Why you need to prevent 'expert syndrome' and find a market need for your startup to succeed

Guest column

The biggest reason startups fail is because of no market need. Emilija Manevska/Getty Images

It's a brave new world. It's an era of hot IPO's, next-generation technological disruptions, Silicon Valley tech-storms, and many startups that eventually nosedive. Many startups believe that they are creating the next best thing, but in reality, more than 80 percent of the startups fail on a global scale.

These are staggering numbers as the world is evolving, and the job market is saturating exponentially, giving to the rise of startups and entrepreneurial ventures. Nowadays, it's easy to get caught up in the endless stories of startup successes, but in actuality, startup failures are way more common that startup successes in accord with data from CB Insights.

According to the surveys by CB Insights analysts and researchers, more than 70 percent of upstart tech companies fail, and their counterparts the 'consumer hardware startups' are prone to failure with 97 percent ultimately dying or becoming "zombies." Let's talk about why startups and businesses fail. One of the significant factors that cause startups to fail miserably is that there's no market need.

Preventing 'expert syndrome'

Startups can run into the problem of their being little or no market need for the product or service they are providing. Startup founders tend to overrate and overestimate themselves and underrate the more experienced people around them. This is known as 'expert syndrome,' and it is one of the contributing reasons why many startups tend to fail and nosedive.

Ignorant individuals are often bursting with escapism, unrealistic expectations and grandeur emotions, which may cause their businesses to fall out. The actual feeling that you are in control combined with an idealistic inevitability that there is market need for the creator's product or service can lead to inevitable failure.

Expert syndrome is recognized in the field of psychology as the Dunning-Kruger effect; cognitive bias of superiority in the mind of an individual that believes their knowledge is greater than it is. This can also result in unrealistic expectations for otherwise relatively small impact incremental innovations.

As an MBA, I have seen this in myself over the years (admittedly often in hindsight) and in waves of fresh MBAs trying to turn their class project business plan into a real business. However, it is not exclusive to MBAs as any domain experts' true knowledge could be limited by their perspective and experience of a given situation. On the contrary, the secondary issue of the nature of innovation is more complicated as it presents a cause and effect relationship with the market scenario.

For a startup's success, it is essential for the product or service to be more 'disruptive' in nature rather than being merely incremental. The startup needs to solve an unsolved problem rather than assisting the problem.

Lessons learned

Now, the million-dollar question is how to learn from 'No Market Need' as the leading startup reason for failure. My advice is to get out and speak early and often with those with a different perspective on the innovation, certainly outside of the area of the innovator. From my experience this is better done in waves in that the questions are asked to the relevant persons, first reaching out to those most proximate to but outside the invention and inception space. After that moving further out from the center to find reason, logic, and ideas for validation of the disruption that can support the startup momentously.

For example, the technology for Solenic Medical addresses infections on medical implants, which was invented by a pair of university researchers at UT Southwestern. The first is an expert in infectious diseases and the second is a thermal medicine engineer.

In my due diligence research, I first reached out to orthopedic surgeons who perform the implant surgeries and deal with the first challenges of infections that arise. Receiving great feedback, almost too good to be true at first pass, I moved on to a next wave of doctors a little further out. I spoke to an ER doctor, a neurosurgeon, an interventional radiologist, and so forth, which didn't result in the same level of enthusiasm but raised good questions that drove further investigation in the due diligence effort.

From there I moved on to contacts in surgical centers and medical billing experts, further removed from the problem and again less enthusiastic. Less enthusiastic for sure, but none of them raised significant barriers, and some helped refine our understanding of what it would take to get the product to market within facility budgets and medical reimbursement requirements.

The crux here was not in any way to disrespect or discredit the inventor of the invention, but to get a perspective that complements the inventor(s) and validate the technology in multiple dimensions: the customer perspective, the product enabled by the technology, team requirements, funding challenges, all leading to valuable insights on the value of the innovation itself.


Obviously in the case of Solenic Medical, we chose to license that technology and form a company around it because we became confident that there was significant market need worth the challenges of bringing the medical device to market. This is what 'Market Need' is all about. It's about finding the right need at the right time and in the right manner.

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James Y. Lancaster is the Texas branch manager for Arkansas-based VIC Technology Venture Development. Lancaster, who lives in College Station, oversees business there, in Dallas, and in Houston.

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UH lands $11.8M for first-of-its-kind early language development study

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Researchers at the University of Houston have secured an $11.8 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to conduct a first-of-its-kind study of early language development.

Led by Elena Grigorenko, the Hugh Roy and Lillie Cranz Cullen Distinguished Professor of Psychology, and research professor Jack Fletcher, the study will follow 3,600 children aged 18 to 24 months to uncover how language skills develop at this critical stage and why some children experience delays that can influence later growth.

