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Three Things Founders at SXSW Couldn't Stop Talking About

Rooftops, Austin skyline, a room full of founders and investors—and underneath all the good energy, the same three problems kept surfacing, conversation after conversation.

At the Dream Boldly: Investors + Founders Rooftop & Global Launch Event during SXSW, I had the chance to sit with builders from all over the world. Some were pre-revenue, some post-raise. Different stages, different industries. But the pain? Remarkably consistent.

Here's what I heard—and what it actually means.

Why Is Our Marketing Still Not Working?

This came up more than anything else. Founders would describe doing "all the right things"—posting consistently, running ads, updating the website—and yet nothing was moving. The audience wasn't growing. Leads weren't converting. And nobody could pinpoint why.

Here's what's actually happening: the way people search for information has fundamentally changed. Your buyers aren't typing keywords into Google the same way they were five years ago. They're asking AI tools for recommendations. They're getting answers from short-form video before they ever hit a website. They're trusting peer communities over brand content. The medium has shifted—but most founders are still marketing like it's 2019.

Doing more of the same thing isn't the answer. The question is whether your marketing even lives where your audience is looking. If your content isn't showing up in AI search results, if you're not building credibility in the channels your buyers actually trust, it doesn't matter how polished the message is. You're talking in a room nobody walked into.

The fix isn't more volume. It's presence in the right places—and that means auditing where your audience actually goes to make decisions, then building there.

⚡ How Do You Find People Who Can Do More Than One Thing?

Founder after founder described the same frustrating pattern: they'd hire for a specific role, and within months they'd realize they needed that person to stretch well beyond the job description—and most couldn't.

Early-stage companies don't run on specialists. They run on people who can hold strategy in one hand and execution in the other. Someone who can sit in a product meeting in the morning and write a pitch deck in the afternoon. Those people exist—but most hiring processes aren't designed to find them.

The shift is in what you screen for. Stop asking what someone has done. Start asking how they think when things break, when priorities conflict, when there's no playbook. That's the range that actually matters.

🧠 How Do You Find Investors Who Actually Get It?

This one hit the hardest. Multiple founders described investor conversations that went well on paper—term sheets, follow-up calls, interest—but ultimately felt off. The investor understood the market but not the mission. Or they liked the numbers but kept pushing the company toward a version of itself that didn't feel right.

Misaligned capital is one of the most expensive mistakes a founder can make. And it's almost always a narrative problem before it's a people problem. When your pitch is calibrated to impress rather than to filter, you attract the wrong room.

The founders who consistently connected with the right partners at events like Dream Boldly were the ones who could articulate their vision with specificity—not just what they're building, but why it has to be built this way, by this team, for this exact person. That kind of clarity is a filter. It pushes away the wrong money and pulls in the right kind of conviction.

That's a big part of what Chief Catalyst works on with founders—getting that narrative tight enough that every conversation, investor or otherwise, starts from the right foundation.

Nawal El Solh

Founder & Chief Catalyst

Nawal helps business leaders cut through complexity and scale with clarity. With decades of experience guiding executives through growth challenges, she founded Chief Catalyst to give leadership teams the strategic firepower they need—without the fluff. When she's not helping CEOs make faster decisions, she's probably asking "but what's the real problem here?"

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