Early in my career, I pitched a mentor to invest in my startup.
He paused, looked at me, and said:
"Noah, you're a 9/10 entrepreneur solving a 2/10 problem."
I was stunned. It took me years to understand what he meant.
He wasn't doubting my ability to execute. He was questioning my target. I had picked something I could build, not something worth building.
The Problem
Today, as an investor, I see it all the time: AI-native, Ivy-educated, hustler, hyper-networked founders building slightly better CRMs or launching the 87th "social network for X."
It's not a talent gap. It's a calibration gap.
These are smart people. Driven people. People who could genuinely build almost anything. The tragedy isn't that they can't execute. It's that they've aimed at the wrong target.
A 9/10 founder solving a 2/10 problem will still lose to a 6/10 founder who found a 9/10 problem. Every time.
The Lesson
One of the hardest lessons I've learned: just because you can build it, doesn't mean you should.
The ability to build something is a dangerous thing if you haven't first asked whether it deserves to exist. Execution without calibration is just fast travel in the wrong direction.
The Question
Now every opportunity I evaluate starts with one question: "Is this a problem worthy of my best years?"
It's not "Could I sell this?" But "Would I be proud to have built it?"
Self-awareness is one of the human skills I explore in The Human Skills That Make Us Irreplaceable.
How to Find the Right Problem
I've started asking founders three things before anything else:
First: have you lived this problem? Not read about it. Lived it. The best founders I've backed had scars from the exact thing they were trying to fix.
Second: who else is working on this? If the answer is nobody, that's a warning sign, not a green light. No competition usually means no market, not a blue ocean.
Third: could you work on this for ten years if the money never came? Because the problems worth solving almost always take longer than you think.
Get the problem right first. The execution is the easy part.
Conclusion
Stop building what you can. Start building what you should.
Follow me on LinkedIn for more content like this.
It's the same judgment I lean on as an investor, which I unpack in investing through economic uncertainty.
