on it's own.

A better formulation might be: solve ancient problems by any means necessary.

I think it is where a lot of innovation comes from, and it’s certainly how we think of innovating & investing with BirdDog.

[The Lindy Effect]

The Lindy Effect is the theory that the longer some non organic thing has been around, the longer it is likely to be around:

As an example, you might say that the New Testament, which has been around in something approximating it's current formulation for maybe 1700 years, has a life expectancy of another 1700 years.

If this seems like a strange idea, I'd ask you to go into a bookstore and look around. When you do, do you think that it is more likely that 10 years from now, the copies of the Hunger Games & Harry Potter are still there, or that copies of a 6 month old teen fictions books are still there?

By virtue of something being around for a longer time, it has gotten through more natural filters that could otherwise "knock it out." People have had to keep buying & consuming Harry Potter content for the last 25 years for it to stay relevant. Continued consumption is not the default AT ALL. But, now that it has survived for so long, it's a lot more likely that Harry Potter will continue having staying power than it is that an arbitrary book that comes out tomorrow has that sort of staying power.

Based on the Lindy Effect, you might have the following preferences:

• Prefer copper water bottles to plastic

• Prefer older books to books that came out in the last year

• Prefer fruit to candy / processed sugar

• Prefer Lisp & C to Java Script & Python

• Prefer free range livestock to factory raised livestock, and factory raised livestock to lab grown meat

• Prefer wool & cotton & silk clothes to synthetics

• Prefer not getting sunburnt to wearing sunscreen

You don't actually need to know WHY wool might be better than polyester; if all else is equal, you just go with the older thing, because it has been tested and vetted by the generations of humans creeping back to the beginning of time.

Interestingly enough, a lot of 'Lindy' preferences come out as actually being pretty good--see the numerous studies on the problems with wearing & producing polyester materials, vs shaving a sheep once a year and owning the garment for the next 5 years.

While using the Lindy Effect is a very good way to avoid following fads and hype cycles, there are certainly limitations--are you going to get 'stuck in the past'?

[Faster Horses]

The IT Lady at my middleschool had a poster in her office that said something like this:

I was fond of our IT Lady. The sentiment here is one I really like--challenge the status quo (adhering to this heuristic plus attending a catholic school is the fastest way to get a 15 year old to read Christopher Hitchens and Nietzsche).

Challenging the status quo get's romanticized in the trope of the brilliant, aggressive founder creating something really powerful and cool and unique.

Think Elon Musk questioning every single regulation and rule and convention when creating SpaceX, or Steve Jobs pulling the iPhone out of thin air. Or, best of all, Henry Ford's iconic horse quote:

In mathematical terms, you might say that making a horse faster would be trying to optimize or improve a local maximum--you have something that is 'good enough' for now, horses, and you're trying to make it better. Really, though, there are much greater gains to be had by thinking outside of the box and jumping from horses to cars.

On the surface, this seems to be in direct odds with defaulting to selecting more Lindy things. If you as a default prefer the thing that's been around forever, sure, you might avoid some hype traps, but how will you ever innovate like this?

I think the two are actually compatible. Assuming you take a step back and optimize for something that people have always wanted, like speed, you can get out of the faster horse trap pretty easily.

[First Principles]

First Principles Thinking is a through line that connects both the Lindy Effect & Challenging the Status Quo.

The idea here is to start with some subset of rules or facts that you know are real and true and don't expect them to change on a meaningful time scale, and then to make decisions that are congruent with these rules.

Go back to the Henry Ford example. The idea of the car is a massive challenge to the status quo, the horse. However, if you think in terms of first principles, it's actually very inline with a concept that predated human's use of horses, and really explains why we would ever even domesticate horses to begin with: all things considered, we would prefer to travel further faster with less energy. (see: the wheel)

When you put it like that, while a car is not in itself as Lindy as horses (which are still around, by the way), it is congruent with an incredibly Lindy principle.

I could be playing word games at this point, but I really do believe that taking a step back and getting closer to the root of why we want something can help you take advantage of the Lindy Effect while also still putting yourself in a position to innovate.

One major advantage of this world view is that it helps you avoid hype traps.

A lot of people who want to be like Steve Jobs or Elon Musk immediately jump on the use of new technology because they think it makes them innovative or clever or something. They'll throw around that Henry Ford quote and wear black turtle necks.

Really, though, it's never actually been about using new things for the sake of using new things. It's about solving a timeless problem for some subset of people better than anyone else is right now. If you happen to use new technology to do this, good for you, but that really isn't the point.

[Sales Research is Lindy]

BirdDog is built with a very crude principle in mind: the right information can help sellers book more business. This is Lindy, in that it's been true for as long as trade has been taking place.

If I was an ancient Greek olive merchant, I would pay a lot for some oracle to tell me which regions had the worst olive yield that year. Then, I could go and sell my olives there for more than I could in a place that had a surplus of olives.

Now, it's finally actually possible to do something of this sort at scale by taking advantage of the availability of digital information and the viability of processing that information efficiently with modern computers and software.

While this sounds very obvious, not many people are focusing so myopically on the research function for sales teams. There are a number of other local maxima market pressures push firms to.

As an example, a more obvious thing to optimize for in the current market is number of meetings booked with cold email. A lot of people do this and have great success. At some point, though, this does become a faster horse problem.

After all, sales people don't actually care about cold emails; they don't even care about the number of meetings they have. They care about revenue.

Our bet is that the right data is closer to revenue than email sending software is. The research we are providing is valuable in an email, on a phone call, via text, via carrier pigeon, at a bar, at a conference, at a dinner, at a lunch, in a boat, with a goat, in the rain, or on a train.

One of our clients attributed a 6 figure expansion opportunity to BirdDog after bringing up a data point at an in person sales meeting she already had scheduled.

Next week, one of our clients is going into a lunch with 9 executives that cost him $10K & a month of prep work to set up--he is using our research to help make sure he doesn't miss anything important as he preps for the 30 seconds he has to impress each of those execs.

Of course, there is overlap between this data and the data you can book a meeting via cold email with. However, if cold email was the only thing we cared about, we'd be investing our resources in a lot of other things rather than the data. The data would quickly be 'good enough' for that use case (it already is), and we'd be working on writing compelling sequences, setting up a/b testing, sending infrastructure, and a bunch of other stuff.

While that's a totally valid business model, we think focusing on a) the data and b) getting it to the sales person in the right way at the right time is a bigger and more Lindy opportunity that is more aligned with first principles thinking and avoids local maxima traps.

Thanks for reading; I’m here every week, if you enjoyed, please subscribe.

[A Thoughtful Luddite]

You can call me a luddite, and in some ways, I very well might be.

More generously, I think solving ancient problems by any means necessary is more important than biasing towards modern technology for the sake of modern technology.

Live Deeply,