Because some of the best founders we’ll meet this decade don’t know they’re founders yet.
Here’s a prediction for the next 5 years in the tech startup industry: The successful founders of tomorrow are the people who’ve spent ten, fifteen, twenty years inside an industry.
They have deep expertise in real problems and workflows, and they’ve come up with seemingly obvious solutions to annoyances no one else is solving. Solutions that are actually brilliant. But this mix — of familiarity with the problem and underestimation of the solution’s brilliance — is exactly why they’re not building.
That gap is exactly why we’re proud to sponsor From Inventor to Investable, a new YouTube show hosted by Daniela Navaes (founder of Lumni) and Akhil Menon (founder of notNULL Ventures). The show is built for industry experts who haven’t yet made the leap, and its mission is simple: help them become investable founders.
Why we’re backing this
At Lumni Works, we believe deep domain expertise is one of the most underrated advantages in the startup world. Having random ideas is easy. What’s not easy is understanding a problem space so deeply that you can spot the micro-problems within it, and come up with sharp solutions to solve them. Yet, the people who have those insights often never act on them, because they assume that if a problem isn’t being solved, it’s because it’s unsolvable, when usually it’s because no one spotted the opportunity.
I know, this goes against our usual advice that if your startup idea hasn’t been built, it’s probably because there’s no market for it. But this isn’t true when it comes to deep insider problems within highly gatekept industries – which is why we love working with industry experts. Industry experts who spent years building domain expertise, contacts and credibility are more likely to get their first clients – and investors – from the very people within their network.
Inside Episode 1: Should industry experts become founders?
In the first episode, the two hosts explore why insiders spot problems outsiders miss, and why experts so often talk themselves out of acting on them. Daniela and Akhil unpack the expert blind spot (assuming the problems you live with every day are simply unsolvable), the cognitive biases that prevent startups from being successful, and how to catch them early.
The episode also tackles the question every expert is asking right now: what actually matters in the age of AI? The hosts make the case that soft skills are the new hard skills: humans scan, while AI reads everything, but AI hallucinates and experts calibrate. As they put it: “if you’re impressed by AI-generated output in your own field, you probably don’t understand that field deeply enough“. The emerging role for experts isn’t competing with AI, it’s becoming the “Chief Agentic AI Officer” — managing AI agents to multiply outputs, while applying deep human judgment on top.
And finally, the question at the heart of the show: what makes an expert investable? Credibility, network, and founder-market fit. Plus a set of resource recommendations to get any novice started.
Two questions to sit with
The show ends the episode by turning the lens on the audience:
- What problem from your career annoyed you for years?
- What inefficiency do you see every day that everyone else ignores?
Your answer might be the venture you were born to build.
Watch and follow
Episode 1 is live now — find the show on YouTube. Subscribe so you don’t miss what’s coming. You can also reach the hosts directly at investable.studio@gmail.com.
From Inventor to Investable is sponsored by Lumni Works and notNULL Ventures.
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