Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about momentum, what it actually is, and whether you can engineer it as a founder.

Momentum is a founder’s best friend.

When you have it, everything feels easier than it should be. Customers close faster, fundraising conversations warm up, and great people want to work with you. But when you don’t have it, the opposite is also true: everything feels heavier than it should.

No one wants to get behind a slog.

One thing I’ve come to realize is that momentum is a founder’s responsibility. But more importantly, you shouldn’t just wait for it to appear; you have to create it. 

Momentum also has this funny side effect: it makes founders look better than they are. I like to think about it like two people pushing cars. One person is pushing a car that hasn’t started in 20 years. The other is pushing a car already moving at 10 mph. The second person will look way stronger, even if they aren’t. That’s momentum doing the work.

I’ll share some thoughts I’ve had in my head for a while now.

I’ve been asking myself: can momentum actually be engineered? Can you build it from nothing?

What I’ve noticed is that the hardest part is getting the engine to start. Cold engines are brutal. The first thing to accept is that it’s going to be hard, and results may not come fast, but one of the biggest momentum killers is stopping halfway and starting over.

It’s like working on an engine that hasn’t started in 10 years for one hour, giving up because it didn’t start, then coming back a year later to try again. You’re not “continuing”, you’re restarting. Same thing with pivot hell. Jumping from idea to idea is just switching between cold engines, barely turning each one over. Best case, you pick the car that’s been idle for eight years instead of ten. Either way, it’s still brutal work.

Looking back at how my YC batch ran, I see the attempt to engineer momentum.

Early on, in our group office hours, almost everyone missed their weekly goals when the batch started. Red check after red check. I think it was because cold engines are hard to start, and starting momentum is genuinely hard.

But once a company hit its first green check, it could almost keep the long streaks of green for the rest of the batch.

YC’s framework quietly teaches this. Every week, you set one goal. Not two. Just one. The idea is to lower the inertia you’re fighting. And if you don’t hit it, that goal doesn’t change; you keep working on it, even if it takes the full three months. 

No thrashing. No restarting. Just sustained force in one direction.

I tried looking at momentum through a physics lens, and it even made more sense.

It’s easier to push a 10-pound stone on a flat road than a 20-pound stone, if you apply the same force. One way to engineer momentum is to reduce the mass of what you’re pushing. Take something small, apply maximum force, and get it moving.

Once it’s moving, you can add weight, more features, more scope, more people, but only after there’s inertia.

This is why “pick a tiny niche” and “solve one problem really well” keeps showing up in startup advice, and it makes sense.

Lately, I’ve been thinking that maybe the real hack might be taking one massive goal and breaking it into tiny milestones, just so you can see progress over time.

I remember Blake talking about Boom during the XB-1 push, and the team was “burnt out”. What helped wasn’t a reset, but breaking the impossible goal into small weekly milestones they could actually hit and celebrate, small enough to fit people's gratification window.

Melanie from Canva shared something similar. When they had to rebuild the entire product and couldn’t ship features for almost two years, she used a board with little bath toys representing each part of the rewrite. Every week, people just talked about where their toy was.

Maybe when you hit a wall, momentum comes back by manufacturing the first tiny win, even if it feels almost stupid. Solve the smallest problem you can, then the next one.

It’s like basketball. When you’re down 10–0, you don’t try to win the game in one play. You stop the turnovers, take easy shots, and let momentum shift gradually.

I’ve also noticed how much momentum depends on storytelling.

Any single step, in isolation, rarely looks impressive. Momentum only shows up when you connect the dots from step one to step five. If you don’t tell that story, it can look like nothing is happening, and that perception alone can hurt you.

I think it might be.

During YC, having to stand in front of other founders and admit you missed your goal again was painful. Seeing others hit even bigger goals was both embarrassing and motivating. Their momentum made you want to find yours.

So yes, maybe momentum spreads. Or at least, the lack of it is impossible to hide.

I’m still not sure there’s a clean formula for engineering momentum. But I’m increasingly convinced of this: momentum isn’t an accident. It’s focus, force, and time applied without interruption.

I’m still thinking through all of this, and I’m sure I’m missing things. I’d genuinely love to hear how other founders think about momentum, whether you believe you can engineer it, or you’ve only ever stumbled into it by accident.