Run the Origin Audit in Your First Sixty Days

This is the full playbook from “Learn Why the Business Exists First.” The book prints a shorter version at the end of that chapter, and this page keeps every step and every example.

Run this audit in your first sixty days in a new seat, full-time or fractional. Then run it again at least once a year.

1. Find the earliest surviving statement of why this business was funded or started: a pitch deck, a founding memo, an early investor update. Read it as a hypothesis, not as history. What did the founders believe about customers, the market, and the competition?
2. Test the hypothesis against current revenue. Pull the revenue breakdown and ask whether it still matches or has moved to something else. A company funded as a developer-tools business that now earns most of its money from enterprise compliance add-ons is not the company its mission statement describes. Set your technology priorities for the business it has become.
3. Name the game you play now. Use one of the five games in “Learn Why the Business Exists First”, or a mix of them. Say the name to your leadership peers before you say it to your engineering team. If a peer names a different game, stop. That disagreement outranks every item on your architecture roadmap: the organization is executing two different bets at the same time.
4. Answer the four excavation questions in writing: Drucker’s mission question, Feynman’s what-would-have-to-be-true question, Thiel’s contrarian-belief question, and the AI-redefinition question from “Learn Why the Business Exists First”. Date each answer and put your name on it. If you won’t date and sign an answer, you don’t believe it yet.
5. Set the date of the next audit before you close the document. Use twelve months, sooner if a competitor does something that makes you doubt the answer. An audit you don’t repeat becomes an inherited assumption. Eighteen months later it carries your name instead of your predecessor’s.

Try this with AI.

“Compare our current revenue mix against the founding pitch and tell me which business we are actually in, then argue the case a skeptic would make about the gap. Use only an assistant your company has approved for financial data, or convert the figures to percentages first.”

All of the playbooks are listed on the playbooks page.