In To Solve It, Make the Problem Bigger, Vijay Pande judges a builder not only by the outcome delivered but by the user's growing ability to reach that outcome without the builder.

Evidence 1 passage

• groundsUntitled source

  In every case you stop paying the gatekeeper to stand between you and the goal, and redesign the environment so you grow toward the thing yourself. A builder’s product is not just the outcome; it is your growing ability to reach it without the builder. (I’m arguing by analogy and I know it — the full Montessori hospital hasn’t been built yet. Someone should build it; that’s a startup, not a metaphor.) **Gatekeeping is everywhere.** It hasn’t escaped me that VCs can become gatekeepers, between founders and LPs with a well-defined toll (2 and 20). Gatekeeping is a common play you can easily see once you’re looking for it, including journalism, politics, publishing, entertainment studios, etc. Tech at its best creates new ways around these tolls through a common solution: democratized distribution. In fact, that’s how you’re reading this right now. The gatekeeper’s product was never health or knowledge or God. It was the gate. ## **The gatekeepers have willing customers—and all of us have been one** **The unfortunate universal core to many of these issues often goes unspoken: literally or metaphorically, can you heal someone who wants to stay sick?** Or, more directly, someone who has been paid, gently and for years, to stay sick? Educate someone paid to stay ignorant? Sickness, helplessness, and victimhood all pay — in attention, in absolution, in benefits, and in the deepest currency: an excuse.

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