Lewis Carroll

Lewis Carroll surfaces in Kyle’s notes through two of his most-quoted lines. In Leonardo Da Vinci, Kyle’s margin note pairs Leonardo’s boundless curiosity with Carroll’s “Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast” — a credo for entertaining the implausible. In Natural Selection Among Startups - Research, Carroll supplies the source of the Red Queen Hypothesis: the Red Queen’s line from Through The Looking Glass, “it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place,” which Kyle uses as one of two competing frames (Red Queen vs. Lindy) for how startups must keep evolving merely to hold their position.

Context: Lewis Carroll was the pen name of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (1832–1898), an English author and mathematician best known for Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and its sequel Through the Looking-Glass (1871). Both quotations Kyle cites are from those books — the “six impossible things” from the White Queen and the “all the running you can do” from the Red Queen, the latter giving its name to the evolutionary Red Queen hypothesis.

Where this appears

• Leonardo Da Vinci — Kyle quotes “six impossible things before breakfast” alongside Leonardo’s curiosity
• Natural Selection Among Startups - Research — the Red Queen’s “all the running you can do” as the source of the Red Queen frame for startup competition