Beyond the Echo Chamber
Why founders should seek external perspectives to avoid blind spots
The biggest mistakes don’t arise from stupidity, but from certainty. Founders in particular, who are deeply immersed in their subject matter, run the risk of settling into an intellectual comfort zone. The so-called echo chamber — the reinforcement of one’s own convictions through selective perception and feedback loops — is not a phenomenon exclusive to social media. It also operates in startup life. And it works there in particularly subtle ways.
In the early phase of a company, much is geared toward speed, focus, and conviction. Those who found companies must make decisions under uncertainty and need inner clarity to do so. Yet precisely this clarity can quickly turn into self-confirmation — and that’s when it becomes dangerous.
Typical symptoms: Internal micromanagement due to lack of trust. A culture of confirmation where criticism is understood not as an invitation but as an attack. And a self-reinforcing filter bubble consisting of the founding team, investor-friendly advisors, and like-minded partners who nod more than they contradict.
Deep-tech startups are particularly susceptible to these dynamics. Their founding teams often consist of specialists with high academic or technological excellence. The product is at the center. Scientific logic shapes decision-making — and not infrequently, their conception of the market as well. The problem: research is not market feedback. What convinces in theory doesn’t automatically prevail in practice.
Moreover, deep-tech teams often work in small circles for years. They interact with few selected stakeholders — frequently in the context of funding projects, laboratories, or pilot customers. Exchange remains limited, and diversity of perspectives is displaced by the necessity to focus. Such structures don’t generate second-order innovations — but rather incremental optimizations within an established school of thought [1].
Those who persist in these patterns may develop brilliant technology — but not a viable company.
Cognitive Biases: When Founders Get in Their Own Way
The greatest risks for founders don’t arise from external circumstances, but from their own thinking errors. Three particularly insidious cognitive biases can jeopardize a startup’s success:
Confirmation Bias — The Confirmation Error
People tend to interpret information in ways that confirm their existing beliefs. This selective perception can lead to overlooking critical clues and making poor decisions. For example, founders might only seek feedback from well-meaning individuals and ignore critical voices, leading to a distorted view of market needs.
Overconfidence — The Trap of Self-Overestimation [2]
Excessive confidence in one’s own abilities can lead founders to underestimate risks and ignore warning signals. This arrogance can manifest in overly ambitious growth plans or the neglect of market analyses. According to Forbes, many entrepreneurs overestimate their abilities and underestimate challenges, leading to poor decisions.
Wishful Thinking in Business Planning
Founders may tend to make their business plans too optimistic by projecting unrealistic revenue expectations or market shares. This wishful thinking can deceive investors and lead to financial bottlenecks when reality falls short of expectations. Careful and realistic planning is therefore crucial for long-term success.
Social Isolation: When Founders Are Trapped in Their Own Network
While cognitive biases often work unconsciously, the social isolation of founding teams has structurally deeper causes — and often more serious consequences. This isolation often arises through homogeneous team compositions, limited external sparring partners, and lack of access to critical voices. But what exactly does this mean?
Homogeneous Teams: Same Education, Same Bubble
Founding teams frequently consist of people with similar backgrounds, whether in education, professional experience, or social origin. This homogeneity can lead to a lack of diversity of perspectives, which limits the team’s capacity for innovation and problem-solving. Studies show that diverse teams are generally more creative and successful, as they bring different viewpoints and experiences [3].
Hardly Any Sparring Outside of Investors or Operational Partners
Many founders rely primarily on feedback from investors or operational partners. While these groups can offer valuable insights, critical sparring is often missing — the kind necessary to identify blind spots and develop innovative solutions. An article in Forbes Austria [4] emphasizes the importance of entrepreneurial sparring between VCs and startups to promote crisis-resistant foundations.
Lack of Access to Critical Voices
In many cases, founders lack access to independent, critical voices that question their assumptions and strategies. This can lead to overlooking potential problems and missing opportunities. Some studies identify internal conflicts and lack of diversity in the founding team as common reasons for startup failure.
Structural Bottlenecks: When Operational Pressure Displaces Strategic Thinking
While social isolation often arises from homogeneous networks, it’s the structural bottlenecks in many startups’ daily operations that hinder long-term thinking. The permanent operational pressure leaves little room for reflection, systematic feedback, and understanding of broader contexts.
In the hustle and bustle of startup life, there’s hardly time to pause and reflect on one’s own actions. Yet precisely this reflection is crucial for learning from experiences, making strategic decisions, better understanding development processes, and improving future activities.
