Energy Is the Startup Resource That Actually Matters

And no, I don’t mean your Series A.

Some wonderful conversations lately about energy. That it connects all things… that it’s the origin of the universe… that matching frequency is how people find partners, close friends, and love. There’s a word that gets thrown around startup ecosystems like cocktails at a launch party – passion – when the word we should actually say is startup energy. I think we’ve been using the wrong word.

Passion is fleeting. It’s what you feel because you’re energized to fix or startup something, it’s the buzz at the pitch competition, the after-party, the aha moment in the shower. Energy is something different entirely. Energy is what gets the product shipped at 2am, what holds a founding team together through the first pivot, what makes an investor lean forward across the table. Passion is a feeling while energy is a force and connection.

And here’s the thing about forces: the physics of them are well understood. We’re just not applying the lessons to entrepreneurship.

The Invisible Forces Running Your Startup

At the turn of the 20th century, a Polish physicist named Marie Curie was doing work that most of her contemporaries didn’t believe was possible; two-time Nobel laureate, the first woman to win one, the only person in history to win the prize in two different sciences. She worked in a leaky shed with barely any funding, routinely dismissed by the academic establishment, her health slowly deteriorating from radioactive exposure she didn’t fully understand. And yet she pressed on.

Why? Because she had glimpsed something real.

“The invisible forces of nature are revealed through energy,” Curie said.

Think about that for a moment in the context of your startup. The invisible forces (market pull, timing, cultural momentum, founder conviction) these don’t show up in your pitch deck. They can’t be quantified in a spreadsheet. But every experienced investor will tell you they can feel them walking into a room. Curie was describing physics, but she could have been describing the difference between a startup that has it and one that doesn’t.

The energy in your venture, between cofounders, between the product and its users, between your team and the mission, is the invisible force that either pulls everything together or slowly tears it apart. You can’t fake it and you can’t buy it with runway. If you’re honest with yourself, you know immediately which one your startup has.

Match the Frequency, or Miss the Market

Most founders approach fundraising, recruiting, and go-to-market like they’re filling out a form. They optimize the slides from a template while polishing language with practice. They talk to some advisors to work out objection handling. And they wonder why it doesn’t connect.

Let’s talk about Albert Einstein (who needs no introduction, though his biography still surprises people), who spent the last 30 years of his life chasing a unified field theory, trying to reconcile the behavior of the very large with the behavior of the very small. He never quite got there (how very entrepreneurial of him). But along the way he articulated something that remains one of the most useful mental models for entrepreneurs:

“Everything is energy. Match the frequency of the reality you want.”

That is strategy.

What Einstein is describing is coherence; the frequency of your startup (how you show up, what you prioritize, the story you tell, the team you build, the users you serve) either matches the market reality you’re trying to inhabit, or it doesn’t. You can want to be a category-defining B2B SaaS company at the frequency of a lifestyle business. You can want enterprise customers while operating at the frequency of a feature shop. The signal you’re broadcasting and the reality you’re claiming to build are either in sync, or they’re noise.

Investors feel this mismatch before they can explain it. “Good founders, wrong market,” they say. You hear it all the time because I know you do, “talk to customers,” which is really just a soft no because they don’t believe you’ll get there. It’s, “great market, but I’m not sure about the team.” What they’re actually saying, in the vocabulary of physics, is: the frequency doesn’t match.

Before your next investor meeting, your next hire, your next product decision, ask yourself: What frequency am I operating at and does it match where I say I’m going?

Matter Is Energy, So Is Your Company

In 1900, Max Planck made a discovery that broke physics and then rebuilt it from scratch. He was trying to solve a relatively boring engineering problem (how to make lightbulbs more efficient) when he stumbled into the quantum world. Planck discovered that energy doesn’t flow continuously; it comes in discrete packets, quanta, each one indivisible.

The implications were so radical that Planck himself resisted them for years. He’d spent decades working within classical physics, and here was his own math telling him the universe didn’t work the way anyone thought. He eventually accepted it, won the Nobel Prize in 1918, and launched the era of quantum mechanics.

“Every form of matter is energy,” Planck said.

Entrepreneurs, think beyond metaphor.

