The 70% Problem

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My Sustainable Encounter with Love Kashyap

by Albert Schiller

The allure of technology dominates the modern innovation landscape as a panacea for complex social problems. A well-designed app or platform is often mistaken for a complete solution, a bias Love Kashyap identifies as a critical and recurring strategic error. His experience has forged a sharp critique of this tech-solutionism. He argues that many ventures fail because their founders solve the easier, more visible part of the problem while fundamentally misunderstanding or ignoring the larger, more difficult context in which it exists. His philosophy champions a deep respect for the messy reality of implementation over the clean logic of a technologically elegant business plan.

The 30% Solution

Kashyap illustrates this failure mode using a heuristic approach. The visible, digital part of a solution, he suggests, is often only "30% of the problem." The far more significant "70% of the problem" consists of the invisible, complex, and often tedious work of physical logistics, on-the-ground adoption, and messy human behavior. This framework was crystallized while reviewing an ag-tech business plan that he assessed as being "50 times away from reality." The plan was built on the belief that technology could solve everything with the "click of the button." Still, it ignored the immense physical and social infrastructure required to make the technology viable. He often uses the example of a logistics company to illustrate the point: while the app is the visible 30%, the truly difficult part is the massive, physical 70% of inventory management and delivery. Founders who focus only on the tech are solving the easy part of the equation and are often shocked when their “elegant solution” fails to gain traction in the real world.

Blind Passion

This leads to what Kashyap sees as a common founder's fallacy. He observes that many entrepreneurs begin by "loving the problem" but soon become infatuated with the "startup they created." This shift is subtle and critical. When the solution becomes more important than the problem, any market resistance is interpreted as the customer's failure, not the product's. Founders begin to believe that their "customers are foolish" for not understanding the value of their solution. Kashyap argues, the customers are not foolish, but the solution has failed to demonstrate its value in their world. Founders who pass to align with their customers and align with their product instead, insulate themselves from critical feedback. This choice prevents them from adapting their model to fit the market. The result is a venture perfectly designed to solve a problem that no one has in a way no one is willing to execute.

Technically Sound

The ultimate outcome of the founder's fallacy is a failure to innovate. Kashyap believes the root cause is a failure to invest enough time to "understand the problem" before "repackaging a solution" from another market. He saw this firsthand when he reviewed the ag-tech business plan, which was disconnected from ground realities. It was a technically sound idea that misunderstood the cultural and logistical context of the farmers it was built to serve. The founders were not creating a new solution. Instead, they were importing a brainchild born from ego, and, in the best case, well-intended. For Kashyap, a solution that does not account for the messy 70% of reality is not a solution at all. It is a well-packaged hypothesis, destined to crash and burn the minute it collides with reality.

So what can we take from his approach?

Questions for Audience

1. How can founders and investors create systems or "kill switches" to protect themselves from the "blind passion" of becoming too infatuated with their own solution and ensure they remain focused on the problem they originally set out to solve?

2. Kashyap's "70% problem" is about logistics and human behavior. In an increasingly digital world, are we losing the skills and patience to solve these complex, non-digital problems?