Issue #13 · September 27th 2026
I write about the things that don’t change in a world that won’t stop changing.
I believe adding real value is what gives us purpose, keeps us happy and improves our lives.
Ask anyone what a startup CEO does and you will get a version of the same list: fundraising, hiring, strategy, product, culture. All of that is real and all of it matters, but underneath all of it sits something more fundamental that almost never gets named, which is the ability to create a reality that does not exist yet and convince enough people that it will. Everything else in a venture is downstream of that one thing, whether the people running it know it or not.
The sequence
The order in which this happens matters more than most founders realise, and it is not optional. The conviction has to start with the person at the top, then move to the team around them, and only then reach the market. Skipping the first step makes the second collapse almost immediately, because people feel the absence of genuine belief long before they can put words to what is missing, and skipping the second makes the third impossible because you cannot sell to a market a vision that the people closest to the founder do not carry themselves.
This is not a strategy anyone chooses consciously. It is a law that operates whether the founder is aware of it or not, and most of what goes wrong in early ventures can be traced back to a failure at one of these three steps, or to attempting them in the wrong order. The pitch that lands technically but leaves investors with an inexplicable hesitation. The team that is aligned around a vision the founder has not yet fully made their own. The market conversation that starts too early, before the internal work has been done.
“This is not a strategy anyone chooses. It is a law that operates whether the founder is aware of it or not.”
Convincing yourself
This is the hardest step and the least discussed, partly because the most visible founders seem to do it effortlessly and partly because the ones who struggle with it rarely talk about the struggle in public.
Building a startup is a bet on something that does not yet exist, which means the founder has to be the first customer of that bet before any evidence exists to support it, before anyone else has signed on, and before the market has given any signal that the direction is right. There is no traction to point to at this stage, no reference customer to name, no proof of anything except the clarity of the belief itself held in one person’s head and strong enough to act on.
What makes this particularly interesting is that first-time founders often do it without thinking about it at all. The ones who jumped from a well-paid job or spun out of a corporate or left a safe career to build something tend to irradiate belief, because they are genuinely in love with what they are doing and with the specific part of the venture that corresponds to where they come from. Founders with an engineering background fall in love with the technical challenge, the complexity of making things work together into something scalable and real. Founders with a business or finance background fall in love with the commercial architecture, the model, the market logic. Whatever the domain, the love for that specific dimension of the venture is so strong and so visible that it becomes contagious almost automatically, and the task of creating belief in others gets done without the founder ever having to think of it as a task.
The problem shows up later, when the initial love becomes complicated by setbacks, by team friction, by a market that takes longer than expected to respond, or by the simple accumulated weight of years of building something uncertain. That is when creating belief stops being a natural byproduct of enthusiasm and starts requiring deliberate effort, and most founders were never prepared for that shift because the first time around it just happened on its own.
Convincing the team
Once the conviction is genuine it becomes transmissible, not through slides or all-hands meetings or carefully crafted mission statements, but through the quality of the belief itself in every small interaction. People can feel the difference between a leader who has fully internalised the vision and one who is still in the process of selling something they are not completely sure about, and the difference shows up in places that are hard to fake: in how they answer a hard question under pressure, in whether they hesitate before committing, in how they talk about the company in informal moments when nobody is supposed to be paying attention.
What the team needs is not certainty about the outcome, because outcomes at this stage are genuinely uncertain and pretending otherwise creates its own set of problems. What they need is certainty about the person, the sense that the founder has made the vision completely their own and will not waver under pressure, and that certainty is what allows people to take the very personal risk of joining something that does not exist yet and betting a meaningful piece of their professional life on it becoming real.
The art of the story
Conviction alone is not enough. The founder also needs to be able to tell the story of the reality they are creating in a way that makes it feel inevitable to the person listening, and this is where the craft dimension enters, because storytelling at this level is genuinely an art and not a communication technique or a presentation skill that can be absorbed in a workshop.
The founders who have it at the highest level, the ones who built companies that should not have existed on paper but somehow did, were almost always exceptional storytellers who made people feel like they were already living in the future the founder was describing. The story was so vivid and so internally consistent that saying no felt like refusing to board a train that was already moving. Adam Neumann told a story about physical space and human energy and community that was compelling enough to move billions of dollars into a company whose underlying economics never worked. Sam Altman has been telling a story about the future of intelligence for years in a way that has shaped how an entire industry thinks about what it is building. The storytelling in both cases is real, whatever one thinks about the outcomes.
The difference between storytelling that compounds a venture and storytelling that eventually collapses it is whether the story is grounded in a real insight about a real problem that a real market has. When the story and the underlying reality are aligned and moving in the same direction, the storytelling amplifies the conviction instead of replacing it, and that is the version worth studying and worth trying to develop.
“When the story and the underlying reality are aligned, the storytelling amplifies the conviction instead of replacing it.”
Convincing the market
By the time a founder is in front of customers, investors, or partners, the conviction has already been stress-tested twice: first against their own doubt, and then against the scrutiny of people who know them well enough to push back honestly. What arrives in that room is not a pitch in the traditional sense but the residue of a belief that has already survived contact with reality more than once, and that accumulated solidity is exactly what makes the difference between a presentation that informs and one that actually moves people to act.
A vision that has not been through that process feels like a vision. A vision that has feels like a plan, and people respond to those two things very differently when real money and real commitments are on the table.
“A vision that has not been through that process feels like a vision. A vision that has feels like a plan.”
The invariant
The tools change, the markets change, the technologies change, and the fundraising environment shifts with every cycle. What does not change is the fundamental task of the person at the front of any new venture: to create a reality that does not yet exist, to make it completely their own to the point where the doubt is resolved rather than suppressed, to tell the story of that reality with enough art and enough grounding in truth that it feels inevitable to the people listening, to transmit it to the team around them with enough fidelity that those people can carry it when the founder is not in the room, and then to take it to a market where strangers will decide whether to bet their money, their time, or their trust on whether the vision is right.
That is not a skill that appears in an org chart or gets captured in a performance review. It cannot be delegated, systematised, or automated. It is the most human thing in the building, and it is the thing that everything else depends on.
Fernando Martín is Managing Director of NEXMO Movement Data Hub (UC3M), Venture Builder at Creative Dock, and founder of Eccocar. He writes here about venture building, AI agent operations, and the European technology landscape.
The Invariance — by Fernando Martín In a constantly evolving world, only value is the invariance that holds everything together.