I sat across from a founder last week who spent the first eight minutes of his pitch explaining how hard everything had been. The fundraising was brutal, their cofounder quit, and the product pivoted three times. By minute ten he finally got to the business. Had I been at my best, I would have cut
Perfection is the fastest way to look inexperienced. Not because ambition is bad and not because polish doesn’t matter but because the very definition of a startup makes perfection impossible. A startup is not a smaller version of a big company, it is a temporary organization searching for a scalable, repeatable business model. That language
