EP03- Becoming the Chaos Coordinator: Turning Early Stage Disorder into Direction

Chaos has been a companion in my life for as long as I can remember. Not because I wanted it, but because it arrived without asking for permission. It shaped the way I relate to people, decisions, systems, and the unknown. Over time, I learned to see chaos not as the enemy but as a source of information. A living environment that reveals its patterns only to those who stay long enough to listen.

Early-stage innovation lives in that same territory. It is messy, uncomfortable, unpredictable, and deeply human. For many founders, this is frightening. For me, it feels familiar.

This essay is about that space. How to enter it. How to read it. How to turn it into something that moves.

It is about becoming the chaos coordinator.

Childhood and the First Storm

One of the first moments that defined my relationship with chaos came when my parents divorced. I was still a teenager. One day, everything seemed normal, and the next day it felt like the entire structure of our life collapsed. My father left, my mother struggled, and my younger brother needed someone to hold things together.

No one stepped forward. So I did.

It was not heroic. It was survival. I worked next to the school. I bought food. I kept us going. I learned that responsibility is both heavy and liberating. Once you accept it, clarity emerges.

That memory never left me. It shaped how I enter chaotic environments today. I do not panic. I look for the first point of orientation. The moment I see a pattern, I can move.

The Early Stage Parallel

When I started working deeply with founders, I noticed the same pattern repeating:
Chaos arrives. Things break. People freeze.

Founders respond in predictable ways.

They try to build more features.
They hide behind the product.
They hope the market will understand them without them understanding the market.

It does not work.

Innovation does not happen in neatly controlled environments. It happens at the edge where nothing is defined. That is the nature of the early stage. You cannot escape it. You can only learn to navigate it. And the way to navigate is simple, but rarely easy. Start with the problem.

Obsession with the Problem

Founders who succeed share one trait: they are obsessed with the customer's pain. They know the details. They live inside the perspective of the user. They understand not just what is happening, but why it matters on a human level.

When you become obsessed with the problem, two things happen immediately.

First, customers feel that you see them.
Second, product decisions finally make sense.

Most founders know this intellectually. Very few practice it.

I push them into the uncomfortable part of the process:
Meet the customer.
Have the conversation.
Ask the raw questions.
Listen to the answers that hurt.

This is where truth lives. This is where clarity begins.

The Illusion of More Features

Almost every founder I work with tells me the same story. If only we built this one more feature, everything would change. More sales. More engagement. More traction.

Wrong.

Features are not the solution at the early stage. Understanding the problem is.

The market does not reward you for your creativity. It rewards you for relevance. And relevance comes from empathy, not engineering.

Scarcity as a Creative Fuel

The second reality of early-stage ventures is scarcity.
You never have enough time.
You never have enough money.
You never have enough people.

Scarcity forces discipline. It removes the illusion that you can fix everything at once. It brings your attention back to the signals that matter.

The question becomes: How can I get the maximum amount of learning with the minimum amount of resources?

This is where lean thinking enters, but not as a buzzword. As a survival instinct.

Talk to the customer before building anything. Create rough mockups. Test assumptions with conversation. Use duct tape solutions if needed. This is not laziness. It is intelligence under pressure.

The Sailor’s Mindset

My relationship with chaos started long before I entered venture building. I began sailing as a child. Later, I raced. Later, I became a skipper. Eventually, I crossed the Atlantic as co-captain.

Sailing teaches you something that business rarely does:
You cannot control the wind.
You can only adjust your sails.

This is how I see early-stage ventures. The environment will shift. Your assumptions will break. Your resources will run out. Your plans will collapse. But if you stay present and keep adjusting, you stay in the game.

The sea does not reward ego. It rewards awareness. Startups work the same way.

Gut Feeling and Pattern Recognition

People often misunderstand intuition. They think it is mysterious. Something mystical. It is not.

Gut feeling is pattern recognition you cannot yet verbalize. It is your body picking up on signals faster than your mind can process them. It comes from exposure, experience, pain, learning, and honesty.

The key is to listen to it. Not blindly. But with curiosity.

One of my favorite methods comes from a businesswoman I once met. After every interview, she sits alone in the room for a few minutes and simply notices how she feels.

There are only two possible feelings. Relief or energy.

