The Psychology of Building Reactive Technologies: Maintaining Conviction Through Years Without Revenue

The Psychology of Building Reactive Technologies: Maintaining Conviction Through Years Without Revenue

Five and a half years is a long time to believe in something that generates no revenue. Long enough to watch competitors pivot. Long enough to endure countless investor meetings that go nowhere. Long enough to question whether you’re visionary or delusional.

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Marc Borrett, CEO and co-founder of Reactive Technologies, didn’t sugarcoat what those years felt like. His grid measurement platform raised over 80 million dollars, but the path to meaningful revenue tested every psychological reserve he possessed. His candid reflections reveal the mental game required when building infrastructure technology—and the specific practices that keep conviction alive when external validation is years away.

The Loneliness That Nobody Talks About

When asked how he maintained patience through five and a half years to first revenue, Marc’s response cuts through the typical founder bravado.

“It is tough and it is bleak and it is lonely. You know, I’m not going to start crying but it is genuinely difficult,” he admits. “But you have to believe and as long as you know you’ve got the right solution to the right problem then that is the fire that you’ve got to keep alight and that’s the fire that you got to stoke.”

The loneliness Marc describes isn’t about being physically alone. It’s about occupying a psychological space where you see something that doesn’t yet exist—and maintaining belief in that vision when every external signal suggests you should quit.

This isolation intensifies when you’re building infrastructure. “When you’re a startup and you’re on your own and you don’t have that big company infrastructure, you don’t have that wide industry contact network. It is tough and it is bleak and it is lonely,” Marc explains.

Consumer startups can watch user metrics climb. SaaS companies can celebrate new MRR. But infrastructure founders spend years in technical validation, watching cash decline while building something whose value won’t be apparent until much later. There’s no dopamine hit of daily active users or viral growth to sustain you.

Tenacity as Strategy

When asked about his success across two companies—his first in semiconductors that went public, and now Reactive Technologies—Marc’s answer is disarmingly simple.

“I mean, I would say I am unfortunately just very tenacious. And that can be a good thing or it can be a bad thing, but then it comes back to that belief point, I think, Brett, you have to believe in what you’re doing, even in the very, very darkest moments when everyone is telling you’re wrong, you may well be, and sometimes that can be a negative.”

This acknowledgment that tenacity can be negative is crucial. The same conviction that carries you through years without revenue can blind you to pivots you should make. The psychological trait that’s essential for infrastructure building—stubborn belief despite lack of evidence—is dangerously close to the trait that kills startups: refusing to accept reality.

So how do you distinguish between visionary persistence and delusional stubbornness? Marc’s answer involves information advantage through operational intimacy.

The Information Advantage of Being Close to Everything

Marc’s prescription for maintaining accurate conviction rather than blind faith is remarkably specific: know more than anyone else about every part of your business.

“If you’re close enough to every part of your business, if you’re close enough to the product side, you’re close enough to the sales side, you’re close enough to the marketing side, the customer side, the team side, you are the one that actually has got the best view of what it takes to actually get to the next milestone or get the funding closed or get the next customer over the line,” Marc explains.

This isn’t about micromanagement or inability to delegate. It’s about maintaining the information advantage that lets you see signals that others—including your investors—will miss.

When you’re as close to the details as Marc describes, your conviction isn’t based on hope or vision alone. It’s based on seeing the incremental progress that doesn’t show up in revenue metrics. You see customer conversations getting warmer. You see technical objections getting resolved. You see the problem growing even as your sales cycle extends.

“And you’ve got to believe in yourself to do that, even though when it does get dark, you obviously doubt whether you’re doing the right thing,” Marc adds. The doubt never fully disappears—but detailed knowledge of every part of your business gives you the evidence to counter it.

Watching the Problem Grow While You Build

One specific practice that sustained Reactive Technologies through their extended timeline was tracking problem growth alongside company progress. Marc didn’t just monitor his own metrics—he monitored how much pain his future customers were experiencing.

