Uncertainty is not new, but the past few years have shown how quickly business conditions can change. Geopolitical conflict, energy price volatility, supply-chain disruption, new regulation and rapid technological development have reshaped entire industries in ways few organisations fully anticipated.
For early-stage startups, these shifts can challenge the assumptions behind decisions about products, customers and markets. Financial projections, market estimates and growth plans are necessary, but they depend on expectations about regulation, technology, access to capital and demand.
Such assumptions are unavoidable. Every early-stage company is, to some extent, a bet on how the future will unfold. The risk lies in building the company around one version of that future without considering how conditions might change.
So, what can founders do when their strategy depends on a future they cannot know?
Drawing on his experience as a certified Future Strategist, we asked our CEO and General Partner, Dr Evangelos Kosmidis, how principles of strategic foresight can help early-stage founders prepare for and respond to change.
Forecasting and foresight serve different purposes
Strategic foresight is sometimes mistaken for an attempt to predict the future more accurately. Instead, it explores several plausible ways in which the external environment could develop and uses them to improve decisions in the present.
Forecasting remains essential. Startups need it to estimate demand, prepare budgets, monitor runway and plan short-term operations. It is most useful when sufficient data exist, conditions are relatively stable and the time horizon is limited.
Foresight becomes more valuable when regulation, technology, human behaviour and geopolitics interact in less predictable ways. A forecast asks what is likely to happen under a given set of assumptions. Foresight asks what else could plausibly happen, which assumptions might no longer hold and what the company would need to do differently.
For Kosmidis, this distinction is especially relevant at the early stage, when founders must make consequential decisions before they have enough evidence to know whether their assumptions will hold. This is particularly important in climate tech, where commercialisation, certification, infrastructure development and industrial adoption can take years. A startup may therefore be preparing not for the market that exists today, but for the one that will exist when its technology is ready.
That market may be shaped by energy prices, regulation, industrial priorities, public investment, supply chains and competing technologies. The objective is not to predict which scenario will materialise, but to understand what the company is implicitly betting on and how exposed it would be if conditions developed differently.
Recognising change and building adaptability
Does this create another complex exercise for founders who are already expected to build, fundraise, recruit and sell? Not necessarily, Kosmidis argues. At its core, strategic foresight strengthens a capability already considered essential in entrepreneurship: adaptability.
A company cannot adapt until its team recognises that the assumptions guiding it no longer fit the evidence. Founders inevitably develop a mental model of their market: who the customer is, why the product matters and how adoption will happen. As they invest more time, capital and personal conviction in that model, assessing evidence that challenges it objectively can become more difficult.
A shift in customer behaviour, procurement priorities, public policy or technology may signal that an assumption needs to be reconsidered, or it may simply be temporary noise. The challenge lies in determining which developments matter and what they mean for the company.
In Kosmidis’s view, this ability is closely connected to the quality of the founding team. A future-oriented mindset does not require founders to follow every trend or continuously change direction. It means remaining committed to the problem while being willing to reconsider the route. A team can change its product, initial customer, commercial model or route to market without abandoning the problem it set out to solve.
Adaptability is therefore more than a founder’s personality trait. It is an organisational capability developed by revisiting assumptions, staying close to the market, monitoring external signals and preserving enough flexibility to change course. This becomes increasingly important as the company grows and changing direction becomes slower, costlier and more consequential.
Connecting scenarios to decisions
Scenario thinking is one way to develop this capability. But imagining alternative futures has little value unless it changes a decision being made today. A simple exercise can begin with three questions: What must be true for our current strategy to work? What evidence would suggest that this is no longer true? And which decision would we need to revisit if that evidence appeared?
Consider a startup whose commercial strategy depends on new regulation. The team could examine whether customers would still have a reason to buy and whether the company would have enough runway if implementation were delayed or varied across markets.
The same logic can be applied to supply-chain disruption, rising costs or a delayed funding round. The purpose is not to prepare for every imaginable event, but to identify the external conditions on which the strategy depends most heavily and examine the consequences if they change.
Testing a strategy in this way can reveal whether it is optimised for one expected future or robust across several plausible ones. The first may produce the strongest result if its assumptions prove correct. The second preserves the company’s ability to operate, learn and respond when they do not.
For Kosmidis, robustness does not mean avoiding bold decisions. It means understanding which assumptions those decisions depend on, which factors remain outside the company’s control and what the team would do if conditions developed differently.
Preparing rather than predicting
Founders cannot analyse every emerging trend. Early-stage companies must build, test, sell and execute, and foresight should strengthen those activities rather than compete with them.
They should not be expected to interpret every development alone. Investors, mentors and industry partners can challenge familiar assumptions and identify changes the team may not yet see. A strong ecosystem provides more than capital and introductions. It broadens the company’s field of vision.
The objective is not certainty, but preparedness: the capacity to recognise meaningful change, question assumptions and act before the gap between the company’s strategy and external reality becomes too wide.