Cheers to the crazy ideas. 🥂 I was raised in that world. And am better for it.
I think I was always trying to help connect people and concepts in some capacity, I just didn’t realize that’s what or how I was building my career. And I know there are so many other strategic thinkers out there doing the same without realizing it.
Who gets hired (don’t mess that up, but you will).
How do companies find talent?
How knowledge and opportunity move through organizations…
If you stay in that world long enough, something interesting happens.
You start to realize the technology isn’t actually the point. (It’s sometimes the point).
BUT, the point is always the people and human connection.
Somewhere in that evolution, I realized a large part of my “why” had quietly formed around one idea:
How do I help scale connecting people to opportunity.
Because talent, as we all know, even if some systems still pretend otherwise, is everywhere.
Brilliant, capable, motivated humans exist in every city, every background, every industry.
But opportunity?
Opportunity is incredibly limited, scarce, hard to find, hard to be connected to and almost impossible to define.
Which now, raises a much bigger question for those of us building companies, products, and organizations:
How do we actually create systems that surface talent instead of hiding it?
How do we find people who have the potential to change the BIG things?
…and, how do we create pathways and systemic change that allow us all to move forward?
If I’m being honest, I don’t think anyone has fully cracked that code yet. However, I have been privileged to sit front row in watching innovative founders work on this for almost two decades.
Where Crazy Ideas Come From
Crazy ideas rarely arrive as polished strategies.
They show up as questions and observations.
“What if we tried this differently?”
“Why does this system work this way?”
“Why couldn’t someone build something better?”
In my experience, the people who generate the most interesting ideas tend to share a few characteristics.
They notice (everything) but most importantly, the friction.
They pay attention to problems other people have accepted as normal, and actually work to fix them
They’re curious about how things could work instead of how they currently do.
And maybe most importantly, they’re willing to sit with uncomfortable questions long enough to imagine something new. (Guilty as charged, hate it and love it.)
Crazy ideas aren’t about genius at all, in my opinion.
They’re about refusing to accept the default settings of the world.
The Hardest Part: Bringing Them to Life
Ideas are the easy part. Everyone has an idea. And most people want to tell you about them. (Great for cocktail parties, bad for business.)
But, execution is where things get real or come to die, and not because they’re bad.
…because they encounter something every founder, operator, or builder will eventually run into:
bad advice.
(sorry, seen that so many times, it needed to be headlined). Tell your friends.
This is, advice that sounds responsible because it came from a wallet or a check.
Advice that sounds practical or easy, because… it was easy.
or, advice that tells you why something probably won’t work. (where are all my dissenters?)
“Someone tried that already.”
“The market isn’t ready.”
“That’s too complicated.”
“That’s not how this industry works.”
Sometimes that advice is helpful…
But often, it’s simply the voice of people protecting the current system, or the majority doesn’t want the crazy idea, the world shift, or the progress. Because that doesn’t protect them.
And now, for my next trick, this is where leadership actually matters.
Because great leaders don’t just tolerate crazy ideas.
They support them, tactically.
They create space for experimentation.
They allocate resources.
They protect builders from getting buried under the weight of organizational inertia.
They ask better questions instead of shutting things down too early.
They say things like…
“Let’s test it.”
“Show me what it could look like.”
“What would it take to make this real?”
Without that kind of leadership, even the best ideas stall out.
With it, ideas get oxygen.
And when ideas get oxygen, people start building and your business starts growing.
Finding the People Who Believe
One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned over the years is that ideas don’t succeed alone. They succeed because of the people who gather around them.
The leaders who fund them.
The teams who build them.
The communities that support them.
In the early stages, this often looks less like strategy and more like alignment. You find the people who feel the same friction you do.
The ones who see the same gaps.
The ones who say things like:
“Wait… why doesn’t this exist already?”
Those are your (or at least, my) people.
And when you find them, things start moving. Because belief is contagious. 💫
Cheers to the crazy ones and the believers, 🥂
Kelly
