Down the Rabbit Hole of the Unique Insight
The Truth You See That No One Else Sees
The author of this post is Julien Petit
VCs say it all the time, especially the top-tier ones.
“What's your Unique Insight?”
But most founders don’t really hear it. Or they hear it without understanding what it truly means or why it matters.
This article is here to change that. It’s your field guide to a concept that’s both elusive and essential, the one thing that can turn a pitch from interesting to irresistible.
And if you read to the end, you’ll discover the real-world stories that make it unforgettable, from Mistral to Mirakl, Cardiologs to Cerebras.
1. The Spark: An Insight That Makes You Think
Top-tier VCs meet thousands of founders. Most pitches blend together, predictable, derivative, intellectually flat. Even when well-articulated, they often feel like echoes of ideas heard a hundred times before.
But once in a while, a founder says something that no one else has ever said.
And something shifts.
It’s not a new stat. Not a killer metric. It’s a way of seeing, a sharp, clean reframing of the problem that hits you in the gut.
You blink. You feel it in your chest before you process it in your head.
“Huh.”
As Eric Vishria of Benchmark puts it:
“It’s never a metric. It’s an insight — a lens on the world that makes you stop and go: ‘Wait… I’ve never thought of it that way.’”
That moment, the tilt, the surprise, the little burst of dopamine, that’s when conviction begins.
“I talk to people every day. I read constantly. But when a founder makes me think in a way I never have before — that’s rare. That’s powerful. That’s insight.”
A true Unique Insight doesn’t just inform you.
It destabilizes you.
It shows that the founder is not merely repeating what the market says, they’ve gone further. They’ve explored, synthesized, reframed. And in that flash of originality, you glimpse something else: they’re a learner.
You can feel it in the interaction.
The questions they ask.
Their ability to reason from first principles.
Their willingness to pause, dig, challenge, even ask what seems like “basic” questions to uncover deeper truths.
As Vishria says, great founders often feel like they’re plugging a vacuum into your brain and downloading everything. And when you meet someone who does that, week after week, for years… they don’t just stay ahead. They compound.
2. It’s Not Obvious — Until It Is
One day, I was lucky enough to hear Alexis Robert (Kima Ventures) say something that stuck with me:
“The best insights feel obvious after you’ve heard them.”
That’s the paradox.
A real Unique Insight isn’t loud. It doesn’t force its way into the room. It simply unlocks something that was always there, hidden in plain sight. So natural, so clear, that you wonder how no one saw it before.
That’s the moment when the VC leans forward and thinks: “Damn. That actually makes total sense. Why has no one said this before?”
It’s Plato’s Cave, again and again, a metaphor that came up often in my conversations with Alexis Robert.
Most founders pitch from inside the cave, describing shadows, extrapolating projections of something they haven’t truly experienced.
But those with a real insight?
They’ve stepped outside.
They’ve seen the light.
And they’ve come back, not just to describe it, but to reveal its source.
That’s what a Unique Insight does.
It doesn’t dazzle.
It reorients.
And when it lands, it feels like it’s always been there, just waiting to be seen.
3. The Formula: Door, Key, Proof
Most founders confuse Unique Insight with “being smart” or “knowing the industry.”
But real insight isn’t trivia. It’s structure. And to make it work, you need three parts:
Insight → Action → Evidence
Door → Key → Proof
🪟 1. The Market Insight (The Door)
This is the moment the map flips.
A good insight isn’t just “there’s a big market.” It’s “everyone sees the market wrong.” It’s a shift in how people behave, or a truth that hasn’t been acted on yet.
Let’s look at a few:
Google realized that backlinks, not keywords, were the real signal of relevance.
Stripe saw that developers hated payment integration and no one was building for them.
NVIDIA saw the future of computing would need graphical horsepower, not just CPUs.
PayPal noticed eBay sellers were dying for a way to get paid instantly.
Those are insights.
They point to the door.
But pointing is not enough.
🔑 2. The Edge (The Key)
Insight without edge is philosophy.
You might know where the gold is buried, but without a shovel, you’re stuck dreaming.
The Edge is what lets you act on your insight.
It’s not just a good idea, it’s how you build faster, move deeper, or play a different game entirely.
And the best edges? They often look irrational at first.
Google: Betting on relevance over revenue. PageRank ranked pages by authority, not keywords, using backlinks as a signal no one else prioritized. Paired with a clean, lightning-fast, ad-free interface, it looked simplistic, even naive. But users felt it instantly: better results, faster load times, no distractions. Quality drove traffic. Traffic built trust. And trust opened the door to monetization, years later, with AdWords. What looked like a minimal product was actually a wedge into one of the greatest businesses ever built.
