brypto

career wise i think i'm a bit cooked on delayed gratification psychologically, esp. of the variety of like working/iterating on a startup for multiple years in stealth and/or without traction. not sure if i'm capable of doing that, but to an extent the ability to do that is what is required for outsized success

would posit this is somewhat consistent in the "brain" of our generation, esp with startup / build-in-public / twitter founder "cracked" culture becoming so widespread, it is v contrarian and perhaps psychologically difficult to quitely grind and stay focused for years on something you believe in. think many founders currently in 20s prob compensate for this by getting validation via attention, while they wait for validation via market (the real thing). 

shayne coplan good exception imo.

Still thinking about this cast from @six 

I think this is the biggest arb in crypto — ie. If you can defer playing attention validation games and focus on playing market validation games (hunting for pmf), you have a shot at 100x the outcomes of even the biggest attention games (since longevity is a multiplier)

Founders don’t chase the meta, we create it. To a certain extent you have to play an attention game because being the category creator is valuable in product theory textbooks.

But that comes after you validate there is actually a market for what you’re doing.

For me, i was already obsessed with zkTLS for years before i started a company. When i did start i was faced with a lot of skepticism. 

I guess i was lucky that i had no choice but to go the hard way.

P.S Empiricism (carefully chosen) will never lead you astray. The retards on CT and VCs might