# The stakeholder prioritization paradox Early-stage ventures rarely fail for lack of ingenuity; they fail from a paradox: they must commit irreversibly to stakeholder groups before knowing which commitments will prove fatal (Gans et al, 2019). Unlike established firms with slack resources to recover from missteps, startups operate under extreme constraints where a single misprioritization cascades into failure (Johnston, 2002). The choice appears binary—pursue customer validation (quality investments, prototypes, pilots) or secure resource partners (suppliers, investors, talent)—yet both paths carry existential risks. Prioritize customers too early, and you may lack the operational capacity to deliver; prioritize partners too early, and you may build for markets that don't exist (CB Insights, 2018). This is fundamentally a time allocation problem: each hour spent perfecting the product for customers is an hour not spent securing supply chains, yet this time investment directly determines product quality and thus stakeholder commitment probabilities. Cognitive biases compound the challenge, as entrepreneurs systematically overweight their initial strategic choice (Busenitz & Barney, 1997) and mislearn from limited feedback (March et al., 1991). The result is a landscape littered with ventures that had the right product but wrong timing—Webvan's premature scaling, Better Place's infrastructure-before-demand—where the failure stemmed not from poor execution but from solving the prioritization paradox through intuition rather than analysis. [[🟪2]]