Domain expert founders: Perfect is the enemy of the good
Tl;dr When we were building SupplyShift, we knew how to make the perfect platform for our customers. Or so we thought (spoiler alert, we didn’t). We planned for everything the market SHOULD need. But if the market is figuring out how to walk, your perfect race bike is not the solution, no matter how well thought out. Domain expertise is a strength that can turn into a trap.
I started my career as a climate scientist. In academia, you’re trained to ensure that anything you publish or present has to be based on extensive data. If you’re unsure, you gather more evidence. You run more analyses. You wait until you’re confident you can fully support your statements.
That instinct is useful in research, but it rarely works in business.
When I moved into building companies, I thought deep domain expertise would be the hard part. Although it helped, for sure, but it was far from the hardest part. The harder part was learning how to turn that expertise into something people would actually use, but almost always without perfect information.
Domain experts have real advantages as founders. They’ve lived with the problem for years, they know what’s structural and what’s just noise. They tend to pick real problems, not trendy ones, or bring the same solution to lots of problems. And customers usually trust them faster, because they’ve “been there”, so that depth is a serious edge. Gives an edge for investment conversations as well.
And yet, it’s also a trap.
Experts tend to overbuild. We want things to be right before they’re useful, we try and cover all the edge cases. We delay launches until it’s “perfect” (whatever that is). We fall in love with solutions that are important… but not always buyable.
In the early days of SupplyShift, we definitely did this. We built features we knew companies would need someday. They were thoughtful, they were robust. They were… far too broad, and way ahead of where most companies actually were in their journey.
We were solving for where we thought the market should be — not where it was.
We also tended to speak in expert language, while our customers are just trying to get through their day. And maybe hardest: we’re attached to how things should work, when startups are about learning how things actually work.
The real shift isn’t from expert to founder. It’s from being right to being useful, and about optimizing for the right thing: not “truth” but customer adoption and value.
So, if you’re a domain expert building (or thinking about building) a company:
• Prepare to ship before you’re proud, and sell before you’re comfortable
• Trust your gut, because you will have to decide with imperfect data
• Hire people who challenge your assumptions, and who are not domain experts, but know how to run a particular part of your business better than you.
And for VCs, if you’re backing a domain expert founder:
Don’t confuse “rough edges in business” with “lack of ability.” Help them learn speed and business mindset without it looking like you’re asking to abandon rigor.
Some of the best companies I’ve seen were built by people who knew their space deeply, and learned, often painfully, how to let go of the academic data obsession and realizing that perfect is the enemy of the good.
