Marginality: the Hidden Variable of Impact

08 Sep 2025

Impact isn’t only moral philosophy. It’s also pragmatic.

It’s more fun. Building something singular is infinitely more satisfying than being cog #12,428 in someone else’s machine.

It’s better for your head. People who optimize only for money or status often end up restless. Someone else will always have more and when you finally stop optimizing for that, you don’t have much else to show for it.

It compounds. Impact tends to snowball. Choosing to work on something meaningful attracts better people, creates deeper conviction, and sustains you through harder problems.

Impact is both self-serving and world-serving. It’s the alignment between what keeps you happy and what makes the world better.

At the same time, when people talk about “impact,” it usually comes wrapped in abstraction.

Did this career matter?

Did this donation move the needle?

Did this company change the world?

It gets much sharper if you treat it like an equation:

Impact = Marginality x Scale

Scale is straightforward: how big is the surface area of what you’re working on? Marginality is slipperier: how much does the world actually change because you showed up?

Why the Margin Matters

Marginality isn’t about being present, it’s about being decisive. If you weren’t there, would the outcome still happen?

By this lens, a lot of careers look less impactful than they first appear. High frequency trading might be the most extreme: HFT firms handle more than half of trades (often trading with each other) so the “marginal” impact isn’t building markets, it’s being the 42nd firm in an already crowded race. Even if you capture a sliver of improvement in liquidity, the world wouldn’t really notice if you didn’t exist.

The opposite is true in fields where no one else would have stepped in. Vacuums would still suck without James Dyson, theme parks wouldn’t exist without Disney, and nothing like Airbnb would exist without Brian and Joe or YC funding them when everyone else said no.

If you’re the marginal career or investment dollar[1] that leads to something truly new, the world after your decision is meaningfully different than before and the essence of impact.

Marginality without scale

Unfortunately, a brilliant breakthrough that never reaches people is little more than a curiosity. The world is full of elegant prototypes, academic papers, and clever hacks that live only on GitHub or in a dusty lab notebook. They might prove a point, but they don’t change the point of the world. Impact is defined not only by being the first to do something, but by finding the leverage to make it matter.

Adjusting for scale

Sometimes even a tiny marginal improvement, if multiplied by scale, can be enormous. Making ChatGPT inference 0.01 seconds faster for 1 billion people searching 1,000x / year would save ~320 years of human life.

That’s the magic of scale: a nearly invisible improvement per unit balloons into double-digit billions when stretched across a large footprint.

Scale without Marginality

But here’s the marginality test: if ten different engineers were working on inference optimization and you were the one who happened to land the win, was your presence essential? Or did you just happen to be the one standing in the right place when the bowling ball rolled down the alley? The difference between “I reduced global compute costs by billions” and “I was one of dozens who might have gotten there” is exactly why marginality matters.

This leads to the real challenge: the highest-impact work is not about joining the biggest game, it’s about finding the game that wouldn’t exist without you or where you skill set can truly be unique.

Building an “N-of-1” company

Building a unique, N-of-1 companies scores high on marginality by definition. If they scale, they dominate.

These kinds of companies do a few things at once. What matters isn’t just being first, but altering the trajectory of what follows:

** Point to the possible:** The best companies are magnets for optimism that shift the Overton window of what feels achievable.

** Rally people:** Dozens, then hundreds, and eventually thousands of people orient their careers around the world these companies build.

** It compounds outside you:** N-of-1 companies are filled with missionaries instead of mercenaries so their growth looks more like a spiritual movement than a corporation.

SpaceX is perhaps the best recent example: they insisted on reusable rockets, reduced the cost of orbit, and enabled the modern space industry.

Do something unique

Marginality teaches us that impact is not evenly distributed. It accrues disproportionately to the people who choose work that literally wouldn’t exist without them.

That’s the specificity needed to drive conviction, attract the best collaborators, and leave no ambiguity about success or failure — either at a startup, as a researcher, within a big company, or in government.

Find the place where your marginal presence multiplies by real scale. Go do the thing only you can do.

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Standing invitation (inspired by Patio11 who also has some good tips on how to approach this): if you want to talk about hard tech or systems, I want to talk to you.

My email is my full name at gmail.com.

• I read every email and will almost always reply.
• I like reading things you’ve written.
• I go to conferences to meet people like you.
• Meetings outside of conferences are tougher to fit with my schedule - let’s chat over email first. Specificity and being concise makes it easy for me to reply :)