engineering/science gives you better mental models for business if you think of yourself as mainly an operator right now, spend some time in engineering/science again — you will gain mental models which help you become a better operator:

• thinking about information flow through org structures as neural networks → job of ceo to find best neural network architecture
• modeling companies as RL environments (state space — action — reward)
• thermodynamics/entropy: the second law applied to orgs: organizations naturally tend toward disorder (bureaucracy, misalignment) without constant energy input (management/culture). you must actively pump energy into the system just to maintain structure.
• control theory & pid controllers: managing growth vs. stability. if you correct a metric (like burn rate) too aggressively, you induce oscillations (hiring/firing cycles). you need the right amount of "damping" to reach a setpoint smoothly.
• distributed systems (cap theorem): the trade-off between consistency (everyone agrees), availability (speed of decision-making), and partition tolerance (remote/siloed work). in a fast-moving startup, you often sacrifice consistency for availability (speed).
• biology (allometric scaling): how an organism’s metabolic rate changes with size. as companies grow, they often become less efficient per employee (super-linear scaling of complexity vs. sub-linear scaling of output).
• computer science (big o notation): evaluating processes based on scalability. does a manual onboarding process scale linearly (o(n)) or does the communication overhead scale quadratically (o(n^2)) as you add people?
• signal processing (signal-to-noise ratio): as a company grows, internal "noise" (slack messages, meetings) increases. the ceo's job is to act as a band-pass filter, ensuring the "signal" (strategy/vision) isn't drowned out.
• circuit design (impedance matching): ensuring the output of one team matches the input capacity of another. if engineering ships faster than sales can sell (or vice versa), you have an impedance mismatch, leading to reflected energy (waste/inventory) rather than power transfer.
• chemistry (activation energy & catalysts): understanding that some initiatives require a huge initial energy spike to start (activation energy) unless you introduce a "catalyst" (a specific tool, hire, or market event) that lowers the barrier to reaction.
• mechanical resonance: finding the natural frequency of a team or market. pushing at the right frequency amplifies results with little effort; pushing at the wrong time (fighting the market) dissipates energy.