There’s a specific tell I listen for now in the first ten minutes of a founder conversation, and it’s become almost embarrassingly reliable: does this person talk more about the problem their customer has, or more about the thing they’ve built to solve it? The founders obsessed with the problem tend to build companies that adapt and survive. The founders obsessed with their own solution tend to build companies that are fragile the moment the market shifts even slightly, because their identity is wrapped up in a specific implementation rather than a specific outcome for a specific customer.
Solution-obsessed founders give you incredibly detailed answers about their architecture, their tech stack, their feature roadmap, and noticeably thinner answers when you ask what their customer’s life actually looked like before the product existed, and what specifically changed after. That asymmetry matters more than it seems like it should, because a company that deeply understands the problem can rebuild the solution three times over as the market and the technology change around it — and in a period of AI-driven disruption like this one, that flexibility isn’t optional, it’s existential. A company that’s attached to its current solution has a much harder time making that pivot, because letting go of the solution feels like letting go of the company’s identity, even when the underlying problem it originally set out to solve hasn’t gone anywhere.
I think about this most acutely right now because the pace of technological change is forcing exactly this kind of test on a huge number of companies simultaneously. The businesses whose founders can say, with total clarity, “our customer’s actual problem is X, and the way we solve X might look completely different in eighteen months than it does today” are the ones I’m most comfortable backing through a period of disruption. The businesses whose founders describe their company primarily in terms of their current product are the ones I worry about, because the moment a better way to solve the same underlying problem shows up — and in this environment, it will — that company doesn’t have the organizational muscle memory to follow the problem rather than defend the solution.
Problem obsession also tends to produce a healthier relationship with customer feedback. A founder anchored to the problem hears “this isn’t quite working for us” as useful data about the problem they’re still trying to solve. A founder anchored to their solution hears the same feedback as a threat to something they’ve already emotionally committed to, and the instinct to defend rather than adapt kicks in exactly when adaptability is what the moment requires.
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