Fractional CPO/CMO & Board Advisor at Evolution Advisors — on Toxic Certainty in Startups, What HPRCs Really Are, How to Find Product-Market Fit, and Why Technical Founders Struggle to Listen to Customers
Most startup founders are smart. Many are technically brilliant. But brilliance has a dark side in the early stages of building a product — and Ken Evans has a name for it: toxic certainty. It's the syndrome where a founder, usually a technical one, becomes so convinced they know what needs to be built that they skip the most important step in all of product development: actually talking to potential customers.
Ken Evans has spent most of his career in product management — in small companies and large ones, across product, marketing, and product marketing — and for the last six years he has been running what he calls an "incelerator": a hybrid incubator-accelerator that takes founders from ideation to shipping a real product. He has screened hundreds of startups. He knows exactly who gets in and who gets quietly rejected. And the deciding factor almost never has anything to do with the technology.
In this conversation, Ken and Serhiy go deep on what separates curious founders from certain ones, why the first six customers matter infinitely more than your first million in ARR, how Airbnb proves that imperfect products win when they solve real pain, what AI actually changes about customer discovery without replacing the real human conversations, and why the most dangerous thing a technical founder can do in a customer meeting is keep talking.
Ken Evans has spent most of his career in product management — at both small startups and large companies — spanning product, marketing, and product marketing across all three disciplines simultaneously. He now works as a fractional CPO, CMO, and board advisor through Evolution Advisors, helping early-stage founders and their investors make sure they're building products that actually solve real problems before they go to market.
For the last six years, Ken has run what he calls an "incelerator" — a hybrid between an incubator and accelerator — that takes founders from the ideation stage to the point where they're actually building and shipping a product. He has screened hundreds of startups. He knows exactly what separates founders who are genuinely curious about their customers from founders who are simply making noise to attract investment capital.
Ken is a self-described introvert and "ambivert" who has built his approach to coaching on the belief that the most important thing any founder can do is talk to real potential customers — and then shut up long enough to actually hear what they say.
A lot of times when you've got a purely technical founder, they have this syndrome which I call toxic certainty, which is I'm going to build something even without the potential customer's input because I've got to move fast in crypto. I've got to move fast in AI and we'll tweak it around the edges and we'll make it fit their scenario. Like good luck with that.
Tell me about your zero to six customer journey. I don't care about your first million or five million of ARR. If you say that too early, I don't believe you anyway. But I want to know who are going to be your first six customers and why are they going to tolerate your imperfect product?
Uncomfortable silence is a technical founder's worst nightmare because when they get to that point they can't shut up. They just keep talking. They keep pitching. They keep talking about the technology and how wonderful it is. And that just turns people off.