Organizations Are Verbs
There’s a grammatical violence we commit every time we talk about startups (or organizations in general) as things. “My company has three employees.” “The organization needs to pivot.” “We’re building a unicorn.” Subject-verb-object, as if the startup were a discrete entity that could possess attributes, occupy space, make decisions.
But every founder I talk to knows, viscerally, that this isn’t true. They know their startup isn’t a thing that exists independently and then does things. It’s more like a continuous accomplishment, an ongoing negotiation, something that has to be remade every day through conversation and coordination and a thousand tiny acts of relational maintenance.
Weick said it in 1979, almost casually: “If you look for an organization you won’t find it.” What you’ll find instead are events linked together, sequences of interactions that we erroneously make into substances. We treat organizations like nouns when they’re actually verbs.
This matters more than it sounds like it should.
From Substantialist to Relational
Most startup advice is based on what philosophers call a “substantialist ontology”, which is the assumption that entities exist first, as bounded units, and then enter into relationships. A substantialist view of a startup understands that it is an entity that can have resources, capabilities, and positions. The startup is the subject that acts.
But relational ontology inverts this: relationships aren’t something that entities have, they’re the fundamental process from which entities emerge. Your startup doesn’t exist and then build relationships, it comes into being through the relationships.
This isn’t semantic wordplay. It changes everything about what we think affects performance.
What Dies When Startups Die
Startup advice also loves to focus on having a strong technical team, raising adequate funding, working on a quality product, and validating the market need. But if you are part of a startup ecosystem, I bet you've seen a startup that seemed to have it all and still failed.
Maybe what happened is that the founders stopped being able to talk to each other. Not necessarily in a dramatic way, with shouting matches or betrayals, just a slow divergence in how they interpreted the same reality. They started working in different directions without even realizing it, and by the time they noticed it, the confusion, disagreements and lack of direction had metastasized to the team, to investors, to mentors, to clients.
What failed wasn’t the product or the market, what failed was the organizing - the continuous relational work that made them be a company. When that fundamental foundation gave way, there was nothing left to fail, just people, suddenly separate, wondering what had bound them together in the first place.
From a substantialist view, this looks like dysfunction that killed an otherwise viable company. From a relational view, this is what company death looks like: the dissolution of the relational processes that constituted organizational existence.
The Startup as Ongoing Accomplishment
So what does it mean to treat your startup as a verb instead of a noun?
It means realizing it’s not a thing, but an act, a collective work of becoming-with. It means understanding that relationships and relational work are what enable the startup to exist, so the quality of these relations should be your priority.
For your daily practice, it means understanding that “shared vision” isn’t something you create once in a founding document. It’s something you accomplish and re-accomplish through repeated acts of collective sensemaking. Every time you and your cofounder interpret an ambiguous customer signal together, you’re not just sharing information, you’re performing the startup into being.
It means noticing that coordination is how the team exists at all. Those morning meetings where everyone realigns on priorities are not just about maintaining the organization, it's in fact making the organization. Stop doing it and watch how quickly the entity dissolves into individuals pursuing adjacent but incompatible goals.
It means recognizing that when an investor commits capital, they’re not just funding an existing entity, they’re integrated into the relational process through which that entity continues to exist. The founder-investor relationship doesn’t support the company, it partially constitutes the company.
The Strange Ontology of What We Build
Converting an organization into organizing is scary and clarifying. Before, you thought you were building a successful product, now you know you are in the business of building relationships (and little more than that).
Why do some teams with minimal resources create extraordinary things while well-funded teams with stellar credentials fall apart? Because organizing capacity isn’t about what you possess, it’s about what you accomplish relationally.
Why does losing a cofounder often kill the startup even when they weren’t the technical lead or the customer-facing person? Because they were part of the relational substrate through which organizing happened. Remove them and the remaining founders aren’t just doing the same work with fewer people, they’re attempting to perform a different organizational configuration, and often can’t.
Why do “acqui-hires” so often destroy the thing that made the team valuable? Because you can transfer people and IP, but you can’t transfer relational organizing. The capabilities weren’t possessed by individuals, they emerged from specific patterns of interaction that won’t reproduce in the new context.
Living in Process
I wonder sometimes if founders would make different choices if they really internalized this, if they understood their startup not as a thing they’re building but as an ongoing relational accomplishment they’re performing.
Maybe they’d pay more attention to the quality of their daily interactions, knowing these aren’t incidental to “real work”, they are the work of bringing the organization into existence. Maybe they’d invest differently in practices that sustain relational coherence, understanding these aren’t soft skills but ontological necessities.
Maybe they’d be more honest about when organizing is failing, instead of throwing resources at an entity that has already stopped existing in any meaningful sense.
Or maybe they’d just feel less alone in the peculiar experience of pouring themselves into something that only exists insofar as they keep pouring themselves into it. Something that is always becoming, never settled, sustained only through continuous relational work.
Organizations are verbs. We are always organizing. The company is what we do together, and it lasts exactly as long as we keep doing it.
What changes when you stop pretending otherwise?
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