Why Being Uncomfortable is Sometimes the Point: A Reflection of SPARK 1.0
Written by Petra Scalamandré
Four weeks is not a long time.
But during SPARK 1.0, it was long enough to realise that entrepreneurship feels very different from how it is usually described.
I came into the programme with a structured way of thinking. My background in finance and investing had trained me to look at businesses from a distance. Assess the model, understand what scales, identify risks, and ask whether something would grow. It is a useful lens, but it assumes that the business already exists in some recognisable form. That the decisions have mostly been made. That the problem is already understood. But distance assumes form, and most of the time in SPARK there was none yet.
Ideas were still forming, shifting, sometimes breaking halfway through a conversation. You would walk into a session thinking something made sense, and leave realising it did not hold as well as you thought. Often it was one question that did it. At one point, I was asked why the problem I was working on actually mattered. I thought I had a clear answer. I didn’t.
That was uncomfortable. It was also the point.
There is a difference between refining an idea and questioning it. SPARK pushed much more towards the second. It forces you to sit with the possibility that what you are building is not quite right yet, and to keep going anyway.
A lot of what we were doing could probably be described as iteration, or perhaps as pivoting in small ways. But for me, that never fully captured what was happening. It felt closer to what Joseph Schumpeter described as creative destruction. Schumpeter argued that innovation rarely comes from endlessly refining what already exists. Instead, progress comes from replacing assumptions and creating space for new ways of thinking. I had always found that idea compelling, and it is one of the reasons entrepreneurship interested me in the first place. What surprised me in SPARK was how personal that process felt.
This is less dramatic than it sounds. It is just the repeated need to let go of parts of an idea that no longer hold, even when they were the reason you started.
The cohort mattered as much as the sessions. People were building very different things but often facing similar problems beneath these diverse technical expertise: How to explain something simply; how to decide what matters early on; how to move forward when there is no clear next step. These familiar challenges may not always have a fixed answer, and discovering the best route for you was helped by learning with others.
It made it obvious that there is no single way of building something. Just different ways of dealing with uncertainty.
There is also something slightly interesting about sitting in the in-between. Close enough to understand what founders are going through, but no longer fully in that position. You are not there to provide answers, but you are also not neutral. Most of the time, the value is in asking the question that someone is avoiding.
That, in a way, reflects how I now think about entrepreneurship more broadly. It is often described through outcomes. Funding rounds, launches, growth. But at the beginning, it rarely feels like that. It feels slower, less defined, and more uncertain than expected. Progress often does not look like progress, and clarity usually comes later than you would like.
SPARK 1.0 condensed that reality into four weeks. It did not make the process easier. But it made it harder to ignore what the process actually is.
If there is something worth taking from it, it is probably this: Entrepreneurship is not about having a clear answer early on. It is about learning to keep moving when you realise you might not have one yet. Looking back, I think that is what Uri Levine means when he says founders should fall in love with the problem, not the solution. SPARK did not teach me to become less attached to ideas. It taught me to become more attached to the questions behind them.
Petra Scalamandré is the SPARK 2.0 Coordinator and a SPARK 1.0 alumna. She brings seven years experience across growth equity and private equity, focused on technology scale-ups and investment analysis. She is now exploring new ventures at the intersection of technology, education and investment, with a particular interest in how AI can support clearer thinking, broaden access and improve decision-making. Petra is a member of King’s College and Cambridge Judge Business School, where she is currently undertaking the MSt in Entrepreneurship.