Without established feedback processes, valuable knowledge remains untapped. Regular, structured feedback enables continuous improvement of products and processes. Forbes [5] emphasizes that an effective feedback loop is crucial for understanding customer needs and staying competitive.
Furthermore, excessive focus on product development can cause the bigger picture to slip from view. A holistic understanding of the value chain and market mechanisms is essential for sustainable success. The concept of systems thinking in the product development process emphasizes the necessity of considering interdisciplinary questions and incorporating different perspectives.
Market Perspective: Why Founders Must Dare to Look Beyond Their Own Horizon
Another challenge is that many startups don’t comprehensively understand their market. A common mistake is concentrating on early adopters — those first users who enthusiastically embrace innovations. While their feedback is valuable, they don’t represent the broad masses. A product that resonates with early adopters doesn’t necessarily meet mainstream needs. Therefore, it’s crucial to also speak with potential non-customers to identify blind spots and adapt the product accordingly.
Moreover, it’s important not to equate market knowledge with achieving product-market fit. While product-market fit describes the alignment between product and market need, genuine market knowledge goes beyond this. It encompasses a deep understanding of market trends, customer behavior, and competitive landscapes. Through continuous market analyses, startups can make informed decisions and successfully position themselves in competition.
Comprehensive market understanding enables founders not only to respond to existing needs but also to proactively shape future developments. This requires the courage to look beyond one’s own product focus and systematically incorporate external perspectives into corporate strategy.
Systems Perspective: Why Founders Must Think Beyond the Product
While the market perspective helps understand customer needs, the systems perspective enables a holistic view of the entire value chain. Startups that focus exclusively on their product risk overlooking crucial external factors that can significantly influence success.
Exchange with experts from adjacent areas such as regulation, policy, or logistics is essential for making one’s own business model robust and future-ready. These perspectives help identify potential challenges early and develop corresponding strategies.
A successful product alone doesn’t guarantee market success. Only through understanding and integration into existing value chains can a startup achieve sustainable impact. This requires a shift in thinking: away from isolated product focus toward a systemic approach that considers all relevant actors and processes.
An example of systems thinking is the US startup Twelve. The company develops technologies for converting CO₂ into chemical building blocks such as plastics, fuels, and additives for consumer goods. Twelve doesn’t just think in products, but in entire supply chains: Together with partners like Mercedes-Benz, Procter & Gamble, and LanzaTech, the company works to replace fossil inputs in industrial production — for instance in vehicle components, packaging, or cleaning products.
These partnerships go far beyond classic pilot projects. They are part of long-term industrial cooperations where regulatory requirements, scaling strategies, and infrastructure questions are considered from the beginning. This makes it clear: Those who think in value creation systems from the start not only increase their own resilience — but actively help shape industrial transformation.
Meta-Perspective — Reflection Beyond the Daily Noise
Founders are often caught in constant operational fire: funding rounds, product roadmaps, team leadership, stakeholder management. What quickly gets lost is the view of one’s own actions — not just in the areas of action. This is precisely where the meta-perspective comes in: Coaches, experienced advisors, venture studios, or science-adjacent clusters offer spaces where not operational excellence, but strategic reflection is at the center.
The quality of decisions depends not only on available knowledge, but on how alternatives are considered. Research from innovation studies shows that founders with access to structured sparring make significantly better strategic decisions — especially in early phases with high uncertainty [6].
What distinguishes successful sparring partners is not their proximity — but their distance. Good coaches or strategic advisors are not yes-men, but challenge hypotheses, ask uncomfortable questions, and reflect contradictions. This targeted disruption helps recognize thinking errors, question narratives, and discover options beyond familiar categories.
We at COSMICGOLD work with founding teams not only on business models or pitch decks, but on strategic clarity. This often involves exposing the implicit operating system of a startup — and deliberately developing it further. Such meta-perspectives are particularly valuable when teams are stuck or need to decide between growth options.
Especially in the tension field of impact, technology, and complexity, reflection spaces are crucial for making decisions not just faster, but better. Those who focus exclusively on operational efficiency and product development often miss the chance to critically adjust their own actions — and thus lose not only time, but strategic effectiveness.
Whether through innovation clusters like the BioInnovation Institute in Copenhagen or deep-tech venture studios like COSMICGOLD: The investment in structured, external sparring pays off not in quarters, but in strategic course-setting.
