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Ask a founder to explain their product and you’ll often get an accurate answer that nobody outside the company fully understands. Ask an expert teacher the same question about a hard concept and you’ll sometimes hit the same wall. Deep knowledge, it turns out, makes simple explanation harder, not easier, and that pattern shows up almost identically in classrooms and pitch meetings.
The Same Blind Spot, Two Different Rooms
Education researchers call this the expert blind spot. Indiana University’s Center for Innovative Teaching and Learning describes it as instructors’ subject-matter expertise overshadowing their awareness of how novices actually learn, leading them to skip foundational steps that feel too obvious to mention. Once a concept is fully internalized, the memory of not understanding it disappears along with it, and so does the ability to predict where a learner will get stuck.
Founders run into a version of the same problem talking to investors. Y Combinator’s own guidance on how to pitch a company is built almost entirely around this issue: founders are told to explain what they do in the simplest language possible, because the instinct to sound sophisticated is exactly what makes a pitch harder to follow. The advice isn’t about dumbing the idea down. It’s that founders, like domain experts, consistently overestimate how much context their audience already has.
Why the Instinct to Add Detail Backfires
When someone doesn’t understand an explanation, the natural response is often to explain it again with more detail, more precision, more evidence of expertise. That usually makes things worse. More detail without better sequencing just gives the listener more material to get lost in.
A few patterns show up repeatedly in both classrooms and pitch rooms:
- The setup is skipped. Experts often start mid-thought, assuming the listener already has the context that took years to build.
- Precision gets prioritized over comprehension. A technically accurate explanation that nobody follows has failed at its actual job.
- Jargon substitutes for explanation. Domain-specific terms function as shortcuts for the expert and roadblocks for everyone else.
What Actually Fixes It
The reliable fix in both fields is the same: test the explanation on someone outside the field before it matters, and organize it around what the listener needs to know first rather than the order the ideas developed in the expert’s own head. Teachers do this by watching where students consistently get stuck. Founders do it by pitching to people outside their industry before they pitch investors.
For high-stakes moments, some founders and educators bring in outside presentation content specialists specifically to pressure-test a talk or pitch deck from a genuine outsider’s perspective, catching the gaps that are nearly impossible for the person who built the material to see on their own.
Quick Answers
Is the expert blind spot the same thing as the curse of knowledge?
They describe closely related ideas. The curse of knowledge is the broader cognitive bias where knowing something makes it hard to imagine not knowing it. The expert blind spot is its specific application in teaching, where subject-matter expertise overshadows awareness of how a learner actually develops understanding.
Does Y Combinator actually tell founders to simplify their pitches?
Yes. Y Combinator’s published pitching guidance emphasizes explaining a company in the simplest language possible and treats clarity as more important than sounding impressive, since investors who don’t immediately understand what a company does typically won’t fund it.
How can someone check whether their own explanation is too complex?
Test it on someone genuinely outside the field, not a colleague who already shares the background context, and watch where they hesitate or ask for clarification. Those points usually mark exactly where the explanation is skipping a step that feels obvious to the person who wrote it.
