Idea to Startup Why You're Struggling with the Easy Stuff as a Founder
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Oct 16, 2025 Ever wonder why simple tasks feel insurmountable as a founder? It turns out, it’s less about productivity and more about your nervous system hitting its Risk Threshold. Explore the dynamics of why our ancient instincts make customer-facing tasks feel especially risky. Discover how this sense of safety can lead to mediocre product choices and learn practical tips to lower perceived risks. Plus, get a sneak peek into a new book in the works. It’s a fascinating dive into the psychology of entrepreneurship!
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The 17 Sandwich Boards
- Brian Scordato describes seeing 17 local campaign signs clustered at an intersection as a vivid example of herd behavior.
- He uses the sandwich-board scene to show people choose safe, familiar actions when their nervous systems are taxed.
Nervous System Misreads Social Risk
- Your nervous system treats social risk like bodily risk because evolution wired us to fear standing out from the herd.
- That mismatch makes public, nonphysical risks feel overwhelming even when they're not dangerous.
The Riskiness Equation
- Brian presents a riskiness equation: perceived risk = (how many people you know who've done it) × (how public failure would be).
- Perceived risk maps to the distance between past experience and the publicness of the action.