Entropy-neurship
“Life feeds on negative entropy.” — Erwin Schrödinger
Sorry to start so dramatically, but we are slowly decaying. This is what the 2nd law of thermodynamics is about: entropy. Simply explained, entropy the gradual decline into disorder. Hot coffee gets colder as heat dissipates across space. As default, the universe tend moves from order to disorder.
“Everything subject to origination is subject also to dissolution.” — The Buddha
An overwhelming majority of founders report experiencing anxiety, depression, or burnout in one form or another. Four times the rate of the general population. You’ve most likely been there if you’ve ever stared at the ceiling at 3am, wondering why building feels so much like dying. Creation is hard and it takes a mental toll on everyone.
Burnout is linked to chronic stress, prolonged cortisol spikes, and mental exhaustion. What if burnout was in fact caused by something even more fundamental: not grasping the laws of thermodynamics?
When it comes to chaos, do you believe your role is to reverse entropy? To fight it? To negate or neutralize it? Life itself is an act of entropy-reversion so it is tempting to view our roles as changing the very course of the universe by reversing entropy that would other be left unchecked.
Entrepreneurship is entropy-neurship. Anti-fragility is a core value of mine. Thriving on chaos, being pro-entropy, or gaining from disorder as Nassim Taleb puts it. This is definitely a powerful mindset to adopt for entrepreneurs.
But like most values, you can take it too far. Chaos is a paradox and so founders should understand the nuances of how to approach entropy, disorder and how to do so in a way that will not result in burnout—which is, in terms of thermodynamics, caused by you trying to swim against the tide of physics, causing you to deplete your stamina when you come in contact with entropy.
To sum up the scientific evidence in a single insight: The founder’s job isn’t to defeat entropy—it’s to channel it properly.
Entropy Reframed
In 1944, physicist Erwin Schrödinger asked: How does life exist when everything tends toward disorder? His answer: life doesn’t violate thermodynamics—it exploits it. Organisms import order (food, sunlight) and export disorder (heat, waste). The universe’s entropy still increases. Life just redirects where.
In 2013, MIT physicist Jeremy England took it further. His research suggests that matter naturally self-organizes to dissipate energy more efficiently. Life isn’t an accident—it’s thermodynamically inevitable. We exist not despite entropy, but because of it. We are the universe’s way of accelerating its own decay.
What does this mean for founders? Your startup is a dissipative structure. You both accelerate and reduce entropy, but the net is that you cause more entropy.
Think of Amazon: it absorbs massive energy (capital, talent, attention), transforms it (into logistics networks, cloud infrastructure, retail algorithms), and disperses it (as products, wages, warehouse labor, competitive pressure).
The order Jeff Bezos created—next-day delivery, cloud computing, the everything store—came at the cost of disorder elsewhere: Main Street retail upended, warehouse workers competing against robots, competitors bankrupted, disruption of infrastructure technologies.
Technology companies are disruptive, and disruption is definitely increasing entropy. Therefore the role of the founder is not to reverse but to channel entropic expansion to advance their mission. The question isn’t whether you’ll pay the thermodynamic cost. You do. The question is how you’ll pay it.
Unknowingly, most founders pay for it with their bodies. That’s why the majority of us feel anxious, depressed, and overwhelmed in one way or another. Handling entropy isn’t a sustainable activity and so you need to recharge your literal batteries like a phone once in a while.
The Founder’s Mind on Chaos
A 2025 study using fMRI brain imaging found that entrepreneurs’ brains literally value uncertainty differently. When shown gambles with unknown odds, entrepreneurs assessed ambiguous bets 16% above their expected value—while non-entrepreneurs discounted them. Same information, opposite valuation. The uncertainty that repels most people attracts founders.
It’s not just perception. It’s structure. The study found increased gray matter volume in the anterior insula—a region linked to risk perception and detecting risky situations—among experienced entrepreneurs. Their brains had physically adapted to processing chaos.
In 1997, Saras Sarasvathy at UVA’s Darden School discovered something unexpected while studying how expert entrepreneurs think. She gave 27 founders a 17-page problem set and recorded them thinking aloud. What she found upended conventional wisdom.
Non-entrepreneurs use causal reasoning: set a goal, gather information, predict outcomes, execute the plan. Entrepreneurs use what Sarasvathy called effectuation: start with what you have, limit downside, treat surprises as opportunities, co-create the future with partners. They don’t try to predict—they make prediction unnecessary.
The difference is profound. Causal thinkers ask: Given this goal, what resources do I need? Effectual thinkers ask: Given these resources, what goals become possible?
One approach fights uncertainty. The other makes friends with it.
Research on entrepreneurial cognition confirms founders process incomplete information differently. Robert Baron’s work on pattern recognition shows entrepreneurs “connect the dots” faster—seeing opportunity structures where others see noise. They’re not smarter. They’re wired to extract signal from chaos.
Even their neurology cooperates. Studies show entrepreneurs make decisions faster thanks to better hemispheric synergy—their left and right brain communicate more efficiently. They respond more quickly to stimuli and feel more in control under pressure.
Here’s the reframe: Founders aren’t people who absorb chaos. They’re people who see order in it that others can’t.
The high burnout rate makes more sense in that context. Founders do hard work, yes, but they’re also doing different - and taxing - cognitive work.. They’re constantly translating between the chaos they perceive as opportunity and the order everyone else needs to function. That translation is exhausting.
Complexity theorists have a term for where founders operate: the edge of chaos—the transition zone between order and disorder where innovation emerges. Too much order kills creativity. Too much chaos kills execution. Founders naturally live in the narrow band between.
