StartUp Founders: Reality ≠ Consensus
Dear Reader,
Your startup exists in multiple realities simultaneously.
You see a unicorn. They see a horse with an ice cream cone stuck to its head.
Same startup. Different realities. That gap between perceptions is where founders live every day… the space between what is and what’s perceived.
The investor who squints at your deck and diagnoses the wrong problem. The advisor who actually knows what’s holding you back. The prospect who can’t see why your solution matters. The team member who’s certain why that feature missed the mark.
All looking at the same data you are. All seeing something completely different.
It’s obviously just a communication problem. If only you explained it better. If only you highlighted the right metrics. If only you told the story differently.
It’s not a you problem. Well… it is you. It’s just you and everyone else.
It’s this gap between truth and perception. That forces you to recognize you are not only building a product but also building perception infrastructure.
The Reality Construction Site
The journey founders often have to find out for themselves, through long painful cycles, is that it’s not objective. Reality is constructed in real time through emotions, assumptions, timing, fear, bias, memory, noise, and ego.
Reality isn’t a fact. It’s a negotiation. It’s a mirror. Everyone sees their own reflection. And everyone is convinced that their reflection is the actual room.
This isn’t a love letter to you being misunderstood. It’s the opposite. A wake-up call to the universal truth that perception isn’t reality for anyone. The most dangerous distortion isn’t what others might miss. It’s what you miss.
A few times a year some college kid emails me about their dinner recommendation app: “We can’t decide where to eat. We end up at the same place. So let’s build an app that makes shared recommendations and splits the check.”
They’re not wrong. The problem feels real. But they’re solving the wrong thing. It’s not a discovery problem. It’s decision fatigue. It’s social inertia. It’s the Paradox of Choice. The same conversation I have in my house on a nightly basis.
Everyone in their group agrees the app makes sense. It doesn’t.
Consensus ≠ reality
Perceived utility ≠ usage.
The Perception Chasm
The 2015 dress photo that went viral because some people saw it as blue and black, while others saw it was white and gold. Same image. Different perceptions. It’s literally the perfect metaphor for the founder experience.
The pixels didn’t change. The data didn’t lie. But the reality each person experienced was fundamentally different.
Your startup is the dress. Your metrics are the pixels.
Perception isn’t passive. It’s active. We don’t just receive information. We construct it based on our past experiences, current needs, and future fears. (NOISE)
Your customers do it. Your investors do it. Your team does it. YOU DO IT.
Think about the last time someone seemed rude, didn’t hold the door or say thank you. Maybe they just got shitty news, lost in their own crisis? Maybe their internal reality is so f’d they didn’t even see you.
It’s rarely personal, but there you are building an entire narrative around it. It wasn’t about you. It rarely is. Main character energy!
A founder I coach built an AI tool that cuts proposal creation time by 70% for a very specific use case. The win rate for the few clients using it? Insane. Undeniable.
Yet still, prospects and investors reflexively ask: “What about ChatGPT?” There’s no amount of explaining that can bridge that gap. He has to find people who can see what he sees, until he has enough of them, to change what they see.
The Real Job
You think you’re building product. You are, go do that. But also you’re building perception infrastructure.
Every metric, milestone, market move. It’s not just about what is. It’s about how it’s seen, heard, and understood.
It’s more than just shipping features. It’s narrating, framing, and managing signal distortion in real time.
Instead of telling people what to think, you have to create experiences that lead to the right conclusions:
- Instead of assuming one big launch will change everything, create multiple moments of truth
- Instead of hoping the right people will see what you see, engineer revelation moments
- Instead of explaining complexity, create simple entry points that make the problem visceral
The Cognitive Tightrope
But what about your own distortion?
Disclaimer: Clever words courtesy of a clever friend:
This is where it gets neurologically painful. The cognitive dissonance that keeps you up at night because you must simultaneously:
- Maintain conviction in your vision when others don’t see it
- Question your own perception when it might be misleading you
It requires holding two contradictory thoughts in your mind every single day:
- I’m right about this thing everyone else is missing.
- I might be missing something everyone else sees.
And that second thought inevitably spirals into… What if I’m the one who’s wrong? What if I’m the delusional founder seeing patterns that just aren’t there?
This isn’t just hard. It’s against our biological wiring. The human brain desperately wants cognitive consistency, not contradiction.
So how do you do both? Who knows. Maybe a truth-seeking machine.
- Create systems that test your perceptions against reality, not opinions
- Find people who will tell you when your baby is ugly, but also when it’s beautiful
- Learn to distinguish signal from noise in yourself as rigorously as you do in your metrics
You have to build frameworks that make this navigation possible.
The Hidden Advantage
The gap between reality and perception isn’t a bug, like everything, it’s a feature!!
If everyone could immediately see and understand your vision exactly as you do, it probably wouldn’t be that innovative. The perception gap is both your greatest frustration and your greatest competitive advantage.
Truth isn’t obvious. Signal isn’t clean. Reality is not consensus.
But when you find those people who see the dress the same way you do? Those are your early adopters. Your true believers. Your aligned investors. They’re the ones who will help you build a reality where everyone else starts to see it too.
Your job isn’t just to build something great. It’s to make its greatness perceivable. Master the art of bridging the perception gap..
If this is you, I can probably help build that path within the hour. If I can be of service, feel free to grab time.
LFG.
— James