Momentum
When it's there, everything feels possible. When it's gone, you notice every crack.
Issue #10 · August 1st 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.
There is a moment in every project when everything clicks. The team is tuned in, decisions land fast, the market responds, and you feel like the wind is behind you regardless of what you do next. Hiring feels easier. Conversations close faster. The next step feels obvious before you’ve finished thinking about it.
That feeling is real. It is also fragile. And most people don’t notice it leaving until it’s already gone.
What momentum actually is
Not enthusiasm. Not a good quarter. Not a team that gets along.
Momentum is the compounding of small wins, aligned energy, and external validation into a force that lowers the activation energy for everything around it. When it’s present it feels structural, like a property of the project itself rather than something generated by the people inside it. Decisions that would normally require three meetings get made in one. People volunteer solutions before the problem has been fully stated. The market leans in.
When it’s absent, the same actions feel like pushing against resistance that wasn’t there before. Not because the work changed. Because the force that was making it easier has gone, and now you can feel the actual weight of everything.
“When momentum is present it feels structural. When it’s absent you feel the actual weight of everything.”
When it goes
It rarely leaves dramatically. It cools.
Gradually the friction starts accumulating on different fronts at the same time. A hire that doesn’t work out. A deal that stalls without a clear reason. An investor who responds slower than they used to. A team meeting that used to feel energising that now feels like maintenance. A partner who takes four days to reply where they once took four hours.
None of these individually would matter. Deals stall. Inboxes fill up. People get busy. But when several of them happen simultaneously, the texture of the work changes. The tailwind is gone. Every decision now requires more force than it did before.
In a startup, in a career, in a long project, this pattern repeats. The peaks feel like the natural state. The troughs feel like something has gone wrong. Usually nothing specific has. The compounding just stopped, and now you’re running on the underlying fundamentals instead of the force that was amplifying them.
Real or perceived
Here is the uncomfortable question: is it real or is it in people’s heads?
Do teams lose momentum because something objectively changed, or because people get less excited over time and the friction is mostly psychological? Does the investor go quiet because the opportunity changed, or because the energy in the room at the last meeting was different and they felt it without naming it?
The honest answer is probably both, and that makes it harder to diagnose. Because if the momentum loss is real you need to change something external. If it’s perceived you need to change something internal. And if it’s both, you need to know which is driving which before you do anything. Acting on the wrong diagnosis accelerates the problem.
What seems clear is that momentum has a social dimension that pure execution metrics don’t capture. It lives partly in the belief of the people around you. And belief, once it starts to waver, is harder to restore than almost any operational problem.
Reading the room, one person at a time
Some people don’t notice when momentum leaves. They keep pitching with the same energy to a room that stopped leaning in three meetings ago. They miss the investor who has gone politely quiet, the team member who stopped volunteering ideas, the partner whose replies got shorter. These are signals. They are not subtle once you know what to look for.
But not everyone looks. Some founders operate at the level of the project, tracking metrics, managing milestones, reading the aggregate. Others operate at the level of each individual relationship inside the project. They notice the cooling before it becomes cold. They feel the shift in a single conversation before it shows up in the numbers.
Whether that is emotional intelligence or pattern recognition built from enough cycles of gain and loss is an open question. What is clear is that founders who have it operate differently. They don’t just manage the momentum of the venture. They manage the momentum of each relationship that holds the venture together. And in a world where you are trying to make real something that doesn’t yet exist, where uncertainty is the only constant and belief is the primary raw material, that ability to read and shape individual momentum is one of the most underrated skills a founder can have.
“Belief, once it starts to waver, is harder to restore than almost any operational problem.”
What you can do
Momentum can be rebuilt but not faked. Manufactured enthusiasm without underlying substance accelerates the loss rather than reversing it. People feel the difference.
What does work is small, visible forward motion. A closed deal. A shipped feature. A new partner announced. A metric that moved in the right direction. These matter disproportionately when the tailwind is gone because they lower activation energy artificially while the real thing rebuilds. The team needs to see something moving. Not a vision slide. Something that actually moved.
The worst response is to wait for momentum to return on its own. It doesn’t. It is rebuilt deliberately, relationship by relationship, win by win, until the compounding starts again. That process is slower and harder than it looks from the outside. It requires the same energy as building momentum the first time, but without the excitement of starting something new.
The invariant
Momentum is not a given. It is a result of alignment, of early wins, of a market that responds, of relationships maintained with enough care that the belief inside them stays alive.
The projects that sustain it longest are not the ones that never lose it. They are the ones where someone noticed it leaving early enough. Not at the project level, but at the level of each person, each conversation, each relationship that the whole thing depends on. Early enough to do something about it before the cooling became cold.
That recognition is the skill. The rest is just execution.
Fernando Martín is Managing Director of NEXMO Movement Data Hub (UC3M), Venture Builder at MOVEN, 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.
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