Two weeks ago, we organized the fourth iteration of the Founders Circle.

Every iteration usually brings a couple great ideas. With enough effort, some of these ideas can actually achieve solid traction. But most others have the blessing of having to learn and improve more.

And now that I think about it, Founders Circle is a perfect reflection of the Uzbek startup ecosystem right now. It is raw. It is honest. And still figuring out what it wants to be.

And I mean raw in the best possible sense.

Earlier this year, I got to know more about Richard Hamming through his book "The Art of Doing Science and Engineering." Richard spent 30 years in Bell Labs observing brilliant minds fail to produce brilliant work. [1]

The diagnosis Richard reached had nothing to do with intelligence itself.

Courage. Courage to choose problems heavy enough to matter. That's the diagnosis.

Most people in the industry actually know which problems those are. But then they look away. They find something they can manage with ease and call it pragmatism.

Uzbekistan has not yet mastered this particular kind of reflex. (Maybe because we yet lack people who actually know which problems to solve. That's unlikely. But, that, I don't know.)

As they scale, ecosystems (particularly in innovation) start having this gravitational pull towards repetition.

Silicon Valley built the internet. A huge breakthrough for its time. Everything was happening just too fast. People expected crazier scale of inventions to pop out in the next years.

But nothing particularly new happened. They spent the better part of fifteen years engineering increasingly sophisticated ways to sell advertisements. The Dot-Com Bubble had eventually popped. We then plateaued.

Maybe we are entering something similar now. The LLM breakthrough was generational. But are we, again, mostly engineering better ways to monetize attention? (Sam?). The cycle of innovation seems periodic.[2]

That is Silicon Valley. Here, things can go differently, if we actually want them to.

In Uzbekistan, what we are still assembling is the infrastructure of belief. We need (and we actually already have) a small number of people who decide to behave as though the ceiling was already gone, before any evidence suggested it was.

Founders Circle exists to accelerate that decision.

The ideas from our sessions are uneven, sometimes rough, occasionally brilliant in ways their founders had not fully caught yet.

Hamming believed the subconscious of a great scientist needed to be given the right problems and then left alone. What accumulates over four iterations is harder to name than that, but I hope it rhymes with the same idea.

Raw intelligence is the thing experience slowly spends.

Uzbekistan has it in abundance. What happens to it from here is, genuinely, an open question.

[1] Bell Labs, by any measure, is the most productive research institution in the history of technology. It was essentially a closed environment where some of the sharpest people alive were given resources, proximity to each other, and enough freedom to work on whatever they found important. Hamming was inside that environment for decades.

[2] It is actually periodic according to Thomas Kuhn and his book "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions." I had read it earlier, but I might need to visit my notes.