Earlier this year, just as I had started writing my book, I had a conversation with an investment manager at a UK fund. I told her what I was working on and, because I ask a lot of questions, I asked why she thought most startups fail.
She answered before I had finished asking.
Because founders are stubborn, and they don’t listen.
I thought she was wrong.
Founders work harder than almost anyone I know and carry more of the risk than almost anyone else at the table. Blaming them for the failure of their own companies struck me as easy and unkind, so I let the comment go.
Months later, I think she was half right.
Founders are stubborn, and they have to be. Starting a company means spending years on something that does not exist yet, paying yourself less than you are worth and asking good people to join you on the strength of a story. Everyone around you can say no at no cost to themselves. Customers say no, investors say no and the engineer you wanted to hire turns down your offer.
A founder who took all of that at face value would stop in the first year. Conviction is the engine, and without it nothing gets built.
Which is why advice of the “listen more” kind is useless. A founder who listened to everyone would never produce anything.
The question is which part of the conviction to hold on to, which part to check, and when.
At Tørn, I had two kinds of belief and I treated them as one.
The first was that the construction industry throws away enormous amounts of usable material, and that someone should build the market that puts it back into use. That was true when I started in 2020 and it is true now. Holding on to it through five years is the reason the company existed at all, and I would hold on to it again.
The second kind looked identical from the inside, but was made of guesses.
Suppliers would change how they worked if we built them a better product. Buyers would keep coming back to a marketplace where stock was unpredictable. The unit economics that worked on our first customers would hold and improve as we acquired more of them.
Every one of those was a hypothesis with a price tag on it. I carried them with the same certainty I carried the mission, because in my head they were the same conviction.
The rebuild is the clearest example.
We spent six months and a lot of money changing the product so that suppliers would behave differently. When it shipped, they behaved much as before.
The evidence had been sitting in our own dashboards for years, in how they used us, what they did with the goods we did not take and how they had responded the last time we made something easier for them.
Nobody went to look.
Looking would have meant asking whether the plan we were already building was the right one. In a company moving at that speed, that question can easily sound like doubt about the mission.
That is where the blind spot sits.
It is not spread evenly across everything you believe. It forms around the belief you are most invested in, at the point where being wrong is most expensive, and it is protected by the same conviction that got you that far.
Seeing past it is not a matter of character. I have stopped believing that more humility would have saved us.
It is a matter of having a moment where the question is expected rather than brave.
Two things make that moment happen.
The first is to write down, before each big commitment, the belief that commitment rests on, the evidence you have for it today and the result that would tell you it is wrong.
One page, before the hire or the build or the new market. And the belief to start with is the one that would cost you the most if it turned out to be false at the stage you are at now.
The second is to decide who goes and looks, and by when.
A question nobody owns dies in the meeting where it was raised.
There is a reason so few companies work this way. Founders were never taught to.
The habits and the playbook took shape over decades when money was cheap and plentiful, and being wrong was cheap along with it. A company could miss its numbers, raise again and carry the same untested belief for another two years because the next round arrived before the evidence did.
Speed was rewarded. Checking was not.
The habits outlived the money.
They were handed to a generation of founders who have never built a company in those years, through the stories we tell each other and through what gets taught.
Everyone knows the story of the Airbnb founders being turned down by investor after investor and selling cereal boxes to keep going. Nobody tells the far more common story of the founders who pushed through the doubters with the same conviction and turned out to be wrong, because nobody invites them to speak.
Entrepreneurship courses are built on the companies that won. So a founder arrives at her first round with a pitch and a growth plan, but not necessarily with the habit of asking which belief the money is about to test.
Investors have a part in this too.
A founder who pitches with visible uncertainty does not get funded. Pitch coaching teaches her to answer every difficult question with certainty.
Then, when the company struggles, that same certainty gets called stubbornness.
Perhaps we should ask a different question when a company raises money:
Which beliefs is this round supposed to test?
Founders prepare for whatever the money asks for.
So I think the investor I had talked to was right. But the sentence needs an ending.
Founders are stubborn, and they should be. You need conviction to build something that does not exist yet.
The problem starts when conviction turns a hypothesis into a fact, and the hypothesis could have been checked.
Sometimes the cost of checking is two weeks and a few thousand kroner. The cost of not checking can be six months, a lot of money and a product nobody needed.
I wish I had said that to her at the time.
I have spent a book saying it since.
The Avoidable Startup Failure is about telling those two kinds of belief apart, and testing the one that matters most before the money is committed.
In Norway, the signed edition is at anjali.no/book. Everywhere else, it is available on Amazon in hardcover, paperback and Kindle.