He was talking too fast. Across the table, the founder fired off buzzwords, his words stumbling over one another. It wasn't excitement; it was a preemptive defense mechanism. He spoke without breathing, terrified that a single pause would give me the window to interrupt, lose interest, or mentally check out. It was the muscle memory of someone who had been rejected too many times.
I sat there nodding politely, but a familiar visceral sensation crept in — a physical signal that something was structurally wrong. It wasn't his pitch deck or the technology itself. It was the frequency of his voice. He wasn't building a company; he was managing a panic attack.
What pattern emerges from reviewing dozens of AI founding teams?
Over the past year, sitting on the investor side of the table, I've reviewed dozens of AI founding teams. Seven or eight of them stay with me — not for their brilliance, but for a shared, chronic mental inflammation.
They came from vastly different worlds: a Silicon Valley serial entrepreneur pivoting frantically between tech cycles, sinking into increasingly bizarre niches; a European team desperately chasing the compliance narrative without a single engineer on staff; and a traditional industry veteran, terrified that if he didn't sprinkle AI over his legacy business immediately, he'd be erased from the map.
Outwardly, they were all pitching innovation. Inwardly, they were all running from obsolescence.
What is Borrowed Conviction?
They all suffered from a condition I call Borrowed Conviction.
Their relentless doom-scrolling on X, the chronic fear of being front-run by a new open-source repo — these are merely symptoms. The root issue is much deeper: they are using AI to understand the internal logic of the very industries they are supposed to be experts in.
Instead of leveraging technology to scale their own hard-earned operational judgment, they are using it to fill the gaps in their own cognition. The conviction isn't theirs. It's borrowed from the algorithm, fueled entirely by the anxiety of being left behind.
What happens when anxiety becomes the foundation of a business?
When anxiety becomes the foundational layer of a business, the product is no longer a solution — it is an escape route.
I quickly realize you aren't backing a structural thesis; you are funding a founder's psychological defense mechanism. These teams lack an anchor in real-world commercial mechanics. Their worldview isn't shaped by tangible supply chains, customer empathy, or profit loops, but by the digital frenzy of "what's next."
An ecosystem built on borrowed conviction is a house of cards waiting for the next cycle to blow it down.
People often ask me if I've found the antidote.
The honest truth is, I haven't sat across the table from a cleanly motivated AI founder yet. I haven't met the one who is running toward something real, rather than away from irrelevance.
But I've caught glimpses of them from afar on X — builders quietly deploying technology to solve unglamorous, tangible problems in areas they deeply understand. Their frequency is completely different. They aren't afraid of the noise.
I'm still waiting to meet one in person.