The answer is to have a solution that has not seen a million failures.
In his pitch the founder conceived/pitched the solution as a veiled way to talk about his real problem.
I see it at my job all the time, we talk about technical problems and their solutions as a way of trying to share our fears, anxieties and feelings.
All the heady technical talk is just a proxy for what we really wish we could say.
I know this because I'm often the only one on the team brave enough to state the subtext openly, and have I often been thanked for that.
Every team needs a therapist, it would seem.
I have really come to appreciate the need for regular retros on a team. That a team needs a very safe space to explore failures and difficulties. It helps to have someone who can facilitate, but cam be successful without. It should be long enough to feel slighty awkward, so that people have time to articulate thoughts, and there should be no manager for at least half an hour, so that grievances about them can be aired.
I’ve seen teams really come together and vastly improve with regular safe meetings. I’ve also seen teams start to fall apart when the retro format changed to make it harder to delve into some of the emotional parts.
As has repeated time and time again to the point of almost becoming mythology in my opinion, pg has posted about how he originally hated the AirBnB idea but loved the founders.
The former isn't a "startup" companywise, and the latter isn't one now, but both were certainly novel, and strongly adjacent to the space under discussion. They both got people out of their homes and offices and into unfamiliar parts of town. My guess is the ultimate winner will find a way to hit both the Pokemon Go and Groupon psychological buttons at once.
Which apparently means keeping your passion under pressure.