Know Your Crowd. Walk Your Path.

After meeting hundreds of founders, builders, investors and “value adders,” you eventually start to see patterns.

People walk into the room with the urge, or the need, to show you their model before they’ve even understood your world.

Just yesterday, an investor opened a meeting like this:

“Here’s the most appropriate business model for people like us. I always do X before I do Y.”

Ok.
Fair.
Predictable.
And completely unaware of the room he had walked into, because I genuinely do not care.

Here’s the reality most people forget:

Your playbook isn’t universal.
Your structure isn’t sacred.
Your preferences aren’t strategy.

They’re just yours.
And they may not apply outside your own echo chamber.

Coming from healthcare, we’ve seen this countless times.
In medicine and psychology, it’s called cognitive bias, the reflex to apply your own experiences and assumptions to a new situation long before you’ve earned the context.

Investors do it. Advisors do it. We all do it.

What happened yesterday was a classic case of projection bias: reaching for the familiar model before understanding the context.

Daniel Kahneman would call it a System 1 response in a System 2 situation.

System 1 is fast, automatic, patterned.
System 2 is slow, deliberate, contextual.

Most misalignment happens when someone uses System 1 in a moment that requires System 2.

And we´ve, as we did yesterday, experienced this several times, and often it can one of the biggest pitfalls for both founders and investors fall into.

The need to declare their methods.
The entitlement to impose their logic.
The impulse to perform expertise instead of practicing it.

But expertise is not what you say first.
Expertise is what you hold back until context makes it useful.

The result?
Investors miss the real context of the case, and founders miss the real value the investor could have created.

Over the years, we’ve learned this the hard way.

We’ve sat in rooms where people projected confidence without calibration.
We’ve walked away from collaborations that looked perfect on paper but misaligned in reality.
We’ve seen founders contort themselves around someone else’s “model” because they thought it was required for credibility.

And every time, the answer ends up being the same:

Know your crowd.
Know your role.
Know your path.
And make your decisions from there.

At MVRCK, we’ve chosen ours deliberately.

We don’t copy someone else’s investor persona.
We don’t force-fit a structure because “that’s how others do it.”
We don’t perform certainty for the sake of authority.

We built a Micro–Family Office because we wanted to stay close to the work, close to the founders, and close to the truth.

We invest and advise with the quiet confidence that comes from actually being in the trenches with people, not talking above them.

And here’s what we’ve found:

When you walk your path long enough, you stop needing to announce it.
People simply recognize it.
And the right cases find their way to you.

So here’s the reflection I’ve been sitting with, and the reason I felt compelled to write this:

Before your next meeting, whether you’re a founder, advisor, or investor, ask yourself:

“Does the room need my model?
Or does it need my attention?”

That difference, in my mind, is where most relationships are either built to last or broken early.

If you’re building something meaningful and want a partner who thinks with you, not over you, send us your model.
Let’s explore your thinking together.

Share Your Deck