Airo Health

The talk Jahed gave was not a pitch. Its question was whether being vulnerable is good for business, and her answer came from the middle of building: a founder works constantly, pays themselves badly, and reaches the point where the business stops being a thing they do and becomes an extension of who they are. Then come the investor meetings, where the job is to have every assumption questioned by people watching your face. Her illustration of what founders cannot control was another Y Combinator company in her batch, a drone software team a year and a half in with real recurring revenue, whose product was matched feature for feature by a large drone manufacturer; the founders folded and started again. The expected answer to “how's the company doing” is always “great” — her argument is that saying the harder thing out loud is what makes the rollercoaster survivable, not a liability.