Before I Start a Startup Again

What's the reality? What exists today? How does the world currently work?

You can't find a gap if you don't know the scene. Study it. Talk to people in it. Understand the players, the dynamics, the incentives. Why does it work the way it works? What are people doing today?

Don't just read about it. Be in it. The closer you are, the more you see.

What's missing? What problem exists? What pain do people have that isn't being solved, or is being solved poorly?

The gap has to be real. Not "it would be nice if" but "this is broken and people feel it." Are they complaining? Are they hacking together workarounds? Are they spending money on bad solutions because there's nothing better?

If people are fine without it, there's no gap. There's just an idea.

How do you solve it? What's the product? What's the conviction?

This should be clear enough to say in one sentence. Not a pitch. Not a vision statement. Just: what does this company do and why does it matter?

If you can't say it simply, you don't know it yet.

Not the solution. The problem.

Startups take longer than you think. If you're 25, you're saying this is what I'm doing until I'm 28. That's not a side bet. That's a chunk of your life.

The solution will change. The product will pivot. But the problem space stays. Are you willing to wake up thinking about this problem for years? When it's hard. When it's boring. When no one cares yet.

If the answer is "maybe" — that's a no.

Not a trend. Not a bet. An inevitability I'm just early to.

Every digital experience is already personalized. Spotify, TikTok, Netflix. Why would physical experiences stay generic? The tech catches up. It always does.

Either I'm the one suffering from it, or I deeply understand it. No middle ground. Can't validate from a distance.

Who has this problem? How many? How badly? Are they doing something about it today, even if it's bad?

If they're fine without it, it's not a problem worth solving.

Daily and weekly problems over monthly and yearly problems. The tighter the loop, the faster you learn.

Building an autonomous camera for Fox or NASCAR or F1. How often do you test that? You're waiting months between data points. Building something for a go-kart track. You can deploy, watch, learn, adjust. Weekly. Daily. The reps compound.

MVP only works if you can actually run it.

Can I start small and own it? Or am I boiling the ocean?

Entry point matters. Investors want to see you dominate something small before you expand.

What needs to be proven? In what order? What's the risk at each step?

Hardware adds layers. Every one of them, manufacturing, supply chain, support, is a surface for failure.

"You think it's simple but you don't know how much work there is." The gap between "seems simple" and "is simple" is where founders get stuck.

If raising VC money, the market needs to be in the billions. They need to believe the outcome can be 100x.

Money in to money out needs to be a multiple. That's their game. Know if you're playing it.

What changed that makes this possible today? Why not 5 years ago? Why not 5 years from now?

Inevitable isn't enough. Timing has to be right.

What have I seen that others haven't? What's my unfair insight? Will I grind through the hard parts when it stops being fun?

Rigorously. Not "I googled it." Actually dig. Who's tried this? Who failed? Why? What's my edge?

What stops a big player from entering and doing what you're doing?

You can find a real problem, build something that works, get traction. And then Google, Amazon, or someone with 100x your resources decides it's interesting. What do you have that they don't?

Distribution? Relationships? Proprietary data? Network effects? Switching costs? Deep domain expertise they can't hire overnight?

If the answer is "we'll just move faster," that's not a moat. That's a head start. Head starts disappear.

The best moats compound over time. The longer you're in, the harder you are to catch. If your advantage shrinks as you grow, you don't have a moat. You have a window.

How do I get it into users' hands? If I can't answer this clearly, I'm not ready.

All assumptions until a user touches the system. You are nothing until you launch.

This can happen part time. Get signal before you leap.

Can I get into the rooms where my potential users exist?

If I can't reach them, I can't build for them. I'm guessing from the outside.

In our early days, it took too long to get the product into people's hands. That's lost time. You learn nothing in that void.

What's next after MVP? How do I go from 1 to 100? B2B or B2C?

Scale has to be built into the product from day 1. If MVP requires me at every deployment, every install, that's a warning sign.

Investors move on FOMO. You have to create that fear. Give them something to miss.

Launch. Grow. Talk to the press. Make noise.

They make it feel like they sit at a desk waiting for you. But their job is to find companies. They're scanning, asking their network, looking for signal.

The best fundraising happens when they come to you. That happens when you've launched, you're growing, and people are talking.

Money and equity are involved. Real stakes. Opportunity cost. You need people who are clear about what they want, what their boundaries are. And you need to be clear yourself.

You can't teach critical thinking. You can't teach high standards. They either have it or they don't. Track record or experience working with them is the only way to know.

"Worst case I'll have a good portfolio." I thought that way once. It made me less sharp. It's a hedge. Hedges dilute conviction.

You want co-founders who are burning the boats. Not reckless. Convicted. The leap comes from belief in the mission, not from "this is good experience either way."

If they're already planning for failure, they're not fully in.

Startups have no system. You are the system. No playbook, no structure, no manager. When things break, and they will, the only thing that holds it together is common vision.

Misaligned intentions crack under pressure.