“Can a model perform well technically but fail to create business value, and why?” What a wonderful question; I was asked recently that perspective on tech in a way that made me see a primary challenge in startups, in a different light. Read the question again and appreciate that even the asking of it reveals that we still have a serious gap in education, our economy, and advice about business. In my head, I reframed the question along the lines of what we often hear about startups, “Can an MVP for my startup technically solve the problem but still fail to create business value?”
Hopefully, you know and understand that that answer to that question isn’t just, “yes, of course,” but rather you understand why the question persisting is frustrating to people like me. The question shouldn’t even exist… solving a problem is not a business and creating value isn’t a result of a technical invention, a built solution, or your IP.
Dear founders, most of you fail because your determination to build something and expectation that you’ll be rewarded for that is horrifically wrong.
Article Highlights
Michael Jackson wasn’t Technically Proficient; Why do Founders Still Believe that’s the most Important Skill?
Subscribers and followers, you are familiar with the fact that I have an unusual penchant among startup advisors in that I love using movies, music, and pop culture, as familiar experiences through which to better understand entrepreneurship. Let’s talk about the King of Pop.
Michael Jackson couldn’t read music; that is to say, not with the expertise you might expect given his success. He couldn’t notate a score, and he could barely play instruments. And yet he didn’t just write songs; he composed them, arranged them, produced them, and built a global empire on top of them. One of the most prolific artists and entrepreneurs of the 20th century had none of the technical skills that startup culture obsessively overvalues.
The Cult of the Technologist
Startups continue to operate under the delusion that building the product is what matters most.
Accelerators screen for technical founders. VCs ask, “Who’s writing the code?” Hackathons, pitch decks, and MVPs are all optimized for the person who can show something functional. That engineering-first mentality is so entrenched it now passes for common sense. And yet, most of the biggest failures in tech come not from poor engineering, but from an utter lack of creative authorship.
When Michael Jackson walked into the studio, he didn’t show up with a notepad, a keyboard, or a demo. He came in with a finished product in his head. According to sound engineer Rob Hoffman, Jackson would compose full string arrangements in his mind, complete with breaks and fills, then sing them part-by-part to session musicians. “Here’s the first chord. First note, second note, third note…” He once beatboxed a full rhythm section in court while being sued for plagiarism. No manuscript. No software. Just the fully-formed product, built from taste, clarity, and obsession.
I’ll just sing the bass part into a tape recorder… in court during the Dangerous-era trial in which he just beat-boxed his method, taking the bass lick and putting the chords of the melody over the bass lick to inspire the melody.
On Billie Jean, Jackson layered four different bass parts to give the song its stalking groove. He noted, you’re hearing four basses on there, doing four different personalities, giving it character. That wasn’t experimentation and it wasn’t engineering, it was composition.
Founders, You Aren’t Composing
Most startup pitches today resemble the opposite of Jackson’s approach. Founders rattle off features, stick to the pick deck template they’ve been told to mirror, show mockups and beg to demo the tech as though the solution capable proves something. But ask them to articulate what the product feels like (what the tension is, where the release comes, what emotion the user experiences) and they can’t do it. They didn’t compose anything: they built, shipped, and hope.
Jackson controlled the details not by brute force, but because he heard what mattered before it existed. He was the product – which notice, is NOT the solution nor even the end-all-be-all that so many founders hope is the case when preaching that it’s all about the product: he was marketing, brand, storytelling, and influence, in a product that then fulfilled the solution people wanted. Everyone else in the studio was executing his vision, translating his arrangement from voice to tape. That’s what a visionary founder does and they aren’t fixated on the product itself nor how it’s technically produced but that it delivers what the market values. Think Steve Jobs designing the iPhone around feel before it existed, or Walt Disney describing Disneyland frame-by-frame before ground broke.
The startup world confuses this with mission; vision means a napkin sketch or a pitch because it isn’t what we hope to accomplish or solve but the direction we need to go. Jackson had it all in his head. He could rebuild it from scratch with nothing but a voice recorder.
Can a Model Be Right Technically and Still Fail?
Absolutely. And it happens all the time.
A model, even a startup, can function exactly as designed: It can be profitable, have users, and generate revenue, and it can still collapse. Why? Because business value isn’t created by technical success, it’s created in the market.
Peter Drucker put it bluntly in the 1970s: “Only two things create value in business: marketing and innovation. And marketing is the distinguishing of the two.” That observation of the economy is now ignored by advisors, and investors dangling checks, who, frankly, have no idea what it even means.
Most people think “marketing” means promotion, advertising, growth hacking, and demand gen. They’re wrong. Marketing is the entire commercial discipline of discovering, positioning, communicating, pricing, delivering, and defending value in a competitive market. It’s not the glossy topcoat; it’s the core business function. And if you can’t do that, your innovation is irrelevant.
A technically successful model that fails to differentiate, fails to understand competition, or misreads the customer will still go under. The failure might not be immediate – you might have early adopters, customers, and press coverage (traction by most accounts), but six months later, someone else eats your lunch. You thought you created value, but you didn’t; you captured temporary attention before getting out-marketed.
Drucker’s point was structural: Innovation alone doesn’t create value. Marketing makes innovation valuable. A startup that doesn’t understand that will eventually mistake working software for a working business.
Michael Jackson didn’t just compose, he barely could! He marketed and he distinguished. He didn’t need to be technical because he understood the emotional architecture of attention. He understood competition and he created culture, not just content.
It’s Not About Being Technical, it’s About Mattering
The problem I hope to illuminate is NOT that technical founders are bad; obviously that’s not the case and none of the technical ventures would work without the code or semiconductors, it’s that the industry treats technical execution as the determining factor of success. The tech is not the moat… No one has a proprietary app, every API is available, features are duplicated in days.
What can’t be copied is the insight and taste that creates something people actually feel.
Founders obsessed with technical ability are like aspiring musicians who spend years learning scales but never write a song – the song is the thing! The impact, the emotion, and the resonance, that’s what makes a product stick, not whether it’s built on Firebase or Ruby or with AI.
The best startups emerge thanks to the people with an unavoidable point of view. The kind of person who would beatbox four basslines into a microcassette recorder and fire a band member for changing one note. Michael Jackson didn’t need to code to build a billion-dollar business, he just knew what it needed to be and how to make people love it.
Feel it a lot!!
Best Nights VC right? Once you see it and realize it, you can’t avoid the patterns