Acknowledgement: This post is obviously indebted to VGR's The Gervais Principle, in substance and form.

Disclaimer: The principal author of this piece is o3. I've wanted to write it for awhile, but have been completely underwater with Quotient, so I gave o3 an outline, research, style and tone requirements, and it gave me this article back.

The cheapest thing in business used to be talk. Now it’s execution. Servers rent by the minute, models autogenerate code, and a first draft of any interface falls from Figma like prefab housing. The scarce input is no longer capacity but conviction: the sense that this specific crew, out of all the crews on Earth, will out‑run entropy long enough to pay everyone back.

The market prices that conviction in stories. Revenue is optional; narrative is mandatory. No company illustrates the swap better than Netflix, which, in its annual report, vows only to “win moments of truth”—a KPI so vaporous a Jesuit could debate whether it exists. Because the target can’t be measured, almost any initiative qualifies as progress. Wrestling, Korean dystopia, Oscar bait, grey‑slush dating shows: each success proves breadth and each flop proves daring. Vagueness, done properly, is a license to maneuver.

That license has a patron saint: Lukas Matsson, the bleach‑blond deal shark who strafes the final season of Succession. Matsson’s streaming start‑up, GoJo, inflates its Indian subscriber count by millions. When caught, he shrugs; the joke is that even the fraud is a feature. Numbers, for Matsson, are mood boards. Keep five different versions alive and one will fit the next pitch deck. Ambiguity is not something to hide; it’s the raw material from which leverage is carved.

Call this the Mattheson Principle—after the character, not Sweden. In an economy where execution is standardized, the edge lies in maintaining narrative optionality: an ability to conjure mutually incompatible futures and keep investors, regulators, and employees guessing which one they have backed until it is too late to back out.

If Silicon Valley has a clergy, product managers wear the collar. Their sermons—the product brief, the quarterly roadmap—transform aspiration into budget. A PM declares that if Feature X exists, Segment Y will grow, which will unlock Metric Z. That metric, helpfully, is self‑invented. Slack had “magic moments,” Facebook pressed DAU/MAU, web3 exchanges bless any movement of tokens and call it volume. Invent KPI, hit KPI, raise on slope of KPI. The ice cream licks itself.

The old guard plays the game differently. Visa and Mastercard respond to every payments scare—digital wallets, DeFi, CBDCs—with solemn press releases about exploring blockchain synergies. A tiny pilot runs in Uruguay; the core rails remain exactly where they’ve been since the Carter era. The incumbents’ genius is minimal adaptation: nod gravely at the new thing, build a sandbox too small to threaten margins, and let the insurgents die of capital hemorrhage while your interchange fees keep compounding.

Palantir perfected a higher register of the same refrain. Bidding for military work in Afghanistan, it never promised zero bombs—only “patterns hiding in plain sight.” When an attack slipped through, the failure proved the Army needed more data; when one was caught, it validated the algorithm. Heads, the narrative wins; tails, the narrative wins bigger.

If ambiguity is power, why hasn’t Bloomberg vanished? The terminal is medieval in color palette, the price is non‑negotiable, and data accuracy is a religion enforced by fearsome ex‑reporters. Yet precisely because Bloomberg refuses narrative gymnastics, every narrative gymnast depends on it. Traders require numbers they trust not to shift when a marketing team gets nervous. Bloomberg wins by being the floor the rest of the circus lands on.

Rigidity, though, courts obsolescence. The Mattheson cycle kicks in: a mythmaker claws attention; attention converts to infrastructure; infrastructure ossifies; a fresh mythmaker feeds on the gap. Logan Roy owns broadcast towers but must sell to the streaming provocateur; Matsson will one day beg the next enfant terrible for relevance.

Great art survives by the same bargain. In a distracted mass market, the crowd buys comfort food. The visionary filmmaker therefore hustles patrons who guard their leisure like bullion or appeals to financiers who hope the movie billet will unlock some cooperative alpha. Art’s economic unit is no longer beauty; it is the story that beauty can command a premium.

Peel away the dashboards and you find that most “data‑driven” shops are writing their own yardsticks. That’s not a bug; it’s the business model. The winners draft definitions nobody else can audit, then chase the delta, banking belief at every checkpoint. The losers chase accuracy and discover it has almost no price support.

The lesson isn’t that truth is irrelevant. Truth arrives—late, expensive, and inclined to settle its tab. But before it walks through the door, someone has already set the exchange rate at which truth will trade for cash, head‑count, and public forgiveness. That person is the storyteller who convinced everyone to keep filling the punch bowl while the band played.

So the work today, whether you quarry code or crank words, is to master both halves: build something non‑trivial, yes, and narrate it with enough elastic swagger that capital mistakes possibility for destiny. Do that well and the crowd will repeat your thesis back to you until it sounds inevitable. Miss the beat and you will discover, abruptly, that execution is cheap for your competitors too.

The Mattheson Principle holds either way. Someone is going to write the legend before the facts march in. Best make sure the legend is yours.

