The Archive and the Compost Heap

In the early days of my work, I kept everything: half-finished sketches, notes from conversations that went nowhere, code snippets too brittle to use in production. Most of them never saw the light of day again, or so I thought. Years later, those fragments had a strange way of resurfacing. What looked like waste became soil.

Archiving and composting ideas are about building a quiet reserve. Founders who cultivate their past work discover that nothing is ever truly wasted. What matters is how you store, revisit, and recycle.

Archiving as a Founder’s Memory

An Archive is like a memory bank.

The best founders I know have the discipline to store, tag, and revisit their past work. Notes from a failed pitch contain a metaphor worth reviving. An abandoned code experiment might carry the seed of a future feature.

Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks are perhaps the most famous example of this principle. His thousands of pages of sketches and notes, many of which were never developed during his lifetime, later inspired engineers, artists, and scientists for centuries. Da Vinci’s genius was, besides his creativity, in his archiving.

The act of archiving forces you to slow down, to close a loop properly. Even if the project is abandoned, the residue is retained. Over time, this practice turns into a library that outlives single ventures.

For modern founders, version control systems like Git serve a similar function. Even “dead branches” of code sit preserved, waiting for revival. As Linus Torvalds himself noted, “Linux was not a fully formed invention; it was an iterative archive of patches, contributions, and refinements. The value was in what was preserved and built upon.”

The Compost Heap: Controlled Decay

Composting is different from archiving. It is less about cataloging, more about letting things rot in peace. Compost is messy, but fertile. Ideas, like organic waste, break down over time and mix with others.

A half-written essay from three years ago might sit alongside a code snippet from an old hackathon. On their own, neither is useful. Together, they might spark something new. Composting is about trust: that forgotten material will eventually transform, even if you do nothing but let it sit.

Writers like Austin Kleon, author of Steal Like an Artist, speak often of the “swipe file”, a messy collection of clippings, quotes, and drafts. This is intellectual compost. It is unstructured, but over time, connections form.

Startups are full of this kind of compost. The Slack origin story is the clearest example. Slack began as a failed game company called Tiny Speck. The game itself collapsed, but the internal messaging tool the team had built as a side project became the billion-dollar company. The game was compost. The chat tool was the sprout.

Recycling Knowledge Into New Growth

Founders are often told to chase novelty. But innovation is less about conjuring something from nowhere and more about recycling what is already around you. This process is cyclical. It mirrors nature. Nothing is permanent, but nothing is truly lost.

• Old failures become teaching stories. Many of Paul Graham’s essays draw directly from his own failed startups in the 1990s, teaching future founders what NOT to do.
• Deprecated code becomes pseudocode for a new stack. Many machine learning libraries today borrow heavily from older statistical packages. The syntax is modern, the core ideas old.
• Notes from a dead product become positioning for a new one. Instagram began as Burbn, a cluttered location-based app. The founders composted the unused features, kept photo-sharing, and pivoted to the product that changed social media.

Tools for the Practice

1. Digital Archives. Use a consistent structure. Markdown folders, Git repositories, or note-taking systems like Obsidian or Logseq. The key is accessibility, not perfection. Don’t over-engineer; just make sure you can find things later.
2. Compost Bins. Maintain a digital “dumping ground.” A folder or database where half-formed thoughts, scraps, and snippets go without judgment. Evernote, Notion, or even a plain /all, /inbox, or /scratch folder works. Don’t organize too early.
3. Review Rituals. Schedule seasonal reviews. Just as gardeners turn compost piles, founders can revisit and remix their archives. Set aside one day a quarter to scan through the mess. Most of it will still be useless. A few gems will reveal themselves.
4. Zettelkasten Thinking. The Zettelkasten method, popularized by German sociologist Niklas Luhmann, is essentially structured composting. Notes are deliberately linked so that unexpected connections appear over time. Luhmann wrote over 70 books from this system.

Philosophy of Fertility

The Archive gives you structure. The compost heap gives you chaos. Together, they create resilience.

The founder who knows how to recycle their past is less dependent on sudden inspiration. They always have raw material at hand.

Consider the Japanese concept of Mottainai, which embodies a sense of regret over waste, as well as a mindfulness of reuse. Applied to ideas, it suggests that every scrap has potential. Your most powerful ideas may already exist, just in compost form.

Historical and Startup Parallels

• Thomas Edison’s Lab Notebooks. Edison filled thousands of pages with experiments, many of which failed. Those “failed” notes became reference material for later breakthroughs.
• Twitter’s Pivot. What became Twitter started as Odeo, a podcasting platform rendered obsolete by Apple’s iTunes integration. The compost was the messaging experiment. The Archive was the team. Together, they birthed a new product.
• NASA’s Archive. Even space exploration relies on past work. NASA frequently revisits design archives from Apollo missions when building new spacecraft. The past is a blueprint for the future.

Practical Tips for Founders

1. Don’t Delete, Just Archive. Even if a project feels like a failure, resist the urge to erase. Put it aside. Time changes your perspective.
2. Tag Lightly. Over-tagging kills momentum. Use broad categories like “ideas,” “code,” and “writing.” Compost is meant to be loose.
3. Trust Serendipity. The goal is not to force connections but to allow them. New contexts make old fragments useful.
4. Return Seasonally. Like tending soil, checking your archives at regular intervals is sufficient. Most of the time, you are letting things decay naturally.

A founder’s journey is not a straight line but a cycle. Projects die, teams dissolve, and notes get dusty. Yet in that decay lies growth. The Archive preserves, the compost transforms. The choice is not between keeping or discarding, but between building sterile storage or fertile ground. In practice, you need both.