Pi (π) = 3.141592653589793238…

I want to talk about Pi.

Specifically: π = 3.141592653589793238462643383279502884197169399375…

Pi is the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter. It is one of the most important numbers in mathematics. It is also, mathematically speaking, bizarre:

• Irrational. It cannot be expressed as a ratio of two integers.
• Non-repeating. The decimal expansion never settles into a cycle.
• Infinite. It goes on forever. We have computed trillions of digits with no end in sight.

I think about Pi a lot when I think about partnerships. Because a healthy partnership has the same three properties.

Property one: irrational

A rational decision is one that can be expressed as a clean ratio of inputs to outputs. Spend X on marketing, expect Y in pipeline. That’s rational. You can build a spreadsheet for it.

Partnerships do not behave this way. The reason a partnership works is almost never the reason you put it together. You wanted a referral channel. You got a hire. You wanted a hire. You got an investor. You wanted an investor. You got an introduction to a customer’s customer’s CFO who now runs a $400M division at a company you didn’t know existed when the partnership started.

The output is not a clean function of the input. The relationship throws off branches that nobody planned. Most B2B leaders ignore this because their framework requires inputs to predict outputs. They are, in the most literal sense, trying to model an irrational phenomenon with a rational tool.

The cost is high. They make decisions about partnerships using the same math they use for paid acquisition. They ask “what is the ROI of this partnership?” The honest answer — we will know in 3 to 7 years, and not before — is unacceptable to the framework. So they kill partnerships that haven’t paid out in 12 months. They kill partnerships that would have paid out in 36.

Property two: non-repeating

A repeating decimal eventually settles into a pattern: 0.333333…, or 0.142857142857…. Once you’ve seen a few digits, you’ve seen them all.

Most of business is repeating decimals. The same ad copy works the same way. The same hiring funnel produces the same kind of candidates. The same sales motion converts the same percentage of leads. There’s a comfort to this. You can plan around it.

Partnerships don’t repeat. Each one is its own digit. The partnership you started with Avalara is not the partnership you’ll start with the next vendor. The right cadence with one partner is the wrong cadence with the next. The right ask, the right deposit, the right tone, the right introduction — all of it is bespoke.

This is why partnership playbooks mostly fail. They presume repetition. They presume that what worked with Partner A will work with Partner B if you just follow the steps.

What actually works is practice — accumulated reps with no two of them quite the same — and the resulting pattern recognition that lets you read the next partnership accurately within the first conversation. That’s a craft. It does not scale through documentation. It scales through doing it for ten years.

Property three: infinite

The third property is the one that breaks people: a healthy partnership has no end state.

There is no “we have arrived.” Even at the most successful partnerships I’ve seen — the ones that have been compounding for a decade and throwing off seven-figure revenue without ceremony — the work continues. The deposits continue. The check-ins continue. The trust requires maintenance.

Most people, schooled by the goal-setting framework I criticized in the previous essay, expect arrival. They expect the partnership to close, the milestone to be reached, the box to be checked. When it doesn’t happen, they decide the partnership has stalled, and they let it atrophy.

It hadn’t stalled. It was operating exactly as the underlying economics dictated. They just didn’t know how to read the math.

What Pi teaches you about the work

If you accept the three properties — irrational, non-repeating, infinite — three things follow:

1. Stop trying to model partnerships rationally. Make deposits. Watch what comes back. Adjust. The branches of value will not look like the branches you planned.
2. Stop using playbooks. Develop pattern recognition. The reps don’t repeat, but the texture of recognition gets sharper with practice.
3. Stop waiting for arrival. The work is the work. There is no end state. The metric is whether you’re still depositing.

This is, I’ll admit, a non-trivial thing to ask of an organization that runs on quarterly objectives. Most B2B orgs cannot accommodate it. The orgs that can — even partially — develop a moat that nobody else can copy. Because nobody else has done the ten years of compounding.

That’s Pi. That’s partnerships. That’s the work.

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This is the fourth and final essay in the Partner Philosophy series. To revisit, start with “The Revenue Relationship Bank” or return to the Partner Philosophy index.