When they started working with their first customer, the annual cost of the problem Reactive Technologies addressed was about 16 million pounds. “Over the next five years, as we were working with them and we were going from a small scale pilot to a bigger scale to then a national scale, that problem grew fivefold. So 16 million turned into 32 million and eventually got to somewhere north of 250 million in that time period.”

This problem growth created a form of external validation that sustained conviction when revenue couldn’t. The market was moving in their direction—not because of their marketing efforts, but because of fundamental shifts in the energy transition.

“You’ve got to also be addressing a problem and that problem has got to be getting bigger,” Marc notes. This growing problem created natural momentum. “So the platform that we were saying was going to start burning actually took hold and caught a light. And I think that momentum of problem carried us through those difficult engineering discussions to get them comfortable with what we were trying to do.”

The practical lesson: when building infrastructure with multi-year sales cycles, track market-level problem indicators as closely as you track your own metrics. Problem growth can sustain conviction through periods when company metrics can’t.

The Quality Bar as Psychological Anchor

Another specific practice Marc emphasizes is maintaining an uncompromising quality bar throughout the organization. This serves a dual purpose: it builds the technical credibility required to eventually win conservative customers, and it provides a psychological anchor during difficult periods.

“Investing in the best people you can get. You know, as long as you are holding that quality bar as high as possible in the organization, those are the things and the people around you and the things that are then able to be built around you, is that quality that ultimately will make the difference between achieving your goals or, unfortunately, falling short,” Marc explains.

When revenue can’t validate your choices, the quality of your team and output becomes a leading indicator you can control. Every excellent hire, every technically rigorous analysis, every piece of work that meets high standards provides evidence that you’re building something real—even when the market hasn’t confirmed it yet.

This isn’t about perfectionism for its own sake. In infrastructure, technical quality is the only thing that eventually breaks through customer skepticism. Maintaining that quality bar during lean years is what makes success possible during later ones.

The Role of Patient Capital

Marc is explicit about owing “a significant debt of gratitude to the patient investors” who backed Reactive Technologies. Some had invested in his previous company, giving them confidence in his ability to execute long-term visions.

But even with patient investors, the psychology of declining cash creates pressure that founders in faster-growth businesses never experience. “The challenge of making payroll whilst you’re heading towards, as your cash is going down and you’re trying to raise funds, that is a very sobering environment to be in. As you see your cash drop month after month and the conversations, you got to talk to more people generally these days.”

This creates a specific kind of stress that compounds over time. Unlike product problems that you can solve with effort, or customer objections you can overcome with persistence, watching cash decline month after month is a countdown timer you can’t stop through execution alone.

Marc’s advice on fundraising reflects this reality: “Only raise money when you don’t need it. It’s got to be that. And also expect that it will take you twice as long. When I speak to other startups and they say, you know, we’ve added 30, 40, 50% to, I think you’ve got to be more conservative, you’ve got to go early and have enough in the tank where you don’t believe you will actually have to go to.”

The Unsexy Truth About Infrastructure Psychology

There’s no hack for maintaining conviction through years without revenue. Marc’s practices—staying operationally intimate with all parts of the business, tracking problem growth, maintaining quality bars, securing patient capital—aren’t secrets. They’re disciplines.

The psychological game of infrastructure building isn’t about maintaining blind optimism. It’s about creating information systems that let you see progress when traditional metrics can’t capture it. It’s about surrounding yourself with patient capital and high-quality teams that provide evidence of reality beyond revenue.

And it’s about accepting that the fire Marc describes—the belief that sustains you through bleak years—requires constant attention. “You have to believe and as long as you know you’ve got the right solution to the right problem then that is the fire that you’ve got to keep alight and that’s the fire that you got to stoke.”

For founders considering infrastructure markets, the question isn’t whether you can handle the timeline. It’s whether you can build the information systems, relationships, and practices that maintain accurate conviction rather than blind faith through years when the only evidence you’re right is that the problem keeps getting bigger.