Founders are told to "listen to the customer" as if the customer is holding the blueprint and you just have to simply extract the good parts to build a reputable product or service. But the customer is not an architect. The customer is a hedonic optimizer running on past options. Ask them what they want and they'll describe a marginally better version of what exists.....usually cheaper and better..... But desire is downstream of what's conceivable, and what's conceivable is whatever's already been built. The builder's job is not to serve existing preferences. It's really to manufacture new preferences. "How did I live without this" is the greatest signal imaginable. This is why audience captured founders die a slow death. If every decision is validated it's a small surrender of conviction. Consumers grade the past. Builders are graded by the future. That's what it boils down to really.

You are improvising. You don't fully know what you're doing. No one does. The confidence a startup founder role demands is, in a strict sense, a performance. So the "impostor syndrome" feeling isn't lying to you. The people who don't feel it are not better than you. They've just mistaken the role..... for the self.... that gap does not compute. I would now consider that a personality disorder. Why does "Imposter Syndrome" hit founders harder than almost anyone? The founder occupies a uniquely fraudulent feeling position by design. A founder is, definitionally, (and almost always) claiming a future that does not yet exist. You stand in front of investors, employees, customers, your own mother, and you assert, with a straight face, that a thing which currently does not work, has no revenue, and may be physically impossible..... is inevitable. You are there to narrate a fiction, with total conviction, until the fiction recruits enough belief and capital and labor, to drag itself into being real. So of course you feel like a fraud. The feeling of "fraudulence" is not a sign you're doing it wrong. I would say that It's a sign you correctly understand what you're doing. The founders who feel zero impostor syndrome are lying to your face, or worse, have lost contact with the epistemic situation. Fuck it, let's go deeper..... The whole impostor anxiety rests on the assumption that there's a "real you". There is no fixed "real you". The self is not a noun, it's a verb, it's a process, a continuous improvisation. You were always improvising a self. You've been doing it since you were 4. "Being a new founder" feels like impostorhood.... because it's a new improvisation. Being "a normal adult," "being a friend," "being you".....those are improvisations too. You just got frighteningly good at them that, you have completely forgotten they were also performances.

Almost every founder with abnormal drive has an open wound. Not always trauma in the clinical sense but sometimes just a moment where the world told them, that they were not enough. Poor. Foreign. Wrong accent. Wrong school. Laughed at. Overlooked. The wound creates a debt, and abnormal effort is how the debt gets serviced. Larry Ellison, abandoned by his mother, adopted into a house where his father told him he'd amount to nothing, spent fifty years building one of the largest software companies on Earth as a rebuttal. You think that's a coincidence? The chip on the shoulder is the most reliable power source ever discovered.

it's not lack of compute that's the issze. it's that in Europe, it's unthinkable to pay a guy in his mid 20s $600k salary and give him resources and freedom to train models without having oversight by a committee of gerontocratic professorswho don't keep up with the research

Startup life summed up. "Every day you wake up and have to re-win a war you thought you won yesterday."

We may be entering the final major crypto cycle. Previous cycle crypto market already showed early signs of structural weakness. By 2029, I expect a brutal reset. The Shmita cycle from September 2028 to September 2029 could be unforgiving, potentially aligning with the collapse of the AI and tech bubble. Only strongest will survive. Enjoy the cycle but never trade without an exit plan. After, survival of the fittest. PS: this is bullish post, not bearish. Last bull is a front of us, before the harvest starts . $ETH #Ethereum #Crypto #Bitcoin #MarketCycles #AI #TechBubble #RiskManagement #TraderaEdge

The Founder's Experience: Getting wrecked on one call, taking a breath, shaking it off, and hopping on your next call with a smile.

La ora 19:00 incepem live-ul pentru strangerea de fonduri Pigli. Chiar daca nu te intereseaza proiectul, e bine sa fii prezent, vei intelege ce inseamna sa construiest un business real care sustine un proiect cripto. Asta e viitorul spatiul cripto, afaceri reale cu utilitate. Apasa butonul de notificari sa fii prezent din primul minut. youtube.com/watch?v=l9ZfUhcD…

În vremuri ușoare, toți par lideri. În vremuri grele, unii dispar, alții construiesc. Caracterul nu se vede la ATH. Se vede acum. Cu mai multă muncă și mai multă transparență se trece și peste perioada asta. 🚀

Anyone wanna buy a property in Constanta? In the city center, has all the planing and zoning permits, historical area of the city. Land ownership (not 50 year lease) and ROI calculations for different use cases available. Can have intro to developer that can execute project with controlled costs.

Investor green flags. They write the check fast and then shut up. A general rule of thumb I live by. Slow to commit, fast to meddle = nightmare. Fast to commit, slow to meddle = gold. They make intros without you begging. A good investor's rolodex should be completely unprompted. A bad one "is happy to make intros!" and then tumbleweed. A great Investor should have a sixth sense when it comes to piecing intros together.....always scanning. They tell you when you're wrong to your face instead of smiling in the meeting and trashing you to other founders after. They don't panic in the down round. The down round is the investor IQ test......pay close attention to this. Their other founders vouch for them when it went BAD. Anyone can get a glowing reference from a portfolio rocketship. Call the founder whose company died a brutal death. That reference is gold. They ask you for advice as equals ✅

The float is your moat.

0xPPL is winding down. after 4 years of building the onchain super app, we're sunsetting the product. here's what that means for you👇

The EU just doesn't get it. They think the only solution to challenging dollar stablecoin dominance is a Euro CBDC. That's according to a speech from an ECB board member today. Why is the solution to a lack of stablecoin innovation in the EU a government mandated CBDC? Their desire for control is seeing them lose the race of stablecoin dominance before our very eyes.

Sure way of predicting when it will rain ? Just wash your car. Works every time. ☔️