Inventing the Future: Why Some of the Hardest Startup Problems Are the Ones Worth Solving

At Startup Boston Week, one panel challenged a piece of startup folklore that refuses to die: that the best startups are simple ones.

Moderated by Suvojit Ghosh, Founder and CEO of FYELABS, Inventing the Future: Building Startups with Technically Complex Products brought together founders who are building far beyond apps, dashboards, and lightweight software tools. Instead, they’re tackling problems rooted in healthcare, human dignity, animal health, and behavioral science - problems where technical complexity isn’t a liability, but a requirement.

Joining Ghosh on stage were:

• Pramod Bonde, founder of PiroGon, building life-saving medical technology to prevent aspiration-related deaths in hospitals

• Glenise Kinard-Moore, Founder and CEO of VDOM Inc., creating ultra-humanistic prosthetics for gender-affirming care and erectile dysfunction

• Conner Herman, Founder and CEO of Percy, developing sensor-based behavioral measurement tools that help doctors understand sleep as a clinical vital sign

• Jaime Paris, Founder and CEO of PRONOVA, building at-home biosensors to transform how pet health is monitored and diagnosed

The conversation pushed back on the idea that founders should “make it easier on themselves.” Instead, the panel made a compelling case for why some of the most meaningful startups are inherently hard - and why the future will be built by founders willing to take those risks.

Problems That Find You

Each founder traced their company back to a deeply personal moment, proof of a recurring truth in venture creation: the best ideas often come from lived pain.

For Pramod Bonde, founder of Pyrogon, the problem was one he had witnessed repeatedly as a physician. Aspiration - when stomach acid or oral contents enter the lungs after surgery - kills an estimated 200,000 hospitalized Americans each year. The tragedy, Bonde explained, is that patients don’t die from what they were admitted for, but from a preventable complication no one has meaningfully addressed in over a century.

“In 100 years, nobody asked why patients can’t eat before surgery,” Bonde said. “When you ask that question, you realize the entire system is broken.” His company uses neuromodulation to prevent aspiration, tackling a problem that sits at the intersection of medicine, physiology, and systems failure.

For Jaime Paris, founder of ProNova, the catalyst was loss. After losing dogs to conditions that could have been caught earlier, Paris, a mechanical engineer by training, set out to build biosensors that allow pet owners to monitor animal health from home. The company’s first product is a saliva-based diagnostic test for dogs, but the underlying technology can be applied across mammals.

“I knew the technology existed,” Paris said. “What didn’t exist was a way to use it early enough to actually save lives.”

Connor Herman, founder of Percy, came to her work through sleep deprivation, postpartum depression, and a career spanning military intelligence and behavioral psychology. After years of watching doctors rely on unreliable self-reported sleep data, Herman became obsessed with a single question: could you build a system that understands nighttime behavior without spying on people?

Percy now uses sensors similar to those in self-driving cars, not to navigate roads, but to help clinicians understand what’s disrupting sleep and how to fix it.

“Sleep should be a vital sign,” Herman said. “But right now, doctors are blind once patients go home.”

For Glenise Kinard-Moore, founder of SKIMood Tech, the origin story began with a conversation in her kitchen. A friend explained the four-year, invasive, and expensive process of gender-affirming bottom surgery and its 20% success rate. Kinard-Moore, who works in cybersecurity, was stunned that no viable alternative existed.

Her company’s product, the VDOM, is an ultra-humanistic prosthetic designed to feel like a natural part of the body, controlled via smartphone or smartwatch. Initially created for the trans community, the product quickly revealed a much broader market, including people with erectile dysfunction for whom medication or surgery isn’t an option.

“I realized there was an entire population being left behind,” she said. “And nobody was building for them.”

Rejection as a Feature, Not a Bug

If complexity unites these founders, so does rejection.

Kinard-Moore was blunt about the challenges of fundraising. “I’m a Black lesbian woman building a penis,” she said. “The looks, the walkouts, the ‘there’s no market’ - I’ve seen it all.” Yet her earliest believers weren’t VCs or healthcare executives, but older Black women in the South who wrote the first checks because they understood the problem.

Bonde echoed the idea that validation often comes from unexpected places. In medtech, he said, the most meaningful investors were physicians, the very people who would use the product. “If someone is willing to invest their own money into something they’ll use on patients,” he noted, “that’s real validation.”

Herman described a different kind of rejection: being misunderstood. Investors compared Percy to consumer wearables, missing the point entirely. It wasn’t until she self-funded early prototypes - putting her own family at financial risk - that she could show what the system could do.

“When you’re doing something truly new, there’s no blueprint,” Herman said. “Sometimes you have to build it first so people can even see what you’re talking about.”

Paris added that many early “no’s” weren’t about the idea itself, but about communication. “If someone doesn’t have a dog, they don’t immediately understand why this matters,” she said. Learning to translate technical problems into human stakes, she argued, is often the difference between dismissal and belief.

Zero-to-One Moments

Despite operating in vastly different industries, the founders shared a similar definition of progress: not press releases or pitch decks, but proof that the product works in the real world.

For Paris, it was shipping ProNova’s first beta units - packaging, labels, hardware, software, and all. “Getting a text from a customer saying ‘it arrived’ was our zero-to-one moment,” she said.

Kinard-Moore pointed to feedback from 300 beta testers - a risky number for such a sensitive product. The result was a 4.7 out of 5 satisfaction rating, with users describing the device not as an accessory, but as something that felt part of their body.

Herman’s defining moment came when Percy’s system detected a child leaving their bed every night—something the parent had stopped noticing and never thought to report. “That’s when it clicked,” she said. “Self-report is unreliable. And doctors are making decisions without the full picture.”

Bonde described a breakthrough in using AI not as a buzzword, but as a way to see beyond the limits of human senses, reframing diagnosis itself. “If you change the interface,” he said, “you change the entire cycle of medicine.”

Becoming the Founder

As the session shifted from product to personal transformation, one theme dominated: unlearning.

Kinard-Moore spoke about shedding a corporate mindset and learning to trust that “why you?” doesn’t require pedigree, just commitment and audacity.

Bonde described helplessness as his catalyst, particularly during COVID, when he watched patients suffer complications no system was designed to prevent.

Herman talked about letting go of perfection, showing her work earlier than she felt comfortable, and discovering entirely new markets in the process.

Paris summed it up simply: “If you don’t love the problem, it’s not worth it. Every startup is hard. The only question is whether you care enough to keep going.”

The Case for Hard Problems

By the end of the session, one thing was clear: technically complex startups aren’t hard by accident. They’re hard because the problems they address have been ignored, avoided, or deemed too inconvenient for too long.

But as these founders demonstrated, complexity can also be a moat. When you solve problems that matter deeply - health, dignity, sleep, life and death - you don’t just build products. You build conviction.

And sometimes, that’s what inventing the future actually looks like.

To watch the full recording of this session at Startup Boston Week, visit this link or watch the embed at the top of this post!