Stripe: 7 lines of code vs. 100 pages of paperwork. Stripe collapsed weeks of integration into minutes, but the real edge? They rebuilt the entire payments infrastructure from scratch. Instead of relying on banks, they controlled the stack. That meant speed, precision, and reliability. A developer-first product with a deep structural moat.
NVIDIA: A bet-the-company R&D loop. Jensen Huang instituted a 6-month product cycle, 3x faster than the industry. Every chip doubled performance, even if it nearly bankrupted them. But this relentlessness became their edge. Faster learning, faster shipping, and a lead that became uncatchable.
PayPal: A payments company disguised as a fraud lab. PayPal targeted eBay sellers a smart distribution hack. But when fraud exploded, they didn’t panic they built a world-class risk engine. CAPTCHAs, real-time scoring, micro-deposits: they made fraud prevention a superpower.
That edge let them survive where others died.
Your insight gives you the map.
Your edge is how you walk through the wall.
🎯 3. The Proof (You Tried the Key)
When your insight is right and your edge is real, the market responds. Fast.
It doesn’t trickle, it surges.
Compaq: $111M revenue in year 1, from a prototype and a folding table.
Facebook: 50% of Harvard signed up in the first month.
PayPal: 20k users/day, no ads, just viral firepower.
NVIDIA: $40M in revenue while 90+ competitors died off.
Proof looks like:
Metrics breaking your dashboards
Revenue arriving faster than your accountants
Users fighting to get in
It’s not just traction.
It’s signal that the system cracked open.
You found the door.
You forged the key.
And now the lock is turning.
That’s all a great investor needs to believe.
4. A Unique Insight carries the seed of category leadership
The best VCs don’t back products, they back world-changers.
And that’s what a real insight does: it implies an ambition that goes beyond a billion-dollar company.
It carries the unspoken promise that:
This company won’t just participate in a market…
It will redefine it.
That’s why weak insights don’t get funded.
Because even if the logic holds, the magnitude is missing.
A real insight must whisper (or scream):
If this is true… nothing will ever be the same!
5. Real-World Insight Stories
When one sentence reframes everything.
Theory is useful. But nothing lands like a real founder, in a real room, saying something that changes the game.
These five stories show how a single insight, well-timed, well-framed, and deeply earned, can flip a “maybe” into a hard yes.
🧨 Insight in Action: How Cerebras Challenged the Hardware Orthodoxy
Eric Vishria remembers the moment clearly.
It was 2016. AI was still niche, transformers hadn’t arrived, and Nvidia was just a $30B company.
Then came the second slide of the Cerebras pitch:
“GPUs suck for deep learning — they just happen to be 100x better than CPUs.”
That one sentence cracked something open.
It didn’t just introduce a new stat, it questioned the foundations of AI infrastructure.
Why were we building the future of intelligence on chips designed for graphics?
The Cerebras team didn’t stop at provocation, they unpacked the workload, the bottlenecks, the hardware trade-offs.
They weren’t chasing a trend. They were reasoning from first principles.
And Eric Vishria felt it:
“If this works… it could really matter.”
That’s what a true insight does.
It doesn’t just change your mind, it expands what feels possible.
It creates asymmetry.
Not just in the idea, but in the outcome.
And just to close the loop: Cerebras, born from that single, contrarian insight, is now preparing its IPO in 2025.
🧨 Insight in Action: How Mirakl Flipped the Script
Xavier Lazarus (Elaia) almost passed on Mirakl.
“Another marketplace? Not interesting,” he thought.
But then Philippe Corrot reframed the problem:
“The question isn’t who wants a marketplace today — it’s who can survive Amazon without one.”
Suddenly, the company wasn’t selling software, it was selling survival.
And that made all the difference.
“They didn’t prove I was wrong,” Lazarus later said.
“But they made me believe they might be right.”
🧨 Insight in Action: How Mistral Rewrote the AI Cost Curve
Guillaume Lample and Timothée Lacroix had helped build the first version of LLaMA at Meta, alongside a small team, while Arthur Mensch came from DeepMind with a different kind of firepower.
They saw what no one else dared say out loud:
“We don’t need billions or armies. We just need focus and the right team.”
Most believed OpenAI’s scale was the real moat, billions in funding from Microsoft, tens of thousands of GPUs, and a compute infrastructure burning hundreds of millions in capex.
How could a new player possibly compete?
Mistral proved the edge was elsewhere: in execution velocity, design clarity, and above all, the credibility of a team that had already built a world-class LLM inside Meta, with just a small crew.
