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The important adversity question investors never ask
Updated: Feb 14, 2025
"What's been the hardest part about this for you?" It's a question no investor has ever asked me. There's always lots of talk about market potential and why your technology is better, but rarely any discussions about the challenges we've overcome to get to this point. To say nothing of the challenge we now face. The spread of the Coronavirus has been alarming, practicing social distancing and sheltering in place have become the new normal; and it has completely disrupted businesses and whole economies. And it strikes me how this rarely-asked question, has been the most important all along.
Could anyone have predicted the scale of this pandemic 6 months ago? Could they have predicted exactly how it would proliferate through countries and regions and in what order? Aside from the general consensus of pathologists and scientists that the threat of a pandemic has been on the rise for the past few decades, and an eerily accurate TED presentation by Bill Gates in 2015, the severity and impact of the Coronavirus has seemingly taken us all by surprise.
Which brings us back to that really important question, especially now, for both investors and entrepreneurs; what is your process for dealing with something you have no control over? It's very difficult to launch a new venture even when the stars are aligned, so how do you find a way to succeed when confronted with the unexpected? It's going to take a lot of ingenuity and grit to make it through the next couple months- what's your strategy and how have you persevered in the past to get to where you are now?
What stands out is that resilience is not only about how a business reacts once disruption occurs, but also how well its decision-making process exposes weaknesses before they become critical. In investment or project environments, unexpected events can quickly reveal gaps between assumptions and what actually happens in practice. A useful way to examine this is through as planned vs as built analysis, particularly where timelines, dependencies and changing circumstances need to be understood objectively. Comparing the original plan with actual progress can show where delays emerged, which assumptions proved unrealistic, and whether external events genuinely affected the outcome. That kind of evidence-based review adds another dimension to the broader question of adversity because it turns a difficult experience into…
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