Founder’s Curse
Yesterday, I was speaking with Lizelle, a serial entrepreneur and venture partner based out of Colorado. I've grown to love our random Zoom chats. She gives it to me straight, uncut, and raw, without sugar-coating realities. I love that. We connected over our mutual love for the mental health space within the startup community. During our chat, we discussed how startup solutions often want to appear much bigger than they really are. Not every app, SaaS, or product will solve major world problems. So, what drives companies to exaggerate the impact their services or products are making?
Okay, let's backtrack a bit. At the end of July this year, I attended a startup pitch event in Austin, Texas. It was a beautiful location, a vibrant city, and had a rich startup ecosystem. We were in a room with about 30 people, including VCs. Everyone had a chance to pitch in front of investors. You know the usual stuff. I'd say about 80% of the pitches I heard were variations of AI. There was even an AI startup that helped other AI startups improve their AI systems. Out of all the pitches, three stood out the most to me as super impressive. One focused on reducing carbon emissions by predicting traffic light patterns. Another dealt with recycling old airplane OS conductors. The final one came from a woman entering the fashion world with an alternative mushroom leather. All of them were super interesting. However, they garnered very little interest from the VCs... why?
While I can't answer that on behalf of the VCs, I can certainly speculate that it's because they weren't riding the hype wave that AI is currently enjoying. They weren't considered sexy; they weren't what's hot right now, which is AI. To be more precise, they weren't dressed up as innovative AI, like ChatGPT.
This is unfortunate because, while they may not offer the get-rich-quick promise that most AI solutions do, these were genuinely needed projects for long-term change within their respective industries.
Even my own pitch met with resistance. When I explained the problems the mental health sector is facing and that I aim to measure its significance, most VCs were dumbfounded and hesitant. A few in the audience asked, "So once you measure and know, what is the solution?" To which I responded that it's not up to me to decide; it should be left to far more experienced professionals in the health space. Some said, "So why should we invest if you're not even solving anything?"
I was furious! To me, it was obvious. How can we solve anything if we don't even know what that something is yet? The problem is too grand. We need to quantify and measure its depth first. I mean, decades ago, the body thermometer was invented. Did that solve anything? No, it informed and measured. One can argue that it's a successful product.
Then it hit me! Ah, I get it. You all don't want to invest because it's not sexy. There won't be parades thrown your way at the end of this journey.
It's the same reason why so many operational apps and products aren't being redesigned. When the product isn't consumer-facing, it becomes boring. It's not sexy! People won't be able to be in awe and sing your praises if you work on that side of the fence. So, many manufacturing, logistics, and healthcare apps continue to look like a Tetris game from the '90s. Sure, part of the problem is the financial burden and training required to make such changes, but even so, very few startups choose to focus on that side of the problem. It's just not sexy!
There are endless examples of this, what I like to call the founder's curse. It's the belief that you'll become a generational hero if you solve a big market problem. So in their heads, founders paint pictures that the work they're doing is super righteous, that they're solving massive problems, and that their solution is the best there is. Maybe it's ego? Maybe not.
Not every journey will be a beautiful conquest. In fact, most startup journeys are boring, miserable, and end in failure. The stories that you do know, the super successful ones, those are the ones that make it, the one-in-a-million shots. But so what? Does that mean we shouldn't be solving issues if we can't reap personal rewards and acknowledgment? The world would cease to exist if that were the case. I just wish we were a bit more self-aware and understood that in the journey of making the world a better place, not every hero will be remembered or even acknowledged. But we still have to participate in the betterment.
