To go broad, she told me, you have to first go deep. When she was working at UCSF Medical Center, she said, she noticed something interesting: the number one determinant of whether her patients got care was a factor she wouldn’t have expected—it was whether the BART public transit system was running on time.

You have to go deep before you go broad.

For current founders, the question is: how do you stay deep as you scale? This typically means talking to customers. Figma’s Dylan Field was famous for reading every single tweet that mentioned Figma for years.

For future founders, the question is: what have you gone deep on that’s given you the perspective to now go broad? Build what you know. Think of Shopify’s Tobi Lutke building the e-commerce platform he himself needed when launching Snow Devil, his snowboard brand. Or think of Patreon’s Jack Conte building the monetization platform he wished he had as an artist. Depth of insight is hard to fake.

Most of the next generational companies won’t be born from market-mapping or searching for a gap in an industry. Most will be born from a founder looking inward to think about what insights they have from their personal experiences, then turning those insights into big visions.