The Impossible Paradox

Why 99% of builders fail at the most critical skill and how mastering it separates legendary companies from the graveyard of good ideas.

There's a paradox eating the tech industry alive, and nobody wants to talk about it. Every founder we know can articulate their grand vision. They'll paint you a picture of how they're going to change the world, disrupt industries, and build the next unicorn. But ask them what they’re delivering by next Tuesday, and you’ll catch them staring blankly, overwhelmed by the tangled complexity of their own vision.

What’s the paradox? It's harder to make something small out of something big than it is to make something big out of something small.

And this single insight explains why:

• Why 99% of startups fail

• Why enterprise software sucks

• Why the most successful builders seem to know exactly what to work on next

The Folding Problem

We were having discussion with a founder last week who'd just raised a lot of money. Beautiful deck, incredible vision, team of PhDs. But six months post-funding, they're still architecting the platform. When we asked what users could actually do with their product today, the answer was: nothing. This is what we call the Folding Problem:

In poker, you can fold a small bet when you realize you're beat. But when you've already pushed all your chips to the center of the table betting on a massive, interconnected system, folding becomes existentially impossible. You're pot-committed to complexity. We, at Internode also had to face the brutal truth:

Most builders are terrible at managing the spectrum between atomic and cosmic.

Picture a spectrum. On one end, you have the atomic, the smallest possible thing that creates value. On the other end, you have the cosmic: the grand vision that changes everything. The magic happens in the middle. But here's where it gets interesting: the middle isn't a place.

The best builders we know, the ones who've built products that millions of people actually use, they're constantly dancing between atomic and cosmic. They're thinking in decades while shipping in days. They're building cathedrals one brick at a time, but they know exactly which brick to place next. In our experience, shifting between “atomic” and “cosmic” thinking is extremely challenging especially for us technical founders. All too often, we found ourselves talking only about our vision and deep technical solutions, yet never actually shipping anything. This became a major issue, until our two-week retreat in Lake Tahoe, that helped us break the cycle and change our mindset.

Why MVP is a Lie

Let's be honest: MVP has become the most abused acronym in tech. Everyone thinks they understand it, but most people use it as an excuse to ship mediocre products. The real MVP isn't about building the minimum. It's about building the meaningful minimum. There's a profound difference!

A minimum product is the smallest thing you can build. A meaningful minimum is the smallest thing that creates a complete emotional experience for your user. One is about you. The other is about them.

When Uber launched, they didn't build a "minimum viable transportation platform." They built a magical experience where you press a button and a car appears. That's not minimum that's meaningful. This is why enterprise software is universally terrible. When you're selling to committees instead of individuals, when you're building for procurement processes instead of human experiences, you lose the ability to start small and meaningful.

Enterprise buyers insist on feature matrices they need to tick every box. So you end up cobbling together a Frankenstein’s monster of half-baked features nobody really wants. You optimize for the sale, not the experience. The result? Software that costs millions and makes everyone’s life worse. We all know which products fall into this trap (ahem, Teams).

Here's the thing that not many people talks about: leadership involvement is both essential and toxic. You need visionary leadership to maintain the cosmic perspective. But too much leadership involvement in day-to-day product decisions creates the exact opposite of what you want. We've seen this pattern dozens of times. CEO has a vision. Product team starts building. CEO sees early version and says, "But what about this other thing from the vision?" Product team pivots. CEO sees that and says, "Wait, but we also need this other thing."

Pretty soon, you're building everything and completing nothing. You're trapped in the middle of the spectrum, oscillating between atomic and cosmic without ever creating anything meaningful.

The Internode Insight

As technical founders, we fell into the same trap and it was hard to spot, let alone escape. Internode is a bold concept with the power to transform how we interact and work. But we made the classic mistake of trying to build everything big right out of the gate. In our previous post, we explained how we shifted from a tech-centric approach to a human-centric one and how it changed everything. The very essence of Internode - and of us as founders - has since evolved for the better.

The irony is that if we’d begun with something ridiculously small yet meaningful, we’d have learned faster, built better, and likely reached our cosmic vision sooner. At the time, though, starting small felt like a betrayal of that vision it seemed as if thinking too small was somehow wrong. That psychological trap kills most ambitious projects: we conflate “starting small” with “thinking small.” Yet the best builders think cosmically and start atomically.

Users love quality. They also love completeness. But quality and completeness are often in tension with speed and learning. This creates another paradox: you need to ship fast to learn fast, but you need to ship quality to create meaningful experiences:

Instead of asking: "Should we prioritize quality or speed?",

Ask: "What's the smallest thing we can build that feels impossibly good?"

Instead of: "Should we build more features or polish existing ones?",

Ask: "What's the one thing that, if we made it 10x better, would change everything?"

The Airbnb Insight

Brian Chesky tells a story about the early days of Airbnb. They were obsessing over the platform, the payments, the reviews, the scaling challenges. But they were failing. Then they decided to focus on one thing: the experience of the first 10 minutes after a guest arrives. They called hosts. They talked to guests. They optimized that one moment until it was magical. Everything else, the platform, the payments, the reviews, they built around that one meaningful moment. They started atomic and built cosmic.

The Framework

So how do you actually do this? How do you dance between atomic and cosmic without losing your mind? Here's the framework we are integrating at this moment:

• Start with the atomic experience: What's the smallest possible thing that creates a complete emotional experience for one specific person? Not a user. A person with a name and a specific problem.

• Build it impossibly well. Don't build the minimum. Build the meaningful minimum.

• Find the cosmic connection. How does this atomic experience connect to your larger vision? What does it teach you? What does it prove?

• Build the next atomic experience. What's the next smallest thing that builds on what you've learned? What's the next meaningful minimum?

• Repeat until cosmic. Keep building atomic experiences that compound toward your cosmic vision. Each one should be meaningful on its own and essential to the whole.

Most builders fail at this because it requires two skills that seem contradictory: the ability to think big and the discipline to start small. It requires the vision to see the cathedral and the humility to lay one brick at a time. It requires saying no to good ideas so you can say yes to great execution. It requires disappointing stakeholders who want everything so you can delight users who want one thing done impossibly well.

The best builders we know are constantly refining their ability to find the meaningful minimum. It's the difference between building products people have to use and building products people can't live without. We'd love to hear about your experience!

You can contact us at any time on LinkedIn to share your thoughts!

— (Istvan, Sean, Balazs)