As a founder, your lived experience feels like your edge. You’ve felt the problem firsthand, you know it better than anyone. But that same closeness can make you myopic. And when investors pass, it doesn’t just feel like a no on your idea. It feels like a no on you. Today’s chapter Kevin shared his biggest regret.
What Kevin made me think about:
Building to solve your own problem is complicated. You know the pain better than anyone in the room, but it also makes rejection personal in a way that’s hard to separate from the work.
Your experience can feel bigger than it is. The intensity of what you went through doesn’t automatically map to the size of a market.
There’s a difference between the thing you lived through and the thing you’re built to do. Kevin’s regret wasn’t the shutdown. It was not recognizing his real superpower sooner.
You often can’t see your superpower from the inside. Sometimes it takes building the wrong thing to figure out what the right thing is.
Connect with Kevin at UpscaleAI, LinkedIn, Medium, X
Next month — Bob Matsuoka’s Final Update from RunTime Technologies.
Chapter 2.1: Five Years Too Long.
