The Rise of the Iconoclast

I won't bore you with the same often repeated (especially for my friends reading this) tropes or complaints about our modern economy and how a perversion of economic incentives has led us down a path of inefficiency/zombification of our economy(along with second third order etc downstream effects) However I have echoed these thoughts in public, in private, and in innumerable drafts over the years which I haven't published for fear of negatively impacting my job prospects or financial security. So with that preface aside let's get into it.

The era of bullshit startups, bullshit founders, and bullshit money needs to be over and I know this partly because I have ample experience working with all of the aforementioned. We have created a zombie economy where entitled trust fund "adult" children have stolen money, attention and time, from the economy, from its investors (who are complicit), and ultimately society. I know, bold assertion - if you think if this is too on the nose you need to go n-levels deeper. No this is not intellectually lazy, you are.

Focus has been unduly given and placed on false hopes built on a mirage of actually non-existent foundations or fundamentals. A great number of founders of many household names trick, bamboozle, "fake it till you make it" and insert other "inspiring" cliche here to secure funding to give their lives meaning. Yes, it is a form of escapism. Eat pray love meet 21st-century post-post-modern fulfillment/soul searching. Raise a bunch of money, sell lies without knowledge of what you are selling in the hopes you can gain enough traction that others do the dirty work while you claim credit, exit, and move onto the "next big thing", beginning to convince yourself that yes this was indeed entirely your accomplishment. This is the trust fund baby achieving their Brahman. Of course, I'm speaking generally here, and yes there are always exceptions, I know there are many great founders out there many of whom are my close friends. They have expressed similar frustrations echoed above and the false reality of "competition in the marketplace of ideas".

Creative destruction is a very real thing but everyone has so been preoccupied with iterating or copying an idea to add incremental change. This has been a result of short time horizons, high time preference for investment funds which are committed to realizing returns for their investors on the order of quarters. An era of pass the buck economics. Pass the buck....everything. All costs have been externalized, what is cradle to the grave analysis anyway? This has horizontal and vertical effects because you cannot compete with a company that does not take any of this into account. These companies have passed the costs elsewhere but make no mistake these costs still exist. Externalities exist. Risk exists.

The stark reality is that we cannot convince investors to do the right thing. We will always have those who choose to be either willingly or unwillingly duped in search of alpha. What I recommend here is a radical deviation of the norm. The norm has failed us. Look around you. A just-in-time economy, without redundancy, without resiliency, and without innovation. A just-in-time economy, for just-in-time everything, has led to improving efficiency by eliminating redundancy leaving us with neither.

I'm also here to tell you decentralized technology is poised to creatively destroy everything you thought you knew about running a company and even what a company is. I won't say more here because I'm sure many others have said this far better than I ever could.

That said, decentralized technology has been ironically memed as the answer to our problems both by crypto in and out-groups. Black swan of locusts eating our crops or droughts leading to famine? Hurr Durr Bitcoin fixes this amirite? Well, I'm here to tell you yes (in more ways than you think).

I am also here to say the time of the Iconoclast is now. We have seen mainstream media fail us. We have seen the blind leading the blind. We have seen morons parrot that which they do not know and even less that which they do not understand. We have seen the importance of being a contrarian even when it is dangerous or makes you a pariah.

I have verbalized these thoughts far better in the past and unfortunately you, my dear reader, do not have the luxury of experiencing that, so for that I apologize. I hope this little journey through some crystallized thoughts at 4 am serves to create some thoughts of your own, and more importantly than that, actions. ‌‌