I've been in rooms with a lot of founders over the past few years. Different industries. Different stages. Different backgrounds. The ones who build something that lasts share something I didn't expect when I first started paying attention to it. They're not the most confident people in the room. They're the most curious. They talk about the problem obsessively. Not the product, not the company, not the fundraise. The problem. What's broken, why it's broken, why everyone else has got it slightly wrong. They're also comfortable being uncertain for longer than most people can stand. Building something new means living with questions that don't have answers yet. The founders who need certainty too early make decisions too early, and usually the wrong ones. The last thing: they know exactly what they're not building. The clearest founders I've met have a sharper sense of what they've decided not to do than what they have. That discipline is what keeps a company focused when everything around it is pulling in different directions. Skills matter. Experience matters. But I've seen highly skilled people build nothing of value, and people with no obvious advantages build things that change industries. The difference is almost never what's on paper.