Your company is not a concept. It is energy made tangible; the founders’ conviction crystallized into code, into product, and into culture. Every hire you make is an energy decision. Every partnership, every market you enter or exit, every investor you take money from. You’re not building a company; you’re building a field, and everything you pull into it takes on the frequency of what you’ve established at the center.

This is why culture is not a ping-pong table and free breakfast tacos. Culture is the energy of the founding team extended outward into every system and decision the company makes. And like Planck’s quanta, it comes in discrete packets; each decision either reinforces the field or degrades it. There is no neutral. Every hire, every pivot, every “we’ll let it slide this time” is a packet of energy added or subtracted from the whole.

The question isn’t whether your company has energy. It does. The question is whether you’re being intentional about what kind.

If You Want to Understand Your Startup, Think in Terms of Energy

Nikola Tesla is the patron saint of founders who were right too early. He invented alternating current (the electrical system that powers essentially everything on earth) and died broke, in a New York hotel room, with a company that no longer bore his name. Edison stole the spotlight; Westinghouse profited; Elon borrowed it; Tesla worked in the voltage of a reality that wouldn’t catch up to him in his lifetime.

But Tesla wasn’t bitter, he was obsessed with something bigger than credit or cash. He believed, at a foundational level, that the universe ran on principles most people hadn’t yet learned to perceive.

“If you want to understand the universe, think in terms of energy,” Tesla said.

Substitute “startup ecosystem” for “universe” and you have the best piece of advice anyone has ever given founders, and almost nobody is using it.

When you think in terms of energy, your model for evaluating everything changes. The right investor isn’t the one with the biggest check, it’s the one whose energy adds to the field rather than complicates it. The right market isn’t the biggest TAM, it’s the one where your energy matches the pull. The right team isn’t the most credentialed, it’s the one where the combined energy is greater than the sum of the parts.

Tesla built a wireless transmission tower in Wardenclyffe, New York, trying to transmit energy (and information) across the globe without wires, decades before the internet was a concept. He failed to finish it but the idea of it, distributed, wireless, and universally accessible, eventually became the world we live in. His energy outlasted his execution.

Your startup’s energy should outlast you too. The founders you are shapes the company you build, which shapes the ecosystem you contribute to, which shapes the next generation of founders. This is the actual mechanism of how startup ecosystems grow.

Startup Energy More Than Passion

You stop treating energy as a soft concept and start treating it as a management discipline.

Audit your energy inputs. Who do you spend time with? Every conversation is an energy exchange. The investors who drain you, the advisors who cloud your thinking, the cofounders you’re conflict-avoidant with, these are energy problems, not personality problems. Solve them accordingly.

Protect your resonant frequency. As a founder, you set the base frequency for your company. That means your practices, habits, focus, and emotional state are operational variables, not personal luxuries. The startup world’s obsession with hustle culture gets this exactly backward; it treats the founder as an endlessly renewable resource when in fact founder energy is the scarcest resource in any early-stage company.

Recognize coherence as competitive advantage. When your product, your team, your go-to-market, and your story all operate at the same frequency, something remarkable happens: people feel it, users evangelize without being asked, investors move faster, and talent recruits itself. This isn’t magic, it’s coherence, and it compounds.

Build for transmission, not just reception. Tesla wanted to transmit energy freely across the world. The best startups don’t just accumulate value; they transmit it. To users, to ecosystems, to the next generation of founders who will build on what you started. Think about the energy your startup puts out, not just what it takes in.

The Physics of Building Something That Matters

Curie’s invisible forces. Einstein’s frequencies. Planck’s quanta. Tesla’s transmission.

Four scientists who changed the world with four ways of thinking about energy that map, with precision, onto the challenges founders face every single day.

The startup community talks endlessly about metrics, capital, product-market fit, and growth curves. All of it matters but none of it matters as much as the energy at the center of what you’re building.

You already know whether your startup has it. You feel it (or you feel its absence) every morning when you open your laptop. The investors you most want will feel it too, usually in the first five minutes. The team members who become your best people felt it when they took the call.

The physics haven’t changed since Curie worked in her leaky shed, since Einstein scrawled equations on a blackboard in Bern, since Planck reluctantly concluded that the universe was made of discrete packets of energy, since Tesla stood in a field trying to transmit power through the air.

Energy is the thing. It always has been: Match the frequency. Build the field. Transmit.