If you feel relief, something was off. If you feel energized, pay attention.

This works for people. It works for decisions. It works for partnerships. It works for founders.

Truth has a physical signature.

Asking the Right Questions

My main tool is not telling founders what to do. It is asking the question they are not asking.

What am I missing? What decision am I avoiding? What assumption is protecting my ego? What truth do I not want to face?

Questions are navigation tools. They direct attention. Attention shapes action. And action creates momentum.

Answering them is uncomfortable. But comfort never built anything meaningful.

Taking Responsibility

Here is something founders rarely speak about. Some of the biggest failures in startups come not from bad markets or bad timing, but from people who refuse to take responsibility.

I see it often. A founder avoids decisions. Blames circumstances. Avoids discomfort. Delegates their own growth to someone else.

There is no learning in that. And without learning, there is no progress.

If you want to build something that survives chaos, you need to own your role inside it. Every mistake. Every blind spot. Every dropped ball. Every moment where you chose comfort over truth.

Responsibility is not punishment. It is power.

Extracting Value from Chaos

People sometimes tell me that I look calm in environments that feel overwhelming to them. It is not calm. It is a focus. Chaos sharpens my attention. It pulls me into a mode where I can sense what others miss.

Chaos is not noise. Chaos is information.

The question is: Do you know how to listen?

If you listen long enough, patterns appear. They always do. And once you see the pattern, you can build structure. Not a rigid structure. Not bureaucracy. But temporary scaffolding that allows the next step to emerge.

This is what I do. This is how I help founders and investors, not by giving them a map, but by assisting them to sense the terrain.

Becoming a chaos coordinator has nothing to do with enjoying disorder. I do not enjoy it. What I enjoy is the moment when things start to make sense. When the signal finally cuts through the noise. When the founder stops lying to themselves. When the team aligns. When the next move becomes clear.

Chaos is the beginning of every venture. Clarity is the reward for those who stay in it long enough.

The job is not to control the storm. The job is to navigate it.

Timecode:

00:00 Embracing Chaos: My Journey Begins

01:33 The Role of Chaos in Innovation

02:29 Focusing on the Client's Pain Points

05:54 The Lean Approach to Startups

07:57 Learning and Adapting Through Experience

08:51 Trusting Gut Feelings in Decision Making

11:19 The Power of Asking the Right Questions

Links:

Uniprisma: https://uniprisma.com/

Transcript:

My friends told me several times that I have a skill to coordinate chaos, and I know I do. It comes from several things, but there is one thing I know that had a major impact on me: as I grew up, when my parents divorced, suddenly I found myself in a huge chaos. I looked around, and there was nobody taking responsibility, so I took the responsibility, and that taught me. I was basically forcing myself to create an order in the chaos. That made me a different person, I think in a good way as well, which means I'm absolutely not afraid of chaotic situations, but I don't like them. It's not that I like to be in chaos. I like the dynamic of being in chaos and creating an order in chaos.

When I came across what I think was an online advertisement, I saw a t-shirt that said "chaos coordinator." I usually don't like t-shirts with funny lines, but I purchased it, and I'm proudly wearing it because it's part of my identity. I'm a chaos coordinator, and early-stage investment is super chaotic. Both on the human level and the tech level, it's, yeah, it can go so many ways, and I love that. Why? Because in a controlled environment, a predefined and controlled clean environment, there is efficiency, but innovation is not happening there at all. It cannot by its nature. Unstructured is trying to become structured, and once it's structured, it then also wants to go back to the unstructured. I love this cycle.

So when we take the example of a Venture Studio, working with a startup in our case, how do we approach it? I talked about the human factor, the chaos, but then I like to start with the problem, the pain, and not with features and products. Because eventually, the buyer, the client, will focus on his or her pain or problem. That is the core issue. That's why we are providing services, creating products, because there is a need, and we want to fill that need. I like when founders become a bit obsessed with this because I think it's a healthy sign that they will actually make it. If you are obsessed with the client's problem, then two things will immediately happen. One is your client will recognize that and will love that, because they can feel that they are seen, they are heard.

But most of the startups that I work with, they always make the same mistake. They think if only we could develop another feature in our product, then more people would buy it. Wrong. You need less features and more customer focus. Less product development at the beginning, more discussions with the clients. Everybody knows this, yet so few actually do it. So my job is to ensure that I keep founders on track, keep them in focus.

