Climbing the Wrong Mountain: When Founders Build Around Familiar Problems

The first check I ever wrote into Edward Woodford of ZeroHash went into a company that doesn't exist anymore. He was building an exchange for alternative commodities, futures on markets where some weird regulatory friction had scared everyone else off. My favorite artifact of that world is that it's still illegal to trade onion futures in this country. In the 1950s a couple of guys cornered the onion market, the onion lobby (there was an onion lobby) got Congress to ban the contract, and the ban stuck. Polymarket and the CME can list a future on almost anything now. They still can't touch onions.

Edward had a master's in finance, an MIT stamp that gave him more credibility than either of us should have trusted, and a deep, almost academic conviction that if he could just get the thing licensed, he'd have a business.

He got it licensed. Then he looked up and realized he was about ten years too early.

We talked about this last week on a Founder Unfriendly AMA, and he put it better than I could. He'd treated regulation as a sufficient condition for success when it was only a necessary one. Getting licensed was the whole company in his head. It turned out to be the price of admission to a game he hadn't started playing.

That mistake is the reason ZeroHash exists. The second company was the inversion of the first. ZeroHash doesn't make anyone successful. It lets people become successful more easily. It clears the necessary condition, the regulated part everyone else avoids, and hands you back the rest of the problem, which was always yours to solve. Edward spent two years learning the expensive way that clearing the hard technical bar is not the same as having a company.

He has a name for this now. He calls it the sequence of mountains. You fixate on the one in front of you, get the license, get the product built, get the book out, and you climb it with everything you have. The problem is that there's another mountain behind it, and another behind that, and the discipline almost nobody has is sending someone to start up the next one before you've finished the first.

I spent an hour last week with a founder who's standing on top of the wrong mountain and doesn't know it yet.

He's a designer, twenty-five years making beautiful things for the home at brands you'd recognize. He's building a physical product for the kitchen, in a category everyone assumes is finished, and his version is, objectively, gorgeous. He spent two and a half years and several trips overseas getting it to the point where it can actually be manufactured, which is the real reason a thing like this doesn't already exist. The material he built around is a nightmare to engineer. That same choice is why his economics are better than the incumbents', because it runs in small batches where the conventional approach forces orders in the tens of thousands of identical units. He knows the category cold, every unit volume and every margin. He has patents filed. He has the thing in his hands.

His deck spends slide after slide establishing, beautifully, that he can build the product. The materials, the engineering, the certifications, the accessories, the consumables that turn a one-time purchase into a subscription. Every slide is a flex of competence about the thing he's already extraordinary at.

The thing that actually decides whether he has a company isn't in the deck at all.

He has no idea whether he can reach a customer cost-effectively, because he's never had to. His whole career, the audience was already there. He designed inside brands that had spent decades and fortunes building the channel he plugged into. Now he's starting from zero, the platforms have made virality close to impossible (it's hard enough to get the people who already follow you to see your stuff), and his answer to "how will you reach buyers" is a number in a marketing budget. Not a person who's done it. Not a playbook from a launch like his. A line item. I asked who was going to spend that money, which operator would run the pre-launch capture and the ad flow and the whole motion, and the answer was no one yet.

That's the lesson, and it's the one Edward paid two years for. You climb the mountain that matches who you already are. The markets academic obsesses over the license. The product designer obsesses over the product. Each one climbs the mountain he already knows how to climb and puts off the one he doesn't, the one he keeps promising to hire someone for later. The mountain you put off is almost always the one that decides whether the company lives.

The fix isn't to admire the problem. It's to start up the second mountain now, in parallel, because it takes longer than you think. Years ago a portfolio company of mine, TinyBop, put a grad student on a weekly newsletter of beautiful things for kids, puzzles and games and the stuff their future buyers already loved, and grew it to fifteen thousand obsessed readers before they had a product to sell. When they finally dropped the app, it spiked the App Store on day one, because the audience was already standing there. I have a founder right now building a machine that cuts the production time on high-end wigs by ninety-five percent, a genuinely hard, multi-year build. The reason I have almost no anxiety about her is that over those same years she built an email list of fifty thousand people. She's an eleven out of ten on the question that sinks most hardware founders: when you're ready to release the hounds, who are you releasing them on?

This founder is sitting on the perfect tool for that and treating it like a risk. A presale. If somebody set up the campaign tomorrow off his existing deck and sold fifteen hundred units, that's not a problem to manage. That's the best thing that could happen to the company. It answers, in public and with money, the two questions his deck can't: do people want this, and can this team create demand from a standing start. The product, by then, is the easy part. The audience never is.

None of this is "ideas are cheap, execution is everything." It's narrower than that. Founders keep mistaking the mountain that's hardest for them for the mountain that's hardest for the business, and pour their best years into the first while the second sits there unclimbed.

If you've gotten far enough to put a deck in front of me, you can probably build the thing. The real question is whether you've spent two years climbing the mountain you already knew how to climb.