Why I Am Writing This
The founders I work with are often more capable than they believe themselves to be. What trips them up is not a lack of ideas or skill. It is the moment when the people around them, investors, advisors, the market itself, start pushing back, and they lose the thread of their own thinking.
This week: What it actually means to stay grounded in your own judgment, why the noise gets loudest right before the breakthrough, and how to tell the difference between feedback worth taking and noise worth ignoring.
When Zomato acquired Blinkit in 2022, Jefferies published a report stating that investors had "a fundamental question on Blinkit's existence." Analysts asked openly why anyone would want grocery delivery in ten minutes. The deal was called expensive, questioned for governance reasons, and met with widespread scepticism. Deepinder Goyal backed it anyway.
Three years later, Blinkit had become the growth engine of the entire company. Deepinder Goyal himself wrote to shareholders: "We are just grateful that the bet we took on Blinkit worked out just fine, and we are not at a point where Akshant and I are getting fired for an expensive acquisition gone wrong." That line, delivered with dry humour, tells you something important. He knew what the downside looked like. He backed his judgment anyway.
Around the same time, Aadit Palicha and Kaivalya Vohra launched Zepto with a promise of grocery delivery in ten minutes — a bet industry veterans called absurd, arguing the unit economics could not work and that Indians would not pay for speed. Zepto became a unicorn in 18 months. The people who were loudest in their scepticism ended up copying the exact model they had dismissed.
Why the Noise Gets So Loud
The pushback that founders face is not random. It tends to arrive at specific moments: when you are about to make a bet that nobody else has made yet, when your thesis requires believing something the market has not yet validated, or when you are moving in a direction that makes people who are not building what you are building feel uncertain.
Most of the noise is not malicious. It comes from smart people applying existing frameworks to a situation that requires a new one. The analyst who said nobody wants grocery delivery in ten minutes was not stupid. He was applying rational logic to a market that had not yet shown its full shape. The problem is that founders who are building the future cannot wait for the market to validate what they already know.
The loudest scepticism usually arrives right before the proof of concept. Not because the sceptics are wrong about the present. But because founders who are right about the future are always early.
Being early looks indistinguishable from being wrong, until the moment it doesn't.
When I started VisionVoyage, the question I heard most often was a polite version of "is there really a market for this?" And underneath almost every conversation was another, unspoken one: why would someone want to learn confidence from someone who hasn't had enough "real work experience" yet? I am not even 30. In a space where credibility is often measured in decades, people held that against the work before they had even seen it.
I chose to stay with what I knew to be true from the professionals I worked with — that the gap between capability and visibility was real, that it was costing people careers, and that my age did not change what I had seen or what my clients were experiencing. The noise didn't go away. I just got better at knowing which of it was worth listening to. There is feedback that makes your work sharper. And there is feedback that is really just someone else's discomfort with your direction. Learning to tell the difference is one of the most important skills a founder can develop.
1
Ask: is this feedback or friction?
Feedback challenges your thinking and gives you something to work with. Friction is resistance that comes from someone else's risk tolerance, limited frame of reference, or discomfort with the unfamiliar. Feedback makes your idea sharper. Friction just makes you smaller. Before you adjust course based on what someone says, ask honestly which one you are responding to.
2
Know what you know and how you know it
Grounded founders are not arrogant. They are specific. They know exactly what evidence their conviction is built on and can say it clearly. When you can articulate the signal behind your belief, the noise has less power over you, because you are not choosing between your gut and someone else's opinion. You are comparing two sets of evidence, and you know which one is closer to the ground.
3
Build a small circle whose judgment you actually trust
Not cheerleaders. Not contrarians. People who know enough about your domain and your situation to give you feedback that is genuinely calibrated to your reality. The goal is not to find people who agree with you. It is to find people who can help you think more clearly about what you already know. Everything else is noise, and noise is loudest when you have no signal to compare it to.
What made Aadit Palicha and Deepinder Goyal right was not that they ignored all feedback. It was that they had done enough ground-level work to trust what they were seeing over what others were projecting. Their conviction was not blind faith. It was built on evidence that the loudest sceptics did not have access to.
This Week's Reflection
Where in your business right now are you adjusting your direction because of noise rather than because of genuine new information? And what would you do differently if you trusted what you already know?
The noise will always be there. Advisors who have not built what you are building. Investors who are pattern-matching to businesses that are not yours. A market that has not yet shown you are right. None of that changes.
What changes is your relationship to it. The founders who build things that last are not the ones who never doubt themselves. They are the ones who know the difference between productive doubt and other people's fear.
Next week, we look at one of the most underrated skills in early-stage building: how to communicate your vision so clearly that the right people find you, and the wrong ones self-select out.
See you Wednesday.
Riddhi
Founder, VisionVoyage