Acknowledgement: This post is obviously indebted to VGR's The Gervais Principle, in substance and form.

Disclaimer: The principal author of this piece is o3. I've wanted to write it for awhile, but have been completely underwater with Quotient, so I gave o3 an outline, research, style and tone requirements, and it gave me this article back.

The cheapest thing in business used to be talk. Now it’s execution. Servers rent by the minute, models autogenerate code, and a first draft of any interface falls from Figma like prefab housing. The scarce input is no longer capacity but conviction: the sense that this specific crew, out of all the crews on Earth, will out‑run entropy long enough to pay everyone back.

The market prices that conviction in stories. Revenue is optional; narrative is mandatory. No company illustrates the swap better than Netflix, which, in its annual report, vows only to “win moments of truth”—a KPI so vaporous a Jesuit could debate whether it exists. Because the target can’t be measured, almost any initiative qualifies as progress. Wrestling, Korean dystopia, Oscar bait, grey‑slush dating shows: each success proves breadth and each flop proves daring. Vagueness, done properly, is a license to maneuver.

That license has a patron saint: Lukas Matsson, the bleach‑blond deal shark who strafes the final season of Succession. Matsson’s streaming start‑up, GoJo, inflates its Indian subscriber count by millions. When caught, he shrugs; the joke is that even the fraud is a feature. Numbers, for Matsson, are mood boards. Keep five different versions alive and one will fit the next pitch deck. Ambiguity is not something to hide; it’s the raw material from which leverage is carved.

Call this the Mattheson Principle—after the character, not Sweden. In an economy where execution is standardized, the edge lies in maintaining narrative optionality: an ability to conjure mutually incompatible futures and keep investors, regulators, and employees guessing which one they have backed until it is too late to back out.

If Silicon Valley has a clergy, product managers wear the collar. Their sermons—the product brief, the quarterly roadmap—transform aspiration into budget. A PM declares that if Feature X exists, Segment Y will grow, which will unlock Metric Z. That metric, helpfully, is self‑invented. Slack had “magic moments,” Facebook pressed DAU/MAU, web3 exchanges bless any movement of tokens and call it volume. Invent KPI, hit KPI, raise on slope of KPI. The ice cream licks itself.

The old guard plays the game differently. Visa and Mastercard respond to every payments scare—digital wallets, DeFi, CBDCs—with solemn press releases about exploring blockchain synergies. A tiny pilot runs in Uruguay; the core rails remain exactly where they’ve been since the Carter era. The incumbents’ genius is minimal adaptation: nod gravely at the new thing, build a sandbox too small to threaten margins, and let the insurgents die of capital hemorrhage while your interchange fees keep compounding.

Palantir perfected a higher register of the same refrain. Bidding for military work in Afghanistan, it never promised zero bombs—only “patterns hiding in plain sight.” When an attack slipped through, the failure proved the Army needed more data; when one was caught, it validated the algorithm. Heads, the narrative wins; tails, the narrative wins bigger.

If ambiguity is power, why hasn’t Bloomberg vanished? The terminal is medieval in color palette, the price is non‑negotiable, and data accuracy is a religion enforced by fearsome ex‑reporters. Yet precisely because Bloomberg refuses narrative gymnastics, every narrative gymnast depends on it. Traders require numbers they trust not to shift when a marketing team gets nervous. Bloomberg wins by being the floor the rest of the circus lands on.

Rigidity, though, courts obsolescence. The Mattheson cycle kicks in: a mythmaker claws attention; attention converts to infrastructure; infrastructure ossifies; a fresh mythmaker feeds on the gap. Logan Roy owns broadcast towers but must sell to the streaming provocateur; Matsson will one day beg the next enfant terrible for relevance.

Great art survives by the same bargain. In a distracted mass market, the crowd buys comfort food. The visionary filmmaker therefore hustles patrons who guard their leisure like bullion or appeals to financiers who hope the movie billet will unlock some cooperative alpha. Art’s economic unit is no longer beauty; it is the story that beauty can command a premium.

Peel away the dashboards and you find that most “data‑driven” shops are writing their own yardsticks. That’s not a bug; it’s the business model. The winners draft definitions nobody else can audit, then chase the delta, banking belief at every checkpoint. The losers chase accuracy and discover it has almost no price support.

The lesson isn’t that truth is irrelevant. Truth arrives—late, expensive, and inclined to settle its tab. But before it walks through the door, someone has already set the exchange rate at which truth will trade for cash, head‑count, and public forgiveness. That person is the storyteller who convinced everyone to keep filling the punch bowl while the band played.

So the work today, whether you quarry code or crank words, is to master both halves: build something non‑trivial, yes, and narrate it with enough elastic swagger that capital mistakes possibility for destiny. Do that well and the crowd will repeat your thesis back to you until it sounds inevitable. Miss the beat and you will discover, abruptly, that execution is cheap for your competitors too.

The Mattheson Principle holds either way. Someone is going to write the legend before the facts march in. Best make sure the legend is yours.