Experts Live in a Bubble. I Did Too

This is the second part of a short series about working with startups preparing for demo day. You can read the first part here: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/strong-startups-still-can-t-explain-what-they-do-19b1af95be

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After working with the accelerator teams, I caught myself thinking about something unexpected. What surprised me wasn’t that some of the presentations were weak. What surprised me was my own reaction.

I genuinely expected a higher level of clarity. And at some point I realized the issue wasn’t them. It was my expectations.

When you spend years working in the same field, certain things start to feel obvious. You instantly see weak structure. You notice when a slide is overloaded. You can tell when an idea falls apart halfway through a sentence. Over time, you begin to assume this is just a basic professional skill. If someone builds a product and raises funding, of course they can clearly explain what they do.

But that’s an illusion.

We all live in professional bubbles. Inside your own context, everything feels logical and natural. Outside of it, your “obvious” might actually be a rare skill. What you’ve practiced for years might be a completely new way of thinking for someone else.

I saw this very clearly. Strong founders understood their market, product, and technology deeply. They could handle complexity, make fast decisions, juggle dozens of variables. But when it came to articulating their value in a simple, sequential way, it became difficult. Not because they lacked intelligence. Their attention had just been trained elsewhere.

We underestimate how different types of thinking really are. An engineer thinks in systems and functionality. A marketer thinks in audiences and channels. A founder thinks in growth and survival. Structuring communication is its own discipline. Most people don’t study it deliberately. They either develop it over time, or they don’t.

The uncomfortable realization for me was personal. I was living in a bubble too. I had started treating certain habits as common sense. Cut the unnecessary. One slide, one idea. If something requires five extra explanations, the core idea probably isn’t ready. I thought this was just basic logic. In reality, it was years of repetition shaping my instincts.

Once you see that, your position changes. You stop getting irritated. You stop thinking, “This is obvious.” You begin to see differences in context, not differences in intelligence. And then a more important question appears: if you can see structure faster than others, what do you do with that?

Expertise isn’t just about knowing more. It’s about translating. Turning complexity into clarity. Removing noise without flattening meaning. Helping someone find logical ground where before there was just a pile of thoughts.

That’s what I really took from that experience. Not a sense of superiority, but an awareness of the limits of my own bubble. The deeper you go into your profession, the easier it is to assume your way of thinking is universal. And the more important it becomes to step outside that context and see how other people actually think.

Everyone has a bubble. The real question is whether you’re aware of yours. And whether you’re willing to work at the intersection of different ways of thinking, instead of staying inside your own.

In the final part of this story, there’s another layer to unpack: what investors are actually trying to hear when you step on stage, and why most teams focus on the wrong thing.