Innovations rarely emerge from stable systems. They emerge from bounded instability—systems dancing at the edge. That’s where founders live. Not because they’re reckless. Because that’s where new futures get made.
Burnout as Entropic Waste
Walk into any founder gathering. Seven of eight people in that room are experiencing anxiety, depression, or burnout—
Entrepreneurs struggling with business failure show measurably elevated cortisol. Your body is literally paying the thermodynamic cost of the order you’re trying to create.
One finding offers hope: founders who set clear boundaries are three times less likely to experience severe burnout. Boundaries are entropy barriers. Without them, chaos floods into every domain of your life.
It might help to reframe those moments of burnout. You’re not weak. You’re paying the unavoidable cost of creating order in a universe that trends toward chaos. Rest is key to physically handle that chaos load, that entropy toll.
The Rigidity Paradox
“There is an immutable conflict at work in life and in business, a constant battle between peace and chaos. Neither can be mastered, but both can be influenced.” — Phil Knight, Shoe Dog
Too much entropic energy may cause you to burn out. The natural tendency for many is to increase structure, since structure is a way to transform disorder into order, isn’t it?
Yes and no. Success creates structure. Structure becomes rigidity. Rigidity kills.
The timeless pattern: You succeed → you invest in what worked → you build organizational structure around it → that structure resists change → you can’t adapt when the environment shifts → you die.
Company lifespans have collapsed from 67 years in the 1950s to a projected 15 years by the 2030s. Half of the Fortune 500 from 1999 had disappeared just ten years later.
Clayton Christensen built his career on the simple fact that “there is something about how decisions get made in successful organizations that sows the seeds of eventual failure.”
Consider Nokia and RIM. Both of them had the entire smartphone market to themselves before Apple came along. Both failed to recognize that software would matter more than hardware. The very strengths that made Nokia and RIM dominant—their hardware expertise, their carrier relationships—became the rigidities that prevented adaptation.
Nokia and RIM didn’t fail because they were stupid. They failed because they were successful. Their success created structure. Their structure became rigid. Their rigidity killed them. The entropic toll of success is real. The order you create can become the cage you die in.
Entropy Judo
The way to approach entropy is like a judo master uses the opponent’s mass and movement to throw them onto the mat. This is the concept of Wu Wei—”the art of effortless action” in practice.
“The river is not pushed from behind, nor pulled from ahead. It falls with gravity.” — Alan Watts
The river doesn’t fight the rock. It flows around it. And over time, it carves the canyon.
A startup example of this kind of judo move is what we commonly know as a “pivot”—a sharp turn in your product direction to avoid failure. Similar to a Tomoe-nage, executing a pivot needs you to channel the impending chaos and use its momentum to toss it on the mat.
Stewart Butterfield did the startup equivalent of this judo move twice. In 2002, he co-founded a company to build a multiplayer online game called Game Neverending. The game failed. They were running out of money. Apparently, as he was vomiting from the anxiety of impending bankruptcy (not all heroes wear capes), he had a realization that led to a masterful pivot.
While the main idea was tanking, a photo-sharing feature was actually working. So instead of fighting the dying game, he pivoted. That feature became Flickr. Yahoo acquired it.
Then he did it again. In 2009, Butterfield started another game company. The game Glitch launched in 2011, failed, and shut down in 2012. Worse this time: 15 consecutive failed pivots over 18 months. A tearful meeting where he laid off nearly his entire team.
But again, he noticed what was working. The internal chat tool they’d built was actually good. That tool became Slack. Salesforce bought it for $27.7 billion.
Two failed games. Two billion-dollar exits. The difference wasn’t luck—it was direction. Butterfield didn’t fight his failing games. He surfed the wreckage. He looked for and followed what was working instead of forcing what wasn’t.
I can’t wait for Stewart to start his next gaming startup.
Policies Prevent Adaptation
“We held a party to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the last time I made a decision.” — Ricardo Semler
Some founders don’t just accept entropy. They embrace it as an operating system.
In 1980, Ricardo Semler took over his father’s Brazilian manufacturing company at 21. Within days, he fired 75% of the senior executives. Then he started dismantling everything that looked like traditional management.
Semco has no job titles. No organizational chart. No headquarters. No written policies. Semler calls it “a policy of no policies.” Workers set their own schedules—not flexible schedules, their actual hours, chosen entirely by them.
Workers set their own salaries. Not suggested ranges. Their actual pay. The prediction was chaos. The reality: people generally paid themselves fairly, because they knew their colleagues would see the numbers.
Workers choose their managers. And they evaluate those managers publicly. If a manager consistently scores poorly, they’re out. Meetings are voluntary. If nobody shows up, the topic wasn’t important.
Semler himself became deliberately irrelevant. “We held a party to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the last time I made a decision.”
Semco grew from $35 million in 1990 to over $100 million by 1996. They achieved 27.5% annual growth for fourteen consecutive years.
Here’s what Semler understood: policies prevent adaptation. So Semler removed the structures that create entropy resistance. He let the system self-organize. He didn’t fight entropy—he removed everything that was fighting it.
The result: a company that adapts continuously, because nothing prevents adaptation.
The Path
While founders seem to have more tolerance and appetite for chaos and ambiguity than most, it is also important to understand that entropic resistance will cause physical damage leading to burnout, and entropic channeling requires rest and removing rigidity that prevents your adaptation.
Entropy is best approached from a place of harmony - to go along with it, not against it. Channelling entropy is not a sustainable act and it will leave your depleted - mentally, physically. This is thermodynamics and you can’t beat physics.
Entropy can be effectively channelled when best understood:
Ask given the situation or resources, what (news) goals become possible?
Are you channelling entropy toward a mission worth the cost?
Happy Sunday ✌🏻