In partnership with

Hey guys - this week we're diving into another counterintuitive lesson: don't listen to your investors too much in the early days.

The venture capital ecosystem has created an unwritten rule that founders should hang on every word their investors say. After all, these are the people who've seen hundreds of companies scale, navigated multiple market cycles, and literally bet millions on your success.

But what if this advice is backwards? What if being too receptive to investor guidance early on actually hurts your chances of building something truly innovative?

After chatting with Chris McCall from Fotokite, we discovered there's a different approach to the founder-investor relationship that may be a bit tough to swallow for investors. (PS: if you want to hear more about the Fotokite story you can check out our last feature of them here)

Instead of being immediately deferential to investor wisdom, Fotokite's breakthrough came from trusting their instincts early and listening carefully later.

Their counterintuitive discovery: sometimes the fastest way to build something innovative is to ignore what investors think they know about your market.

Investor wisdom everywhere!

The conventional narrative around founder-investor relationships is compelling: smart money comes with smart advice, and founders should be immediately receptive to guidance from experienced investors who've "seen this movie before."

VCs love to talk about their "pattern recognition" and "value-add beyond capital." The thinking goes that if you're not leveraging investor expertise from day one, you're missing out on decades of collective wisdom.

Why founders get hooked on early investor advice

During Fotokite's early days, the team fell into the classic founder trap of trying to be too smart about investor selection:

• Smart money appeal: They wanted investors who brought "more value than just the money"

• Pattern recognition: VCs had seen other hardware companies scale

• Experience gap: As first-time founders, they felt they needed all the help they could get

• Validation seeking: Investor approval felt like market validation

The problem? They were all engineers focused on building something genuinely different—a tethered drone system so simple "anybody could use it." But early-stage investor advice often optimizes for proven patterns, not breakthrough innovation.

The hidden problems with early investor deference:

• Pattern matching kills innovation: Investors push toward "proven" models that may not fit your unique solution

• Premature optimization: Focus shifts to metrics and frameworks before product-market fit is established

• Lost experimental period: Broad exploration gets curtailed in favor of focused execution

• Founder confidence erosion: Second-guessing core instincts based on investor "experience"

Chris learned this lesson through Fotokite's three-year exploration period:

That extended exploration period—which might have made investors nervous—ultimately led to their breakthrough in the public safety market.

So ignore investors completely?

No, ignoring investors entirely isn't the answer. There's never one right approach for every startup.

The key insight from Fotokite's journey is timing. Early-stage companies need to establish their own product vision and market understanding before they can effectively filter and apply investor advice.

Chris doesn't suggest dismissing investor guidance forever. Instead, he demonstrates how the founder-investor relationship should evolve as the company matures.

The transformation happened when Fotokite had enough market knowledge to distinguish good advice from pattern-matching noise. By then, they could leverage investor experience without compromising their core innovation.

What this means for you

Chris’s wisdom suggests that your approach to investor guidance should evolve as your startup matures: 

Phase 1 (Pre-Product/Early Product): Trust your instincts early, when patterns don't exist yet - You're not optimizing an existing system; you're creating something new. That requires different thinking than investor pattern recognition provides.

Phase 2 (Product-Market Fit): Once you've established product-market fit, investor wisdom about scaling, partnerships, and operational challenges becomes invaluable. At this stage investors become strategic advisors, helping identify patterns from their portfolio experience and suggesting operational improvements.

Phase 3 (Scale): Investors provide operational expertise, network connections, and pattern recognition from similar scaling challenges they've seen before.

Are we telling you to really ignore your investors? Probably not, but maybe start asking yourself: is this advice helping me innovate or just making me feel validated?

If you enjoyed this issue, please share it with fellow founders, operators, & investors and fill out our feedback form below:

See you next week!

Rahul & Aryaman