Simplicity Always Wins

Can you describe your company in 2 sentences? It’s a pretty common, seemingly straightforward question. As a founder, I despise it.

Not because it isn’t the right question to ask but because the very question itself requires you to challenge the premise of what you are doing. If you can’t answer it well, then more likely than not, you have serious issues with the work you are doing.

The most successful companies build products whose ideas are simple to grasp and hard to implement. Google was simply to find anything on the internet. Airbnb was to book rooms from locals rather than hotels. These aren’t complex ideas but rather difficult implementations. Implementations that were incredibly complex to actually do but that we now take for granted, implementations we won’t ever really be able to appreciate how difficult it was to get down to the level of simplicity we have today.

This is what I deem as the creator’s burden. As a creator, we know how difficult it was to make something work the way it does, the blood and sweat it takes to make incredibly complex systems into one click for the user. No one will truly appreciate the time you put to make that experience magical. You will quietly carry the time, intuition, and struggle it took to create it. That is the burden we carry.

What’s interesting is that it’s precisely this burden that ends up burning founders. Because when the real work doesn’t show, they reach for work that does. They introduce complexity for the sake of introducing complexity, try to make themselves seem like they are doing more, building something unheard of. I can empathize, it isn’t easy when the first follow up question someone asks is what makes you different. It feels better to have a complicated answer, it sounds more impressive, it gives you something to point at.

However, the truth is most people are never going to be satisfied with whatever you say anyway, especially in the age of AI where the expectations vs the reality for startup moats at the earliest stages are typically misaligned. Trying to satisfy that validation from VCs is what’s ultimately leading to a lot of people tanking their company pretty early on.

No matter what narrative you spin, in the beginning, I think it’s incredibly important to keep things simple. Focus on the strengths you have as a small startup. Fast turnaround, good support, quick iterations. New ideas and potential feature additions are stack ranked and aggressively prioritized relative to their contributions of moving you to the next step. Right beside the creator’s burden, being able to keep things simple like this can be seen as the CEO’s burden. How do you keep things as simple as possible so your team can do its best work? If I do my job well, I know I will never get the appreciation I deserve for it, but it will reflect in meaningful progress in the company.

Maybe that’s the trade I keep coming back to. The work that matters most is the work no one sees, and accepting that is itself part of doing the work. The 2 sentence question I despise isn’t really a question about what you do, it’s a question about whether you’ve actually done the work to be able to say it simply. If it’s conveyed enough value to your customers so you can be confident in its simplicity. If you have, you’ll answer without thinking, and if you haven’t, you’ll keep adding words to the sentence until it collapses under itself. Clarity in this regard is the best measure of confidence in the product, the team and the company.

This isn’t something that comes overnight. I am always working on it myself. But I can see things getting simpler and clearer over time which seems to be a great sign.

Check out this Podcast Episode!

You can also listen on Spotify, Apple Music, and Google Podcasts

In this episode of Building Blocks, we sit down with Emre Ertan, co-founder and co-CEO of Cenoa, a borderless super wallet revolutionizing how people in emerging markets access digital dollars.

Previously the CPO/CTO at Getir where he scaled the engineering team from 80 to 400 people, Emre shares his journey from a small town in Turkey to Silicon Valley, and how that experience shaped his vision for democratizing financial access globally.

He discusses Cenoa’s explosive growth in Nigeria (50K+ signups in first month), their innovative approach to simplifying blockchain technology for everyday users, and his perspectives on building compliant fintech products across 40+ markets.

Thanks for reading,

Daivik Goel