Observation: Resilience helps new ventures to say coherent.
Reflections from the final event I attended in 2025, sparked by a founder’s candid journey talk highlighting resilience, disruption, and making unwanted decisions under uncertainty.
The last event I went to last year finished in a way that felt quietly important.
On stage, a founder spoke about their journey so far. Not only the highlights, but the reality of it. The reality of the venture and the reality of life. What stayed with me most was how often the conversation came back to resilience.
Resilience here was not just about optimism or toughness. It was about being able to keep going when you do not have all the information, resources are limited, and the next steps are not clear.
How you think about resilience matters. That framing matters.
In early-stage ventures, you rarely have enough data to make perfect decisions. Most of the time, you are making the best decision you can at that moment, with partial evidence, limited resources, and pressure coming from multiple directions. Some of that pressure comes from the venture itself. Some of it comes from life.
Founders do not operate in a vacuum. Life events can and will often intervene, your capacity changes, momentum can break, and your energy will drop. At the same time, the venture still asks for progress.
Demand signals are weak, evidence is noisy, and what you hoped would validate the direction often refuses to cooperate. Or, it can say something that you do not want to hear.
Resilience, in that context, is the ability to stay engaged despite the challenges.
Sometimes that means working with what you have rather than what you planned for. Sometimes it means trusting your judgement before the data has fully caught up, and being willing to live with the consequences. And sometimes it means being stubborn enough to continue. Not blindly, but deliberately, because the goal still matters even when the route keeps changing.
This is also where some of the hardest choices show up.
Resilience is tested when founders realise the team they started with may not be the team they need to continue. When roles need to change. When co-founders need to step back. When the founding group needs to grow. These decisions are rarely clear, rarely clean, and almost never arrive at a convenient time.
Avoiding them often feels easier in the short term. Making them is usually what keeps the venture moving forward.
Resilience is also about time. Staying in the game long enough for signals to mature, for evidence to accumulate, and for second-order effects to reveal themselves. And sometimes, for the mind and body to recover.
This is where resilience connects directly to demand, evidence, and coherence.
Without it, teams optimise for relief. They reach for cleaner stories, safer tests, and smaller decisions that reduce discomfort but avoid the harder questions. Teams with resilience stay with those questions long enough for weak signals to either strengthen into real evidence or disappear entirely.
Resilience is not about ignoring evidence. It is about staying engaged until the evidence is strong enough to justify change, or clear enough to know when to stop.
Across founders, venture builders, and spin-out teams, the pattern is consistent. The ventures that progress are not defined by certainty or uninterrupted momentum. They are defined by their ability to hold things together while making imperfect decisions under pressure.
That is not inspirational.
It is operational.
And without it, you cannot keep going.