E184 Soma Pitiryi

Everyone talks about product-market fit. Hardly anyone talks about founder-market fit.

Soma Pirityi believes we’ve been measuring startups the wrong way. After building businesses, losing money, working in venture capital and studying AI, risk and entrepreneurship across Cambridge, UCL and St Andrews, he reached a simple conclusion: companies rarely fail because of the spreadsheet. They fail because of the people behind it.

This conversation explores why founders romanticise failure, why AI won’t replace great co-founders, how investors really make decisions, why cognitive diversity matters more than intelligence, and why understanding psychology could become the biggest competitive advantage in business.