Solutions to Overcome Ignorance

Startup Funding Isn’t Broken, It’s Behind

Ready for a spicy topic likely to frustrate some friends in my criticism of good intentions? Let’s begin with a blunt but necessary truth: venture capital isn’t broken, most of it just doesn’t know what the hell it’s doing. The problem isn’t capital. It’s experience. And the startup ecosystem, especially outside of places where people worked on the internet-based economy on which we rely today, has been playing a dangerous game of telephone. One that has left a trail of misinformed founders, confused investors, and an entire culture of entrepreneurial theater designed to soothe the ignorance of those with money rather than empower those with ideas.

It is essential to recognize that startup funding isn’t broken, but rather, it needs a better understanding of the fundamental principles that drive successful ventures.

We’re living in the aftermath of an innovation boom that nobody finished explaining. In the past 20 years, we’ve seen a glut of books, courses, podcasts, and pitch decks all frantically trying to explain what a startup is, how to build one, how to fund one, and how to exit one. But a YouTube tutorial on how to skydive, most of it is being written by people who work in skydiving but have never jumped.

That image, by the way, is a depiction of hell from “The Garden of Earthly Delights” by Hieronymus Bosch
What happens when ignorance runs wild: when humans reject reason, foresight, and moral grounding

Startups, for all the jargon, are still pretty simple: Team > Market > Solution > Sales. That’s the formula. Has been since Fairchild Semiconductor, will be long after the latest SaaS-on-AI-for-blockchain-gamers implodes. I know you want to throw Funding in that mix, but it doesn’t belong, not until you’ve put in the work – and we know you aren’t putting in the work because most of the books, podcasts, and questions, pertain to what you should have accomplished through the work. Rather than reinforcing that simple, brutal truth (Team > Market > Solution > Sales), the industry has responded to widespread investor ignorance by building “solutions to overcome ignorance” -> buzzwords, acronyms, and frameworks designed to give the illusion of understanding:

• CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost)
• LTV (Lifetime Value)
• MVP (Minimum Viable Product)
• NPS (Net Promoter Score)
• Lean Startup
• Agile
• Unicorn
• Platform thinking
• Network effects
• OKRs, KPIs, TAM/SAM/SOM
• blitzscaling
• Blue Ocean

Most of these aren’t bad. They’re just being used to pretend understanding and then ask of you, the founder, questions that seem meaningful in order to hide ignorance. They were never meant for someone scribbling wireframes in a coffee shop. They’re the comfort blankets for investors and advisors who feel unqualified to evaluate founders on what actually matters: vision, traction, team, and marketing.

For example, a pre-seed founder getting grilled about their CAC. What CAC?? They don’t even have a consistent funnel yet. It’s like asking a farmer about the yield per acre when they’ve just cleared the land. But because someone heard others asking about CAC, they think that’s what diligence looks like. I have never asked a founder their CAC because if I don’t know how they would acquire customers, at what cost, and the marketing involved, I have no business pretending the metric means anything.

It’s not diligence. It’s cosplay.

The hard truth? Most startup investors today didn’t come from startups. They came from finance, consulting, real estate, or because they made their money elsewhere and want a piece of sexy community of startups. They weren’t at PayPal. They didn’t build anything at Google. And they certainly didn’t live through the cultural petri dish of Silicon Valley that taught us how internet-era innovation behaves: erratically, disruptively, and with a completely insane level of obsession.

Notice, I’m NOT saying Silicon Valley does it right or even better – my point should be very evident that decades of actually building the internet means that people who have been there (working on the internet, anywhere) are far more qualified in what’s possible in innovation in our “Information Age” than that Oil & Gas tycoon who wants to show up at Demo Day.

(I told you we’d be spicy and piss off some people but FFS come on, stop pretending you know how to scale an AI-based platform for video just so you can sit in the room; leave it to the people who know it and stop asking about Customer Validation as though their answer means something to you)

Founders, bless their hearts, try to meet the expectations of investors who dangle checks while asking about MRR; not because they’re ready, because they want funding. And thus, the theater of metrics begins.

We’ve become so enamored with books and buzzwords that we’ve forgotten what startups are for: solving problems that actually matter. Look around, there’s no shortage:

• CRMs still suck.
• Dating is transactional.
• Parental alienation is an unaddressed epidemic.
• Mental health is collapsing under digital pressure.
• We’ve optimized our diets into chronic disease.
• AI is eroding trust faster than Facebook eroded privacy.
• Childcare has no infrastructure to support it.
• Clean water is gone and what water remains is sucked dry.
• Social lives are behind screens.
• Government is administrative bloat.
• Forget privacy.
• Pharma has turned prescription into addiction.
• Do you want to put your parents in a nursing home??
• Most edtech is just video lectures with tuition.
• Startup ecosystems themselves are pretending, through coworking spaces.

The problem isn’t a lack of problems. The problem is lack of obsession: with solving, not selling. We don’t need more founders trying to get rich. We need people so personally invested in fixing something broken that they couldn’t stop if they tried.

And yes, that is what great founders do. They fixate. They build. They listen to their market obsessively. They test relentlessly. They don’t need 40 customer discovery interviews or a “validation” checklist, they can smell the problem in the air and refuse to breathe anything else until it’s fixed.

So why so many podcasts on validation? Because too many in the startup world don’t actually know what it means to build a startup. They’re explaining a dance they’ve never danced, watching from the bleachers, yelling advice based on outdated books and pitch competition templates. Call this what it is: a misalignment of comprehension. A gap between what founders actually need and what ecosystems, incubators, and VCs think they need. And in that gap, we find the real danger: the illusion of progress. Pitch nights. Accelerator demo days. Mentors who’ve never built anything. Advisors hoping to close business as a consultant. VCs asking about TAM before the product even works.

You want to “fix” startup funding? Great. Stop asking founders to explain CAC before they’ve sold anything. Stop forcing Lean Startup on someone who just needs to get a prototype in front of five people. Stop building playbooks for comfort and start cultivating understanding.

That means educating investors, not just founders. It means platforms and communities that train people to recognize real potential, not just pattern match to whatever Andreessen Horowitz wrote this month. It means rebuilding our startup support systems around outcomes, not optics. We’ve lost our ability to think critically in this space. People want templates. Answers. Certainty. But startups are the art of uncertainty. The truth is, there is no answer, only relentless experimentation until the market says “yes.”

So, the next time someone throws an acronym at you like a magic spell, smile and ask them what problem they have that an answer solves. Chances are, they won’t know.