Ideas Fight Club: What Happens When You Stop Protecting Ideas

Key Takeaways

• Ideas don't need protection. They need pressure. The good ones get stronger under it.
  
  
• "Fail fast" is the wrong lesson. Real courage is the discipline to abide by what the evidence actually tells you.
  
  
• AI hasn't removed the cost of being wrong. It's amplified it. Bad decisions made faster are still bad decisions.
  
  
• The bottleneck in product development has inverted. Building is now cheap. Thinking, defining the right problem, is the slow part.

• Start with the Because. The customer need first. The hypothesis. Only then the thing you're going to build.

In April, we hosted a dinner in Shoreditch.

Thirty senior product and venture-building leaders, packed into a room above a restaurant on Club Row. Mark Bjornsgaard next to me. And a question hanging over the table:

Roughly 10% of corporate innovation initiatives deliver sustained returns. Billions in. Very little sticks. We have the language of lean, the vocabulary of test-and-learn, the frameworks and the workshops and the sticky notes. And yet the hit rate hasn't moved. Why?

We Learned the Language. We Never Learned the Discipline.

The Lean Startup is fifteen years old. Pretty much the same age as Red Badger. And I've spent most of my career inside its language: build, measure, learn, validate.

We have all the words.

And yet I keep walking into businesses where ideas are still half-baked in a boardroom, thrown over the wall to delivery teams, and never properly interrogated once they're at scale. The honest answer: we learned the language of lean without ever really internalising the discipline behind it.

That night in Shoreditch, Mark put it plainly. Our instinctive bias is to jump to solutions. We want to leap straight to the fun bit:  the feature, the product, the build. And we skip the awkward question of whether anyone actually needs it.

Ideas don't need protection. They need pressure. The good ones get stronger under it.
The room agreed. The conversation went long. And somewhere between the second bottle and the third argument, someone said: we should do this again. But properly. In public. With real stakes.
So we did it again.

We then ran our first Ideas Fight Club at Red Badger HQ.

Founders, builders, and operators. Beers, pizza, and one or two ideas pulled apart properly.
The format is simple. You pitch your idea. No slides. Then the room comes for it, hard questions, real pushback, no politeness for politeness's sake.

. 

The ideas that made it out of the room weren't the loudest ones but they were the ones that could take a punch.

Ideas Fight Club isn't simply a networking event. It's not a pitch competition. It's a discipline, run live, in public, with consequences. And it works because of the method Mark has spent two decades building.

The Man Who Has Run 8,500 Experiments

Mark Bjornsgaard is one of the most consistently successful venture builders I know.
Two decades conceiving, designing, and launching breakthrough businesses inside complex environments.

His latest venture, Deep Green, is unlocking $12bn in funding by heating municipal swimming pools with data-centre waste heat. Across his career, he and his teams have run something like 8,500 smoke tests, quick, low-cost market checks to validate demand before committing to build, with the first 8,300 of them done by hand.

His book, What's the Because?, publishes in September 2026. It distils all of that into one disciplined, repeatable process. From ambition to assured results. The core argument is deceptively simple,  a Three-Step Check before you green-light any experiment, answer these in order:


1.  The Because. What specific customer pain or unmet need makes this worth exploring?
2.  The Who. Who is the precise person experiencing that need? Can you name them?
3.  The What. Only now,  think what is the smallest possible thing you could build or test to find out if you're right?

Continuous Bravery

What I keep coming back to, after both of those evenings, is a phrase that kept surfacing: continuous bravery.

Not the one-off bold bet. The willingness to be brave again with the next hypothesis on the stack. And to abide by what the evidence tells you, even when it kills the idea you walked in loving.

That's what Ideas Fight Club is really about. Not a single event. A way of working that treats every idea as a hypothesis to be tested, not a solution to be protected.

The Lean Startup gave us the language fifteen years ago. Mark's framework gives us the discipline. AI has finally given us the tools to live up to both.

There are no excuses left.
The only thing in the way is us.

Interested in how Red Badger applies hypothesis-driven validation inside complex enterprises? Get in touch.