They also had something almost no one else could claim: a pre-assembled bench of world-class researchers ready to join. A unique recruiting edge, the kind of Cornered Resource that can’t be copied or bought.
The bottleneck wasn’t scale anymore. It was clarity, velocity — and access to rare, elite talent.
🧨 Insight in Action: How Algolia Made Google-Level Search Accessible
Julien Lemoine and Nicolas Dessaigne came from Exalead, with deep knowledge of search.
In 2012, most thought:
“If you want search as good as Google, you need to build it from scratch.”
Algolia said the opposite:
“You should be able to add world-class search to your app in minutes — without becoming Google.”
It was a powerful insight:
E-commerce UX expectations were rising.
In-house search was slow and poor.
Developers wanted performance, not infrastructure.
Algolia abstracted the complexity, just like Stripe did with payments.
That made VCs lean in and developers fall in love.
🧨 Insight in Action: How Cardiologs Turned Hidden Data Into a Clinical Edge
When Yann Fleureau pitched Cardiologs to Jean-Patrice Anciaux, he wasn’t just talking AI.
He was talking about access access to millions of real-world ECGs, collected over years from clinical partners.
His insight?
In the words of Jean-Patrice Anciaux:
“Everyone wants to build medical AI, but almost no one has the data to train it.”
In cardiology, general-purpose models don’t cut it.
You need massive volumes of labeled, clinical-grade data and hospitals don’t hand it over.
But Cardiologs had built trusted relationships with hospitals, and spent years structuring and cleaning the data.
VCs realized something critical:
Competitors could copy the tech.
But no one could copy the data.
And without that, no one could match the model’s performance.
That made Cardiologs more than a startup.
It made them an inevitable clinical platform.
Conclusion - The Deepest Layer: Desire, Models, and Secrets
A VC isn’t just looking for a good idea. They’re looking for a fresh lens, a founder who sees something no one else sees.
As Marc Andreessen puts it:
“You can always tell when you’re talking to someone. Sometimes, you’re in a conversation and you realize — wow, this person doesn’t have a single original thought. They’re just echoing things they’ve heard from others. And then, there are other people you speak with, and wow — they clearly have their own model of how the world works. It’s a different model from yours, and they say things you don’t expect. And that’s when you realize you need to understand their model versus yours. That’s how you actually learn something fundamental — something that sits right underneath the words.”
(Source)
And as Pierre Entremont (Frst) reminds us:
“What’s truly hard is to become the kind of person everyone wants to invest in. And that’s not the same thing as knowing how to pitch. You have to become desirable. And to do that, you have to discover a secret about the world — something you believe in deeply that others haven’t seen yet.
That secret needs to be tied to a dynamic powerful enough to build a massive company. Then, you need to embody that belief — live it, breathe it. You must have ideas for how to bring it to life, both in concrete terms and in ways that are deeply aligned with who you are. That’s the hard part. But if you reach that level…
Don’t worry — the funding will follow.”
(Source)
And as Jean de La Rochebrochard (Kima Ventures) puts it:
“What’s irresistible to fund is when genius meets the obvious.”
That’s what a Unique Insight does.
It makes you feel like it’s always been there, hidden in plain sight.
And sometimes, it does even more.
It creates tension.
Like a good episode of a series, one you can’t stop watching.
As Jean-Patrice Anciaux (ISAI) once told me,
“A great pitch makes you want to see the next episode. You feel a dramatic arc, a thread, a pull. You don’t know exactly where it’s going — but you want to follow.”
That’s the final proof of a true Unique Insight:
Not only does it reframe reality.
It hooks your mind.
I’ve been obsessed with the notion of Unique Insight for more than 5 years now. It started with a series of long conversations with Jean-Patrice Anciaux (ISAI), who, to this day, remains the one who articulated it best. We spoke about it four times over the years and in our last conversation, he graciously allowed me to record our exchange. I owe him a lot. (Thank you, Jean-Patrice, for planting the seed.)
Since then, I’ve shared a personal Notion note on Unique Insight with hundreds of founders. It was the foundation of many of my workshops, sessions, and first calls, a kind of internal compass to help frame what truly matters before any deck or pitch.
But recently, something happened.
I stumbled upon this new interview with Eric Vishria (Benchmark). I’ve listened to many of his talks before, but this one hit differently. It was so clear, so sharp, so full of truth… it pushed me to rewrite everything. This article wouldn’t exist without it.
The author of this post is Julien Petit
“Cutting Through The Noise” by Mighty Nine
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j'adore. The Door (a non obvious way of reframing reality), the Key (what you do about it), the Proof (how one benefits)