Each founder has a list. It lives in their to-do app, or in the back of their anxious mind. On the list are product bugs, customer complaints, hiring needs, runway calculations, and a multitude of other issues vying for attention. The issue with the list is not its length. It is that most founders treat all issues on it as if they need founder-level attention.
They do not.
Not every problem merits founder-level attention. Confusing urgent with important is the number one way founders waste their own time and focus. An effective founder's real strength is not in simply working hard.
It is learning what deserves another hundred hours of your life, and what you should walk away from after ten.
The Difference Between Urgent and Important
Urgent problems shout at you. The website is down, their key employee just quit, a customer is threatening to sue. These are problems that demand action, and founders often fall victim to giving up precious time to these issues.
Important problems stay in the background. They fester and grow, or bleed away value, while everyone focuses on their latest urgent problem.
A founder spending three days fixing an onboarding bug because one customer complained is dealing with an urgent problem. A founder ignoring a pattern of churn among their paying customers is ignoring an important problem. Solving the first feels great. Dealing with the second is messy and involves unpleasant facts.
The thing is, urgency is obvious, while the signs of importance can often stay hidden until it's too late.
When the Right Problem Compounds
There are some problems that, once solved, create disproportionate value. They impact customers, economics, or direction in ways that have a ripple effect.
Suppose you have a list of two problems. The website is slow on mobile, and you don't know which segment of customers provides the most value. Which problem should you work on? How about a founder spending a week on optimizing page speed? If you think you're making a difference… You sure are. A founder working on the same thing for a week to understand their customer economics will see changes across the whole business.
The second problem creates much more value because it is a lever that will impact marketing, hiring, and the product in ways the mobile site optimization never will. The right problem is not always the most technically challenging or obvious. It is the solution that unlocks other wins.
Obsession Needs Boundaries
Persistence is a virtue, but it has a dark side. Founders are often lauded for their persistence, and that same stubbornness can sometimes blind them to reality when it's time to pivot.
Obsession needs limits. A founder has to understand when to be persistent versus when to admit they're wrong, or at least, wasting time. Conversely, maybe a founder spends six months designing a feature that the market does not really care for. Despite the time invested, adoption is low, and support tickets about the feature are few. The sales team does not even talk about it. The founder, however, believes in the vision and keeps iterating. Meanwhile, their competitors have launched a simpler product, and customers are flocking to them.
The founder's obsession with the feature is now preventing them from seeing reality. They are wasting resources on something that is doomed to fail.
If the founder had stopped, they would have invested their time elsewhere. Or pivoted earlier. Obsession is not a useful tool when the evidence mounts up against you. The same can be said for fundraising. A founder has pitched thirty investors with the same deck. They've heard thirty 'no's. They decide that investors just don't understand their vision. Rather than adapting their approach, they continue to spend time with the same strategy, thinking they just need more tries.
Problem Selection as a Core Skill
The real skill of a founder is problem selection. It is prioritizing the problems worth being obsessed over, and avoiding the ones that waste your time.
Here's the thing: this type of skill takes time. It only comes from experience. Those who master it build lasting, enduring companies. Those who don't either burn out or their companies wither on the vine.
Asking yourself these three questions when you face a problem is a helpful litmus test to decide if it's worth your time:
1. Does solving the problem have a material effect on their customers?
2. Does it affect their economics (revenue or expenses)?
3. Does it change the company's direction (strategy, outlook, or critical hires)?
If the answer to all three is 'no', then it's not a good use of your time. If the answer to even one is 'yes', it might be worth considering.
Applying This to Fundraising
Fundraising is one of those activities that easily climbs to the top of the list for founders. It's urgent, because there's only so much runway. It's also important, since cash dictates everything a company can do.
Not all fundraising problems, however, deserve the same amount of attention. You shouldn't be spending hours agonizing over the color scheme of your pitch deck. That's a low-value lever for a fundraising activity.
However, using that same time to research and identify the right investors - those that fit your stage, geography, and check size - is much more valuable. It's also much harder to do than a quick email blast or LinkedIn search. This is where Emerture comes in.
Let Emerture Handle the Search So You Can Focus on the Pitch
Emerture is a UK-based discovery platform for startups and investors. They focus on helping their startup clients find the right investors faster by curating data and contacts. Instead of sifting through lists of investors, their clients can target very specific ones, with very specific asks. These are investors that traditional tools (cold outreach or Crunchbase alike) cannot reach effectively.
For early-stage founders, raising their first round of institutional funding can be an overwhelming task. Emerture offers the possibility to spend much less time on the search and more on the actual fundraising activities like the deck, pitch, and calls. They're built for scaling global-first startups, targeting the USA, UK, EU, or cross-border investors. They're aimed at founders who care about stage, thesis, and check size, rather than general outreach. Emerture is also a good fit for founders who are time-constrained and want end-to-end outreach handled, or to replace warm-intro dependency and move away from accelerators, brokers, and large advisory firms.
Serious founders who are willing to pay for the time and energy to get a good deal on the right terms, in exchange for clarity and discipline in the fundraising process, and will see the best value in Emerture.
Ready to get started? Join several founders who have successfully raised capital through Emerture. Sign up now!
FAQs
1. How can I tell if a problem is urgent or just important?
Urgent problems demand immediate action, while important problems affect long-term value. Ask if ignoring it will compound or erode your business.
2. What does it mean for a problem to compound?
Solving a compounding problem creates ripple effects across customers, economics, or strategy. It unlocks other solutions and makes future decisions sharper.
3. When should I stop obsessing over a problem?
When evidence shows your efforts are not working and you are ignoring data. Persistence becomes stubbornness when you refuse to adapt.
4. How do I choose which problems deserve founder-level attention?
Ask three questions: does it affect customers, economics, or core direction? If none, delegate or drop it. If one, dig in.
5. How does Emerture help founders focus on the right problems?
Emerture handles investor search and outreach end-to-end, so you spend less time finding the right investors and more time pitching.