From the book · Collapse or Collapse
What is a vector?
A vector is one result, aimed at one market, carried by one chain of agents, and held by one pair of humans by default. In Collapse or Collapse it is the smallest unit that produces a result.
Why it is the unit
Nothing smaller produces anything a customer would notice: an agent on its own is a skill, and a skill delivers nothing until it sits in a chain. Nothing larger is necessary: an Outcome is many vectors running the same playbook, and a company is many Outcomes.
What is inside one
The chain of agents, one per step; the gates between them, most reversible and a few irreversible; the alarms; and the pair, an aligner and a tuner. The book’s rule is no silent stalls: every agent reports its own flow.
How vectors grow
A vector deepens: the same vector producing a larger result each month as its agents compound. It splits when its pair can no longer hold its gates in the hours they committed, or when its market divides. Vectors can merge, and can be lent.
Why the word
It came, the author writes, from the physics he was taught at college: a vector has direction and magnitude, and so does this. It is aimed at one result and one market, and its size is the result it carries.
Read more in the book
Questions this page answers
What is a vector in an AI-run company?
One result, aimed at one market, carried by one chain of AI agents and held by one pair of humans. It is the smallest unit in Collapse or Collapse that produces a result.
How is a vector different from a team?
A team is a group of humans dividing a result. A vector is a chain of agents carrying the whole result, held by two humans at its gates.
How do you measure the size of a company made of vectors?
Count vectors, not employees: the company’s size is the number of results it carries at once.
A short guide to one idea in Collapse or Collapse by Vinay Pasricha. The book’s own words are in the chapters linked above. The full text, as plain text.