What Do All Great Companies Have in Common?

Every founder I know has a story about the moment things finally clicked.

For Airbnb, that moment came when the founders realized their struggling platform didn’t have a business problem — it had a customer problem. They stopped coding, flew to New York and started visiting hosts in person. What they found wasn’t surprising in hindsight: Hosts struggled to photograph their spaces and communicate clearly with guests. So the founders picked up cameras, took better photos and helped hosts tell better stories. Revenue doubled in a month.

That story has always stuck with me — not because it’s about hospitality, but because it’s about humility. The moment they stopped guessing and started listening, everything changed.

I recognized that truth because I’d seen the same pattern play out in a very different place. Before founding BuildOps, I spent years in construction and real estate development, managing large projects, walking job sites and working shoulder to shoulder with contractors. I saw how much of the economy depends on their work. But when I began running projects myself, I also saw how far most technology had drifted from the realities of the field.

These weren’t small operations. Many were doing tens of millions of dollars a year — keeping hospitals running, schools open and power flowing to critical facilities. Yet they were coordinating all of it through text messages, spreadsheets and aging software. Dispatchers juggled constant calls while technicians waited for updates. Invoices lagged for weeks. Critical data lived across half a dozen tools that didn’t talk to each other.

That disconnect between the importance of the work and the limits of the tools was the spark for BuildOps.

The leaders of these companies weren’t asking for flashier technology. They wanted clarity. They wanted systems that helped them see their business clearly, communicate faster and stop losing time to the noise between teams. So we started where the work happens.

Our team spent time with dispatchers, service managers and technicians. We watched how decisions were made in real time — what caused friction, where things slowed down and what quietly made people’s days harder than they needed to be. Those observations shaped everything that followed.

What we built wasn’t a digital version of the old way. It was an operational backbone designed around how these businesses actually function. Every major decision — product, design and data — flowed from real conversations with the people doing the work.

That principle has guided us ever since. The closer we stay to our customers, the smarter we build. When we’re testing something new, our product leads are talking directly with the people using it. When a feature ships, we’re already thinking about how to make the next one faster, cleaner and simpler.

It’s a cycle of listening, building and refining that keeps the company grounded.

Related: You Need to Listen More to Lead Better — 5 Tactics for Leaders to Bridge the Communication Gap With Their Team

Proximity changes what you see

Too many startups build from a distance. They design for investors instead of customers. They chase polish before solving pain.

But building something that lasts requires what Airbnb discovered back in 2009 and what I rediscovered years later in construction: proximity.

Proximity reveals what data alone can’t. You can stare at dashboards all day and still miss the moments that define a customer’s experience — the call that comes in five minutes too late, the approval that bottlenecks an entire team, the quiet frustration that never makes it into a report.

When you’re close enough to see those things, you stop building for a persona and start building for a person.

At BuildOps, that belief is baked into how we operate. Customer feedback doesn’t get filtered through layers of abstraction before it reaches the people who can act on it. Our product and engineering leaders talk directly with contractors every week — not through decks or summaries, but through real conversations about what slows them down and what would make their day easier.

Some of our most impactful features — like enabling technicians to capture asset data in seconds or giving dispatchers a clear view of every open call — came from those moments. Not from analytics dashboards, but from lived experience.

Related: Your Customers Are Talking About You — Here’s How to Turn Their Feedback Into Profit

From listening to action

Closeness only matters if it changes behavior. Over time, I’ve learned that most leaders don’t fail because they don’t care about customers. They fail because their feedback loops are too abstract.

If you’re building or running a company and want to apply this idea in a practical way, start here:

Replace assumptions with observation.

Pick one role closest to the work — support, operations, fulfillment — and spend time watching how decisions actually get made. Not in a meeting. In real conditions. You’ll learn more in a few hours than you will from weeks of reporting.

Follow one problem end to end.

Most organizations discuss issues in fragments: a ticket, a metric, a complaint. Instead, trace a single problem from start to finish. Where did it begin? Who touched it? Where did it stall? The real insight usually lives between handoffs.

Shorten the distance between feedback and action.

If customer input has to climb a ladder of summaries before it reaches someone who can do something about it, it loses its urgency. The people building the solution should hear the problem directly.

Fix what makes someone’s day harder, not what looks impressive.

The most valuable improvements are rarely flashy. They’re the small changes that remove friction — fewer steps, clearer handoffs, better visibility at the right moment. Those are the things people feel immediately.

None of this requires a reorganization or a new strategy. It requires presence.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that great companies don’t start with grand visions. They start with problems you can feel — real pain, experienced up close. You can’t analyze your way to that kind of understanding. You have to go see it, touch it and live it.

Because the companies that last aren’t the ones chasing innovation for its own sake. They’re the ones close enough to the pain to build something real.

Every founder I know has a story about the moment things finally clicked.

For Airbnb, that moment came when the founders realized their struggling platform didn’t have a business problem — it had a customer problem. They stopped coding, flew to New York and started visiting hosts in person. What they found wasn’t surprising in hindsight: Hosts struggled to photograph their spaces and communicate clearly with guests. So the founders picked up cameras, took better photos and helped hosts tell better stories. Revenue doubled in a month.