How to run a country like a startup

A startup has one thing it is trying to do, and it cuts whatever isn't that. A country can't copy that. It has to keep the hospitals, schools, and courts running all at once, so a single national goal was never realistic. What it can borrow is the discipline underneath. A startup forces itself to decide what matters most right now, so when two things compete the answer already exists. Governments tend to call everything a priority, which is the same as having none, and the budget spreads so thin that nothing actually moves. You don't need one goal. You need a real order of priorities, and the nerve to let the top of that list win when there isn't enough money for all of it.

Then you go after talent the way a startup does. A company puts its sharpest people on its most important problem and pays whatever it takes to keep them. Governments hire by seniority, pay everyone roughly the same, and watch their best people leave for the private sector or abroad. You have to actually compete for those people, and grow more of them at home instead of waiting for them to turn up.

Treat policy like a product too. Rather than passing one enormous law and defending it for ten years, try a smaller version in one city, check whether it actually worked, then scale what did and scrap what didn't.

And give every goal a single owner who answers for the result, not for following the process. The moment one person is on the hook for whether the thing works, it tends to start working.