Perspectives on weighing conviction versus consensus

Every day, we face choices that reward conventional wisdom — building the right-sized team, raising capital for the hot trend, getting bylined in a publication for following their narrative. And this training, even in the most subtle ways, can signal to us that there’s safety in following the crowd. But real progress — the kind that will radically shape the future — rarely starts with consensus.

At Mercury Spheres, our event for our community of ambitious founders and operators, guest speakers shared their stories of when to pivot ideas, challenge assumptions, and build open-minded team cultures. From a side project with rapid adoption to a for-profit reforestation business to the winning NBA Finals strategy of a young employee, these conversations offered a different lens on how conviction shows up in the hardest, most defining moments. 

Here’s some of what we learned. 

We’ve all been taught the importance of customer discovery in finding — and proving — startup ideas. But while some founders approach this process looking for confirmation bias in their idea, the purpose of customer discovery is to disprove their early beliefs.

Journalist Alexis Madrigal puts it this way: the best insights often don’t come from experts who already know the script, but from people (e.g., founders) brave enough to ask the (seemingly) obvious questions. 

“Experts kind of know what’s supposed to happen in a conversation like this,” Madrigal said, referring to social topics discussed on his radio show where the prevailing narrative reigns supreme, but “then some random person calls in and disrupts the whole careful dance.”

Madrigal shared stories, one about a woman who had suffered a traumatic brain injury and subsequently found comfort in an AI assistant; another about a homeless man who defended encampments, citing the benefits like community and purpose, even though his peers were shamed and ignored.

In both cases, the lived experiences of each subject were at odds with the issue’s prevailing narrative. But it changed the conversation — something Madrigal refers to as “tilting the plane” of the conversation. 

You can plan, plan, and plan some more, but until you ask thoughtful questions — ones that may uncomfortably yield non-consensus answers — you may be spending time building in the wrong direction.

Pivoting your business can be seen as a sign of doubt or indecision, but in the experiences shared by Sara Mauskopf (co-founder & CEO of Winnie) and Gagan Biyani (co-founder & CEO of Maven), their respective pivots showed their commitment to following new customer data.  

Mauskopf and her co-founder, Anne Halsall, spent the first two years building Winnie into a product to help parents find family-friendly places to take their kids — but the product never really took off. 

“It was really easy to trick ourselves into thinking we just need to give it a little more time, but when the funding landscape shifted and we decided to become a profitable business, I think that really helped clarify what is working and what isn’t,” Mauskopf said.

On a weekend whim, Halsall built a childcare search tool, and people loved it. At first, the two thought they’d incorporate the childcare search tool as a feature into the existing product. 

“When we realized we should focus on the childcare search tool and kill the [original idea,]” Mauskopf said, it was “painful.” You’re not only facing the sunk cost fallacy, but you’re also abandoning the idea that so many people — your early investors, friends, family, and users — believed in. 

But letting go of your own idea isn’t abandoning your conviction — it’s refining the way that best serves your customers. This can be the difference between building an enduring business and trying to force a square peg into a round hole. As Mauskopf puts it, “I had to admit my idea was dumb and [Halsall’s idea] was right, but once I got over myself, the business started working.” 

Biyani’s remarks followed a similar path, enduring a pivot that was both painful and slow. The company — which helped customers turn their expertise into interactive courses — spent the first two years working with large content creators who had big audiences but who showed low retention using Maven’s tools.

“Our retention in the second year was about 60%… but in the third year, it [dropped to] 4%,” Biyani reflected.

He and his team knew something needed to change, but instead of changing their product, they pivoted ICPs — focusing on experienced professionals with deep expertise — and retention skyrocketed.

“Our two-year retention rate [improved to] be something like 180%… it was a massive change.”

Biyani and his team didn’t abandon their early conviction — they doubled down on their infrastructure but redirected it to a more aligned ICP based on the real-world retention data they were gathering.

In an industry with decades of entrenched opinions and strong personalities, how does a young video analyst for the Golden State Warriors propose a radical idea that gets implemented on their way to the NBA Finals championship?

“Coach Kerr created an environment where a small, no-name person like myself was comfortable speaking up in the NBA Finals with a relatively drastic idea. That’s so rare,” said Nick U’ren, now General Manager of WNBA team Phoenix Mercury.

In 2015, the Golden State Warriors were down 2–1 in the NBA Finals, and Nick — a junior analyst at the time — suggested an idea: bench the starting center and insert Andre Iguodala into the starting lineup. The team did just that. It worked. And the Warriors won the championship.

Now, as GM of the Phoenix Mercury, Nick is building his organization in the WNBA with that same ethos, encouraging dissent across the organization and creating a culture where anyone can contribute, no matter their tenure or position. 

“I try to really go out of my way to praise ideas or opinions that we didn’t end up using… it’s your job to bring these ideas… it’s our job… to decide what ends up getting implemented.”

Even if their ideas don’t get implemented, that level of respect creates trust and is the foundation of winning organizations. 

At the highest level of sports with billions of dollars on the line (as with incumbent companies and industries), organizations often find themselves siding with the safest bets — the people and ideas that have worked in the past. But setting a culture where dissent is encouraged and meritocracy is practiced enables companies to choose the best decisions regardless of where they came from, and can be a lesson for other tech companies to maximize their team’s potential.

Yee Lee spent twenty five years building tech companies across Silicon Valley, but in 2019, he made a decision most people would’ve considered irrational: he walked away to plant trees.

“Almost as a little bit of a joke… we (Lee and his co-founder, Yishan Wong) were two engineers from Silicon Valley. We didn’t know what the heck we were going to do in climate… Worst comes to worst, we can just plant trees somewhere together,” Lee laughed. 

However, Lee didn’t just want to work on climate. He wanted to build a company that accomplished two non-consensus goals:

1. Ignore the short-term hype cycles he’s been used to in tech
2. Flip the traditional business model for reforestation on its head

So Lee and Wong got to work building a for-profit reforestation company, Terraformation, with multi-decade project timelines using carbon credits to generate income. While most of what Lee knew from the tech industry was about optimizing 18-month funding cycles, he was now building toward something he might never see.

“Our business model is based off of this very long-term revenue model called carbon credits.”

At the time when Lee started Terraformation, most reforestation projects were nonprofit or grant-funded efforts. The thought of building a profitable company in the space, especially when carbon credits can take five plus years or more to start generating income, was a lofty goal. 

“We wanted to create this economic model so that teams will actually have the incentive to keep the trees standing rather than just cut them down and sell them for timber.”

Through Lee’s approach to building an enduring reforestation business, he offers a lesson to all founders wanting to take the leap into a new industry: sometimes being new to an industry, and bringing along a bit of your naivete, can be valuable when confronted by other incumbents and their legacy ways of work.

What these stories show is that conviction is about responsiveness. It’s listening to what your customers are really telling you, letting go of your original assumptions, and empowering your team to challenge you. It’s thinking in decades, and sometimes, it’s as simple as asking better questions and being brave enough to follow the unexpected answers.

To watch the rest of the sessions from Mercury Spheres, visit our playlist.