# Legitimacy cascade * New things in the world need to bootstrap legitimacy from nothing * The strongest way to gain legitimacy is through objective results * However, creating objective results requires (sometimes significant) resources * In order to gain those resources, you need to convince people who hold those resources to give them to you * Legitimacy roughly means that people [[Trust]] that you will use resources well * [[People like funding winners]] * So in order to accumulate resources (hopefully in order to create objective results) you need to gain legitimacy * The process of gaining this legitimacy is a process of gaining resources then leveraging those resources to gain more legitimacy which can then be leveraged to gain more resources: this process is a *Legitimacy Cascade* * In large part a legitimacy cascade is about creating pieces of evidence that can be tied together into a convincing *narrative* and using people’s conviction in that narrative to create more pieces of evidence. * [[Projects need to build narratives of perceived progress on top of pieces of evidence]] * Legitimacy cascades are how [[Perceived progress can unlock real progress]]. * The first step to create a legitimacy cascade is to leverage whatever you can do with zero external resources. For some people this is nothing more than writing (code or English) and for others this is deploying millions of dollars. (The fact that you can get a ton of objective results with very little resources is why it’s much easier to create legitimacy cascades around software (another difference between [[§Atomland, Bitland, and Peopleland]]) * There are many “moves” in a legitimacy cascade * Getting money/other resources from a supporter can convince someone to become a collaborator. This move is why on their websites startups often list VC firms who invested in them, nonprofits list who donated to them, and labs list the government agencies and foundations who funded them. * A collaborator can convince potential supporters of a project’s legitimacy. The heuristic is: “If the project can convince this highfalutin person to spend their time on this thing with so many other options, there must be a there there.” * Less serious collaborators (advisors, part-time collaborators) can be leveraged to resources or results that can be leveraged to more serious collaborators. * Called shots around intermediate trajectory can build legitimacy. ### Related * [[Bootstrapping organizational legitimacy is a big part of starting anything new]] * [[Authority first vs legitimacy first revolutions]] * [[Institutions can reputationally bootstrap off of individuals and other institutions]] * [[Legitimacy]] ### References * [[The Most Important Scarce Resource is Legitimacy]] [Web URL for this note](http://notes.benjaminreinhardt.com/Legitimacy+cascade) [Comment on this note](http://via.hypothes.is/http://notes.benjaminreinhardt.com/Legitimacy+cascade)