The Principle of the Initiative

Yesterday at TechCrunch Disrupt, I heard Anu Bharadwaj talk about founder-market fit. At seed, she said, she doesn’t look for product-market fit. She looks at the founder. Do they have a thesis that holds up? And can they adjust when things change?

I keep coming back to that second question. Being able to adjust isn’t luck. It’s a skill, and skills get built. That’s true for founders, and it’s true for anyone trying to grow.

So how do people build it? I’ve been working on an answer for a while. It came out of my research into adult learning and the history of sales. I kept seeing the same pattern in the people who grow the most. They don’t wait for someone to hand them a lesson plan. They notice a gap in themselves, and they go close it.

I call this the Principle of the Initiative, or POTI for short.

The definition

The cognitive journey of adult self-directed development, starting from a self-diagnosed gap.

The motionFive stages

POTI moves through five stages. Then it starts again.

1. 01

   Interest is when something starts to matter to you. A question grabs you, or you notice something you want to be able to do.

   AskWhat do I want to be able to do?

2. 02

   Intention gives that interest a direction. You decide what you’re going after.

   AskWhat exactly am I going after?

3. 03

   Initiative is the action. You try the work, step into the experience, or start building.

   AskWhat’s the first step I can take now?

4. 04

   Interpretation is looking back at what happened and making sense of it.

   AskWhat worked, what surprised me, and what do I see differently now?

5. 05

   Improvement is the growth you go after because of what you learned.

   AskWhat will I do differently next time?

It’s a loop, not a straight line. One round can raise a new question, and that question starts the next round. And like any flywheel, it gets easier to turn the more you turn it.

In practiceWhat it looked like for me

In January 2026, I went all in on my company. I’m a first-time founder, and I had never written a line of code. That was my own founder-market fit test: could I learn and adjust fast enough?

My interest was simple. I wanted to build things myself, not just describe them to someone else. My intention was to learn to build with AI, one piece at a time. My initiative was to start before I felt ready. A lot of my first tries didn’t work.

The interpretation is where I learned the most. Each time something broke, I stopped and asked why. Was it the tool, the plan, or me? Then came improvement. The next build was better. And the next build always raised a new question, so the loop started again.

Nobody assigned me that gap. I found it myself. That’s why I kept going when it got hard.

Why it mattersThe gap has to be yours

When someone else picks the gap for you, you can learn the material and still not care. When you find the gap yourself, you own the work of closing it. That’s the difference between finishing a course and actually getting better.

I believe the drive inside a person will take them as far as they’re meant to go, as long as they can get to the tools. For a long time, getting to the tools was the hard part. AI is changing that.

That opens the door for people whose lives sit outside the circles we usually look to for experts. Different lives lead to different insights. Someone may see a problem clearly because they lived with it or worked around it. Now they have a way to act on what they know. We should make room for them.

Full circleBack to founder-market fit

Anu asked whether a founder can adjust when things change. I think POTI is how that ability gets built. Every turn of the wheel is practice at noticing, acting, and learning. The more turns you take, the faster you adjust.

Try itRun one loop this week

1. Name one gap you’ve noticed in yourself.
2. Take one small step on it, before you feel ready.
3. Afterward, spend five minutes on what it taught you.

That’s how experience turns into expertise: one gap, one loop at a time.