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The Art of Entrepreneurial Discomfort: Building Developer Platforms in Emerging Markets

Most startup advice focuses on finding product-market fit or scaling growth. But in a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Liam Randall shares a counterintuitive insight about entrepreneurial success: the importance of staying uncomfortable.

“When you’re uncomfortable in your life, it’s where you find growth,” Liam explains. “My personal percentage is around 20% uncomfortable. I continue to seek out areas of growth where I’m not 100% sure how to do the problem.”

This philosophy has guided Liam through multiple successful exits, including Critical Stack, one of the first Kubernetes companies, and now shapes his approach to building Cosmonic, a WebAssembly platform company. But this isn’t just about personal growth – it’s a strategic advantage in emerging markets.

The challenge of building in nascent technology spaces is that conventional playbooks don’t apply. When Liam and his team started working with WebAssembly, they faced a fundamental go-to-market challenge: the technology standards themselves were still evolving.

Rather than seeing this as an obstacle, they turned it into an opportunity. “We took a very structured approach to interviewing our customers, people that weren’t our customers, as well as other community members about what they perceived their biggest challenges to be,” Liam shares. This research revealed that the pace of standards development was itself a major barrier to adoption.

Their response was characteristically bold: they organized a summit bringing together leaders from various WebAssembly projects to align on shared roadmaps. This community-first approach has become central to their go-to-market strategy.

But building developer platforms requires more than just community engagement. It demands deep empathy with developer pain points. Liam cites a recent Deloitte study showing “developers were spending 80% of their time on operations and maintenance.” This insight shapes how Cosmonic approaches product development.

“When you want to deliver a microservice that charges you an interest rate, or that does a lookup to restaurants that are open late, you have to think about the web server and all of these supporting tools, tracing, logging, monitoring,” Liam explains. Each additional requirement adds complexity, particularly in regulated environments.

This understanding led to a crucial insight: the need to separate business logic from operational requirements. It’s an approach that resonates across industries – from banks to defense contractors to manufacturers – because it addresses a universal pain point.

The journey hasn’t been without its dark moments. “I think for me personally, some of the darkest days were the side effects of entrepreneurship,” Liam reveals. “It’s glorified being all in on an idea and being consumed by a business for a while, but it comes at a tremendous cost that is hard to describe or understand until after you’ve already paid it.”

This candidness about the personal toll of entrepreneurship is refreshing, and it influenced how Liam approached his exits. With Critical Stack, despite rapid growth, he opted for an earlier exit to Capital One. “Maybe I didn’t optimize for the highest financial outcome because there was a lot more on the table that was far more important to me. Not being on the road 40 weeks a year, having time to spend with my young kids.”

For founders building in emerging markets, Liam’s experience offers valuable lessons. Success isn’t just about technical innovation or market timing – it’s about maintaining the right level of productive discomfort while building sustainable businesses and communities.

“Entrepreneurship today isn’t really even about convincing people of things,” Liam reflects. “It’s about finding people that already think the way that you do and casting wide enough nets in order to find them.” In emerging markets like WebAssembly, this means building communities around shared visions while remaining adaptable enough to evolve with the technology.