Icebergs

Making the impossible look easy

"Just three buttons? That's all it takes to sell a house?"

At Opendoor, visitors would stare at our simple interface in disbelief. Those three buttons masked a truth: 70% of our company built systems customers never saw. What shocked me most wasn't the complexity we'd built—it was how it vanished into the background, letting customers feel the simple confidence of a fair home sale.

The best companies don't build interfaces. They build icebergs—massive complexity hidden below calm waters.

Figma appears to be design software. But they saw designers were becoming collaborative teams, not solo artists. Notion looks like a document editor. But they grasped that modern work needed flexibility that traditional tools couldn't provide. Databricks recognized that companies would need entirely new tools to extract value from massive data lakes. Stripe saw that global commerce was stuck behind old, complex payment systems.

Most founders stop at the surface. They build features. They chase obvious markets. They copy what works. They get excited about their "wedge" without understanding the deep systems needed to make it real. And they wonder why their "simple" products feel harder to use than their competitors'.

The great ones see deeper. They spot markets years before they emerge. They find gold where others see nothing. They capture data no one thought to collect. They know their space so deeply they build what others can't imagine. Simple interfaces hide years spent understanding how an industry actually works.

Next time you see a product that makes the impossible look easy, remember: The greatest companies are icebergs. Their true power lies in what you cannot see.