What Entrepreneurs Can Learn from The Story of More
Priya ran a small subscription food box out of a rented warehouse, and for two years growth had felt like pure good news. Then a supplier audit showed her something uncomfortable: as her customer count doubled, the waste leaving her loading dock had tripled, because each new subscriber also ordered bigger boxes and reordered more often than her early customers had. She had assumed growth in customers and growth in consumption per customer were the same problem, solvable with the same fix. They were not. Cutting her customer acquisition cost did nothing about the fact that her average order had quietly grown heavier and more energy-intensive to ship. Only once she tracked the two numbers separately did her packaging and cold-storage costs start making sense as one compounding story.
The whole book, compressed
This edition works through 4 core lessons — take them one at a time, not all at once.
What's different for your conditions
Tap whichever ones sound like you. Nothing here is sent or saved — it's just for your own noticing.
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The core lessons, applied to you
Why growth compounds, in business and in nature
Jahren's account, drawn from her own reading of long-term population and consumption data rather than a precise forecast, is that demand rises fastest when more people and more consumption per person happen at once. A business shows the same arithmetic: more customers plus more usage per customer multiplies rather than adds, and a founder watching only one side of that equation misses where the real cost is coming from.
A founder celebrates user growth while ignoring that per-user consumption of packaging, shipping, or server capacity is quietly rising even faster. Practice: track customer count and per-customer resource use as two separate lines, at least quarterly, so you can see which one is actually driving cost.
Track customer count and per-customer resource use as two separate lines, at least quarterly, so you can see which one is actually driving cost.
Where the pattern shows up in a growing company
The book's everyday examples, food waste, energy use, water use, and transportation, map onto a small company's operations: unsold inventory, an always-on server room, water-intensive supply inputs, and a delivery fleet or commuting staff. None of these look dramatic alone, which is exactly why they compound unnoticed as the company scales.
A founder assumes these costs are proportional to revenue and stops watching them closely once the business is profitable. Practice: pick one operational category each quarter, inventory waste, energy, water, or transport, and measure it before deciding whether to change it.
Pick one operational category each quarter, inventory waste, energy, water, or transport, and measure it before deciding whether to change it.
Small operational choices worth testing
Jahren frames personal-consumption change as a real choice with real tradeoffs, not an obligation, and the same framing fits a business better than a mandate would. A founder can test smaller default order sizes or a leaner office footprint, and can genuinely decide some tradeoffs are not worth it yet given cash flow or customer expectations.
Leadership announces a sustainability initiative with no budget or authority behind it, and it dies quietly within a quarter. Practice: choose one low-cost operational change this quarter, run it as a real experiment, and measure the result before scaling it further.
Choose one low-cost operational change this quarter, run it as a real experiment, and measure the result before scaling it further.
The bigger question no founder can settle alone
Jahren is honest that whether responsibility for consumption ultimately sits with individual choices or with larger systems, regulation, industry standards, infrastructure, is a genuinely unsettled debate, not one her book answers. A founder's operational choices matter at their own scale, but they sit inside supply chains and regulatory environments no single company controls, and treating personal habits as the whole answer would misread the book.
A cash-strapped founder cannot always afford the lower-waste supplier or the more efficient equipment, and pretending otherwise is not useful advice. Time spent auditing packaging or energy use is time not spent on sales or product, and both matter to survival. These changes compete directly with runway, and a founder has to choose deliberately rather than assume they are free.
Name one thing, honestly
- Where are you tracking growth in customers but not growth in consumption per customer? - What operational cost have you never actually measured, only assumed?
Good. Now look back at the "Try this" line under whichever lesson feels most connected to what you just wrote, and treat that as this week's actual assignment — not all 4 at once.
The practices from this edition
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Run this for seven days
Choose one low-cost operational change this quarter, run it as a real experiment, and measure the result before scaling it further.