Understand their business, not your product
The most underrated skill in venture building has nothing to do with technology.
THE INVARIANCE
Issue #04 — May 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.
Most founders pitch what they built. The best ones pitch what the customer loses if they don’t change. Those are completely different conversations. Guess which one has a chance to close?
What understanding actually means
Not personas. Not user interviews. Not NPS scores. Those are proxies — useful proxies, but proxies nonetheless. Real understanding means something harder and more specific: knowing their P&L logic, their internal political structure, who owns the budget, and what failure looks like for the person sitting across the table from you.
It means knowing the difference between knowing someone uses your product and knowing what their job costs them when it goes wrong.
But there is one element that most people skip entirely, and it is the one that determines whether a deal moves or dies: the internal champion. Every large organisation has people whose incentives can be aligned with what you are building. A manager who needs a win before their next review cycle. A director with a genuine conviction that the problem you are solving matters. Someone whose compensation, promotion, or professional reputation gets better if you succeed.
Finding that person is not manipulation. It is how enterprise sales actually works. If your champion has no skin in the game, they will not fight for you when the budget committee asks hard questions. If they do have skin in the game — if solving this problem is also solving something for them — then you have an ally inside the organisation who will move things you cannot move from the outside.
“If your champion has no skin in the game, they will not fight for you when the budget committee asks hard questions.”
Map the organisation. Find the person whose interests align with yours. Then make sure they know it.
The role you think you play
When you enter a large enterprise relationship, you arrive with a theory of your own value. You know what your product does. You know the problem it solves on paper. What you do not know — and cannot know from the outside — is where you actually sit in their value chain, whose priorities you are serving, and what your success means in the context of their broader commercial logic.
That understanding does not arrive in a pitch meeting. It builds slowly, through conversations that seem unrelated, through the questions they ask that you didn’t expect, through watching how they talk about you internally when they think you aren’t listening. At some point, if you are paying attention, the picture sharpens. You realise the role you thought you were playing and the role you are actually playing are not the same thing.
That gap — between your theory of your value and their reality of it — is where most enterprise relationships stall. Closing it is not a product problem. It is a listening problem.
Why large organisations are a different game
Early in my career I worked inside the Intel and Apple collaboration on modem programs for the iPhone. These were fast American organisations by any standard — high execution speed, clear accountability, relentless focus on ship dates. And yet the product itself was extraordinarily complex. Modem programs involve hundreds of edge cases, deep hardware-software interdependencies, and regulatory requirements across dozens of markets. You could not have the whole picture from day one. Nobody did. You built it incrementally, through relationships and accumulated context, over years.
Large enterprises in any capital-intensive industry work the same way, but slower. The sales cycles are long. The decision-making structure involves more stakeholders than any org chart will show you. The people you meet in a first conversation are rarely the people who control the budget. And the organisation’s resistance to change is not stubbornness — it is the rational behaviour of a system that has spent decades building processes that work, client relationships that depend on reliability, and a workforce that follows well-greased procedures for good reason.
That same structural weight is also a position of strength. Large enterprise clients come with distribution, with brand credibility, with staff who know how to execute at scale. When they move, they move with force. The challenge is not convincing them that change is possible. It is convincing the right people, in the right order, that this particular change is worth the disruption.
“The organisation’s resistance to change is not stubbornness — it is the rational behaviour of a system that has spent decades building what works.”
That requires understanding their business at a level most founders never reach, because most founders stop at the product conversation.
What the agentic era changes — and what it doesn’t
The tools we have now have collapsed the cost of software execution. What took months takes days. A hypothesis can become a working prototype before the next meeting. That compression is real and it matters.
But it is important to be precise about what it collapses. It collapses the software side. For organisations that are heavy in hardware, semiconductors, physical manufacturing, or complex regulated processes, AI does not compress the cycle in the same way. The supply chain constraints are still real. The validation requirements are still real. The safety certifications are still real. AI can help those organisations move faster on specific sub-problems — improving yield, predicting failures, optimising schedules — but it does not dissolve the fundamental physics of operating in the physical world.
What this means for founders is precise: the execution advantage AI gives you is asymmetric. It is largest in software-heavy problems and smallest in hardware-heavy ones. In both cases, the understanding problem — knowing what to build, for whom, and why now — remains entirely yours. AI does not compress that. If anything, because execution is now so cheap, the cost of misunderstanding the customer has gone up. You can now build the wrong thing faster than ever.
Front-load the business thinking. Then execute at machine speed.
The invariant
Technology changes every cycle. Customer logic changes slowly — and the larger the organisation, the slower it changes. This is not a criticism. It is a structural reality. When you are trying to change a large organisation, you are not only affecting its processes and its P&L. You are affecting careers, internal hierarchies, existing vendor relationships, and sometimes the political balance between divisions that have been competing for resources for years.
The founders who endure are not the ones with the best technology. They are the ones who understood that before they wrote a single line of code, and let that understanding shape everything that came after.
The grey matter shift we talked about in a previous article is not abstract. This is what it looks like in practice. Spend it on the right problem.
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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