The NIH funding will also support the development of the new national Clinical Research Center on Developmental Language Disorders at UH, which aims to bring experts from psychology, education, health and measurement sciences to study how children learn language.

“This will be the first national study to estimate how common late talking is using a large, representative sample of Houston toddlers,” Grigorenko said in a news release. “By following these children as they grow, we hope to better understand the developmental pathways that can lead to conditions such as developmental language disorder and autism.”

UH’s team will partner with the pediatric clinic network at Texas Children’s Hospital, where children will be screened for early language development, allowing researchers to identify those who show signs of delayed speech. Next, researchers will follow the cohort through early childhood to examine how language abilities evolve and how early delays may lead to later challenges.

The Clinical Research Center on Developmental Language Disorders will be the 14th national research center established at UH, and will include researchers from multiple UH departments, as well as partners at Baylor College of Medicine and the Texas Center for Learning Disorders.

“This level of investment from the National Institutes of Health reflects the significance of this work to address a complex challenge affecting children, families and communities,” Claudia Neuhauser, vice president for research at UH, said in a news release. “By bringing together experts from multiple disciplines and partnering with major health systems across the region, the project reflects our commitment to advancing discoveries that impact our community.”

Rice Alliance names Houston healthtech exec as first head of platform

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The Rice Alliance for Technology and Entrepreneurship has named its first head of platform.

Houston entrepreneur Laura Neder stepped into the newly created role last month, according to an email from Rice Alliance. Neder will focus on building and growing Houston’s Venture Advantage Platform.

The emerging platform, which is being promoted by Rice Alliance and the Ion, aims to connect founders with the "people, capital and expertise they need to scale."

"I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what it takes to make an innovation ecosystem more navigable, more connected, and more useful for founders," Neder said in a LinkedIn post. "I’m grateful for the opportunity to do that work at Rice Alliance, alongside a team with a long history of supporting entrepreneurship and innovation."

"Houston has the talent, institutions, and industry base to create real advantage for founders," she added. "I’m looking forward to listening, learning, and building stronger pathways across the ecosystem."

Neder most recently served as CEO of Houston-based Careset, where she helped bring the Medicare data startup to commercialization. Prior to that, Neder served as COO of Houston-based telemedicine startup 2nd.MD, which was acquired for $460 million by Accolade in 2021.

"Laura brings a rare combination of founder empathy, operational experience and ecosystem leadership," Rice Alliance shared.

Neder and Rice Alliance also shared that the organization is hiring developers to design the new Venture Advantage Platform. Learn more here.

Elon Musk's SpaceX files initial paperwork to sell shares to the public

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Elon Musk's space exploration company has filed preliminary paperwork to sell shares to the public, according to two sources familiar with the filing, a blockbuster offering that would likely rank as the biggest ever and could make its founder the world's first trillionaire.

A SpaceX IPO promises to be one of the biggest Wall Street events of the year, with several investment banks lining up to help raise tens of billions to fund Musk's ambitions to set up a base on the moon, put datacenters the size of several football fields in orbit and possibly one day send a man to Mars.

The sources spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk publicly about the confidential registration with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

SpaceX did not respond immediately to a request for comment.

Exactly how much SpaceX plans to raise has not been disclosed but the figure is reportedly as much as $75 billion. At that level, the offering would easily eclipse the $29 billion that Saudi Aramco raised in its IPO in 2019.

The offering, coming possibly in June, could value all the shares of SpaceX at $1.5 trillion, nearly double what the company was valued in December when some minority owners sold their stakes, according to research firm Pitchbook, before an acquisition that increased its size.

Musk owns 42% of the SpaceX now, according to Pitchbook, though that figure will change with the IPO when new owners are issued shares. In any case, he is likely to pierce the trillion dollar mark because he is already close. Forbes magazine estimates Musk's net worth at roughly $823 billion.

In addition to making reusable rockets to hurl astronauts and hardware into orbit, SpaceX owns Starlink, the world’s largest satellite communications company. The company also recently brought under its roof two other Musk businesses, social media platform X, formerly Twitter, and artificial intelligence business, xAI, in a controversial transaction because both the seller and the buyer were controlled by him.

SpaceX has become the biggest commercial launch company in its industry, responsible for sending payloads into orbit for customers across the globe, but has also benefited from big taxpayer spending. That has raised conflicts of interest issues given that Musk was the biggest donor to President Donald Trump's campaign and is still a big backer.

In the past five years, SpaceX won $6 billion in contracts from NASA, the Defense Department and other U.S. government agencies, according to USAspending.gov.

Among current SpaceX owners is Donald Trump Jr, the president's oldest son. He owns a shares through 1789 Capital. That venture capital firm made him a partner shortly after his father won the presidency for a second time and has been buying up federal contractors seeking to win taxpayer money ever since.

The White House and Trump himself have repeatedly denied there are any conflicts of interest between his role as president and his family's businesses.

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