Practical Ways Out of the Echo Chamber
Many founders seek exchange — but often end up in homogeneous founding communities that primarily confirm themselves. Startup events, LinkedIn formats, or demo days frequently serve more for external presentation than for critical sparring. What’s missing is honest, substance-based exchange on equal footing. Peer networks that offer this depth focus on shared challenges rather than self-presentation. It requires trustworthy spaces where weaknesses, doubts, and false assumptions can also be voiced — otherwise everything remains facade.
In many startups, advisory boards are PR instruments: a few big names on the website, strategically placed for fundraising. But in their actual role — as critical corrective — they are often underutilized or not involved at all. Well-managed advisory boards can help founding teams recognize thinking errors, set strategic directions, or identify blind spots. McKinsey emphasizes in “The Board Perspective” [7] that effective boards should not be limited to formal control functions but can actively contribute to the strategic alignment and resilience of the company. This requires open dialogue and trustworthy collaboration between board and management.
While many incubators and accelerators are primarily optimized for pitch-readiness and fundraising, venture studios like COSMICGOLD offer a different approach: They start earlier — at the level of systems understanding, market logics, and roles in the ecosystem. Here, technological, regulatory, and societal perspectives are systematically linked together. The result is not just better products, but more viable business models. An analysis by the Global Startup Studio Network (GSSN) [8] shows: Startups from venture studios have a significantly higher survival rate — not just because of capital, but because of context.
A simple practice that is often underestimated: Regular challenge sessions with experts who don’t come from one’s own industry. Whether philosophers, lawyers, or journalists — external perspectives disrupt entrenched narratives. Particularly effective: Questioners who have no direct interest in the product’s success. The format “Devil’s Advocate Sessions,” as used by companies like IDEO or X (Alphabet’s Moonshot Factory), serves exactly this purpose.
Not everything needs institutional formats. Personal rituals can also help regularly question one’s own operational blindness. A simple tool is the monthly bias check in the founding team: Which assumption was confirmed last month? Which went unquestioned? Where do we tend toward wishful thinking? Articles like “Outsmart Your Own Biases” from Harvard Business Review [9] show: Teams that systematically address cognitive biases make consistently better decisions — not because they are more objective, but because they are aware of their subjectivity.
Those Who Contradict Themselves Build Better Companies
Contradictions are not a weakness — they are a sign of reflection and growth. Particularly founders who are willing to critically question their own assumptions and integrate external perspectives create companies that are more resilient and innovative. External voices are not a sign of insecurity, but an expression of leadership strength that actively manages complexity and uncertainty.
Many leaders shy away from accepting criticism — out of fear of losing control or doubting their own competence. But exactly the opposite is the case: Those who listen strategically and consciously seek perspectives outside their own environment avoid the dangerous tunnel vision that leads to blind spots. Studies show that companies with heterogeneous leadership teams and open feedback achieve significantly better innovation success [10].
Technological challenges can often be solved through know-how and investments. The real risk lies in mental bottlenecks and blind spots that cause strategic misjudgments. Those who act only from their own perspective overlook market changes, customer needs, or regulatory developments — and thus fall behind. External sparring partners help recognize and defuse these risks early [11].
Those who listen learn to anticipate. This active inclusion of perspectives outside one’s own cosmos makes it possible to recognize developments earlier and react agilely — before the market or competition does. Companies that take this path secure a competitive advantage and remain innovative. Because those who seek dialogue create access to tomorrow’s solutions.
Sources:
[1] https://pubs.aip.org/physicstoday/article/74/10/42/397321/The-road-from-academia-to
[2] https://www.forbes.com/councils/forbesbusinesscouncil/2025/04/28/the-overconfidence-trap-why-many-startups-fail/
[3] https://www.bertelsmann-stiftung.de/fileadmin/files/BSt/Bibliothek/Doi_Publikationen/Startups_und_soziale_Herkunft_.pdf
[4] https://www.forbes.at/artikel/unternehmerisches-sparring-zwischen-vc-und-start-up-das-neue-erfolgsrezept-fuer-krisenfeste-gruendungen
[5] https://www.forbes.com/councils/forbestechcouncil/2024/09/16/how-to-build-a-strong-feedback-loop-for-your-tech-startup/
[6] https://hbr.org/2013/10/who-advises-the-entrepreneur
[7] https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/strategy-and-corporate-finance/our-insights/inside-the-strategy-room-podcast/the-board-perspective
[8] https://morrow.co/disrupting-the-venture-studio-landscape/
[9] https://hbr.org/2015/05/outsmart-your-own-biases
[10] https://hbr.org/2016/11/why-diverse-teams-are-smarter
[11] https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/strategy-and-corporate-finance/our-insights/building-a-forward-looking-board
