The VC Field Guide

3What = Problem

In the “Who” (Chapter 2) I talked about founder‐fit (“are these founders good fits with each other?”) as a precursor to team‐problem fit (“is this team a good fit for the problem?”), timing‐problem fit (“is this a timely problem to solve?”), and product‐market fit. It's nearly impossible to predict whether team‐fit is a strength or weakness because the real tests happen when things aren't going well. It is nonetheless important to try to make sure that the things under your influence, like founder‐fit and team‐fit, are going well in the very beginning. The next element on this road to product‐market fit is validating the problem. It's actually quite common for early‐stage startups to fail to validate their initial problem.

Many founders I know were inspired by success stories like Steve Jobs, and marvel how he was seemingly able to predict customers' needs and delight them with innovative solutions over and over as the company grew. There's a common conception that these visionaries are recognized as some of the smartest people in the world and heralded as being able to build and delight customers with something that customers hadn't seen before and hadn't even thought of before. But unfortunately, this model doesn't work out that way very often and, even worse, when these same companies fail, so rarely do we get the opportunity to hear why they failed. Instead, we only hear about successful examples and that's what we remember and, in doing that, we have a ...