How Great Companies Pull Ahead: 3 Multipliers Every Founder Needs

Every founder wants to believe the distance between where they are and their toughest competition can be closed with the right system, mindset, or tools. That somewhere out there is a framework or philosophy that makes the grind a little smoother. That working smarter can stand in for working more.

I get it. I’ve been there.

These days, everyone’s constantly looking for hacks. Simple solutions that promise to close gaps without asking more of us. But in the real world of company-building, it’s rarely a clever tactic that makes the difference. It’s almost always something deeper and harder to replicate.

In the early days of building, running, and scaling a company, the path forward feels wide open. You hustle, you iterate, and you assume that sheer force of will can carry you the rest of the way. And sometimes, it does for a while.

But then you look up and realize other teams are pulling ahead. And it’s not because they discovered a secret playbook. It’s because they’re operating on different physics entirely.  They’re compounding. And they started earlier, with a steeper curve.

Here's the honest truth: If another company has more cognitive horsepower, more time invested, and more internal drive, you don’t catch them. You simply watch them disappear.

But the good news is you don’t have to match them to build something great. You just need to understand the dynamics at play. So let’s talk about what multipliers fuel that kind of trajectory and what it takes to really build a company that endures.

Why Some Founders Pull Away

The fact is, some founders pull ahead of the pack. They build stronger, learn faster, and move through cycles with a momentum that feels hard to match. It's not magic. It's mechanics.

So what's really driving that kind of growth?

The founders who break away are operating with three core multipliers:

1. Slope: Slope is your intelligence. Founders with higher IQs are able to process complexity more quickly, spot patterns others miss, and make better decisions with fewer iterations. You don’t need to be the smartest person in the room (in fact, it's awesome if you’re surrounded by even sharper colleagues), but you don’t want to be out of your league.
2. Speed: Speed is all about the hours you put in and how much you can churn out during that time. Forty hours may keep you in the game, but eighty hours doubles your cycles, your feedback, and your results. Over time, those extra hours separate you from your competitors.
3. Obsession: This is what fuels the first two. Obsession keeps you engaged when the initial dopamine fades. It helps you push past good-enough. And when it’s shared throughout your team, when you surround yourself with people who care as much about winning the game as you do, it becomes a part of the culture.

When one or more of these multipliers is missing, it’s like dragging weight up a hill. And once you're behind, there's no easy way to close the gap. But if you can manage to stack these three, you’ll move forward at a rate that’s hard for others to catch up to.

Unfortunately, you can’t force other people to care as much as you do. But you can choose to work with people who don’t need convincing. You can make fewer compromises about cadence and clarity. You can be honest about what your business needs and whether you're actually meeting those demands. You can hold a higher bar, for yourself and your people.

And that’s what sets enduring companies apart: When founders have teams that bring their own slope, speed, and obsession to the table right alongside them.

What You Can't Fake

Now for the hard part. There are some things you just can’t fake. Not every variable is one we can control. And slope (our raw intelligence) is one of them.

We’ve all heard variations of the sayings “grit beats talent,” “effort levels the playing field,” and “anyone can be anything with enough drive.” But if you’ve spent any time watching how companies actually scale (or don’t), you know it’s not that simple. Intelligence isn’t everything, but it does set the slope of the curve. It determines how steep your learning becomes, how well you absorb feedback, and how quickly you can adapt when the game changes.

If your slope is lower, you’re going to work harder for less growth. That’s not pessimism, it’s just math.

But that doesn’t mean you can’t build something meaningful.

You just need to be brutally honest about what kind of company you want to build and what kind of founder you actually are. The real danger is in pretending slope doesn’t matter because that’s when you start wasting time chasing outcomes that were never aligned with your strengths in the first place.

The sooner you get clear on your slope, the sooner you can build around it. That might mean partnering with sharper minds. That might mean narrowing your focus. But it always means facing reality and using it to your advantage.

Where You Still Have Leverage

You don’t get to pick your slope, but you do get to choose how you work.

You decide how many hours you’re willing to put in. You decide what you care enough about to stay obsessed with. You decide who you surround yourself with, how you structure your week, and what you say yes to.

That’s where leverage lives.

Even though you can’t change your raw processing power, you can absolutely out-cycle, out-focus, and outlast your peers. How? It all comes down to more meaningful reps. Getting clearer faster, not because you’re smarter, but because you stayed later and ran through more iterations.

You also get to decide who you’re going to bring onboard. By choosing people who bring slope, speed, and obsession, you can design a team that not only plays the game, they win it.

But don’t focus on slope or speed alone when designing your team. We get into trouble when we try to compensate for one weak multiplier and ignore the others. They aren’t substitutes for one another, and each one is important. Tools like Ninety make finding the balance easier by giving you the visibility, rhythm, and shared accountability to reinforce slope, speed, and obsession throughout your team.

So stack what you can. Be honest about what you can’t. And don’t fall for the lie that effort alone makes up the gap. Real leverage comes from combining your strengths with deliberate choices. You still get to decide how fast and how far you go.

Play the Game You Can Win

The goal isn’t to become someone you’re not. It’s to understand the game you’re playing and make sure it’s one you can actually win.

Not every founder is going to build a billion-dollar company. Not everyone should. But every one of us can build something meaningful, something enduring, if we’re clear about our slope, speed, and obsession.

This is where we all have to make decisions. I’ve seen too many founders set their sights on a path that doesn’t match who they are or what they’re willing to commit. They hire teams that don’t share their pace or priorities, hoping process or culture will close the gap. But they rarely do.

When you understand your multipliers and design around them, you move with more intention and make real progress faster. And that's when you start to pull ahead of your competitors.

Despite what you may read or hear, there aren’t hacks to win a game like this. You simply need to know what you’re working with. Then, you can design around your strengths by making better choices about where you spend time and who you rely on.

You can’t fake your way to the top. You can only earn it.