I think one reason why nobody likes to do that, or very few actually do that, is because it can be painful. You get rejected. Nobody likes to be rejected. I don't like to be rejected at all. But that's the process. What I learned lately is instead of classic validation of any idea, which is like, "Here is my product, would you be paying for that?" I think that's a totally wrong question. Again, it focuses on the product. The discussion has to be about the client. I think this is the game-changing moment when founders let me push them into that situation, that it's okay to not deal with the product. So this is how it starts: becoming obsessed with the problem and the pain point of the client.

It always sounds good, right? But there are not enough resources at the early stage in the life of a startup. There's not enough time, not enough money, not enough people to help you. Very, very limited resources, which means two things. Once you spend your resources, you cannot go back. That creates pressure because it almost feels like you have to make it right for the first time, because if you don't, then you will not have a second chance. But you cannot get it right for the first time. It's almost impossible.

So what's the best way to do it? I also learned it; it's not something I came up with. It's, I think, most commonly known as the Lean Approach, which is using minimal resources for maximum feedback. It's the mock-up, it's just the discussion. Working with limited resources requires creativity, a lot of duct tape solutions, workaround solutions. It resonates very well with my sailing background. For example, when I crossed the Atlantic, some things broke on the boat, actually many things broke on the boat, including my head injuries, and the engine broke down, and so on and so on. There is no way to ask for help.

I think it's an analogy with a limited-resources startup because they also have to make it work. Whatever the problem is, they have to make it work with whatever resources they have, be it mental resources, financial, infrastructure, network, whatever it is. But that requires one trait, which is not looking for excuses. Because if you're looking for excuses, like, "I couldn't validate my product because the market is so and so," there is no learning from that. Learning comes by admitting, "I didn't think of this and that, and because of that, so and so happened. So I take responsibility, hence I can learn something and I can apply it."

It's not only the startups that I work with learn from me, but I learn from them, or we learn together. I would rather say that I think having more experience is not enough. Drawing the right conclusions from your experience, that's what matters, not the number of the years. So I'm learning together with them. I'm learning new patterns and new techniques as well. I'm also learning a lot about myself because I get to challenge a lot my patience, or my humility, or my competencies, whatever it is. Each project is different.

There are so many decisions to be made, and most of the times you don't have all the data for a good decision. So that's when gut feeling comes into play. To me, gut feeling is not something of a mystical capability; it's actually science. It's pattern recognition of your body, of your full being. I wouldn't even separate it. Our being has a lot of sensors, and a lot of patterns are picked up, maybe not on a conscious level, but somehow you kind of sense it. Over the years I learned to listen to that. By that I mean, it's easier for me to have access to my gut feeling. I don't push it down or I don't ignore it as much as I used to do. I just listen to it.

That only means that I take it seriously. I heard from a successful businesswoman the way she hires people, and I really like that. It's about gut feeling, and this is what she does. She's having an interview conversation with a potential candidate. After the candidate leaves, she stays in the room for maybe two, three minutes and just allows herself to recognize how she feels. There are basically two ways to feel about people when you meet them and after you depart, after you say goodbye. One is relief: "Oh, finally, now I can be myself." All of us know this feeling, right? Like, "Finally, I can be in my own mindset." That's not a good sign. Or the other feeling is like, "Wow, this was maybe tiring, but very wow, that was inspiring, energizing. I want to meet with this person again. I don't know, I could be myself with this person." That's when you know that you are on the right track. So gut feeling is not like a secret weapon, but all of us have it. We just need to learn back to have access to it and recognize it.

My avatar or my role as a chaos coordinator, with the abilities of recognizing my own gut feelings, this enables me, I think, with at least one power that I have, which is asking the right questions. I think I do that to myself as well. My favorite question to ask is, "What are the questions that I'm not asking now that I should be asking?" These questions are the best way to escape chaos or find order in chaos because they are narratives basically. They direct your attention to a certain direction, and once you go there, everything else falls into place, or not, and you don't need to look at that way. So it directs the attention. Attention is actually the driver, the vector of action from that moment on. I approach everything with questions to myself and to people I meet, to the world. This is the way I discover and this is the way I handle chaos and I extract value from chaos.