At SIGGRAPH, I watched two founders present something genuinely revolutionary.

New software. Real innovation. The kind of demo that makes the room lean forward. When it ended I walked up and asked two questions: what educational materials do you provide, and what's your plan for teaching this to students?

They brushed me off. Said it was easy to learn if you already knew the competing software.

And there it was. The exact problem, stated out loud without any awareness that it was a problem.

The people who build great software know precisely how it works. They've lived inside its logic for years. What they can't see anymore is what it looks like to someone encountering it for the first time, someone who needs a reason to invest the hours, a mental model to hang the features on, a moment where it clicks.

If you assume prior knowledge, you've already written off most of your market.
a few short years later, I got an email. They were shutting down. Another piece of capable software gone, not beaten by a better product, but buried by the gap between what it could do and what anyone understood about it.

Great software dies from poor adoption. Poor adoption is largely an education problem.

The programme I built placed 98.7% of 227 graduates into the industry. I didn't do that by handing people documentation. I did it by building the bridge between what a tool could do and why a person should care enough to learn it.

That bridge doesn't build itself. Someone has to design it.

That's the job.