Carl Sagan on beauty – Quote

I’m slightly obsessed with Carl Sagan. I was recently watching Cosmos again and heard this quote which made me think of startups and what we should be thinking about contextually:

“The beauty of a living thing is not the atoms that go into it, but the way those atoms are put together.”


This should remain top of mind with anything we start, build or do in a business sense. It’s why one startup is more successful than another even though they are trying to do the same thing. It says that the parts that combine to invent success are available to everyone, but what we do with these components is what actually matters.

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4 thoughts on “Carl Sagan on beauty – Quote

  1. What I like about this is that you seem to be able to grasp the fundamentals of a concept and relate it to business.

    It is indeed a thing of beauty. The ugly truth, on the other hand, is to realise that the combination of components, the way the atoms are put together will require a lot of trial and error on our part. We will have to try, and fail, and try again, and fail again, and times that by 20 before we find the right combination. And we do it anyway because we believe it is going to be worth it when it all comes together.

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