I often get to hear about people’s deferred life plans, by virtue of having worked in crypto. It usually goes something like this:
“My life’s work is to build rockets, so what I’m going to do is make 100 million dollars in the next 4 years trading cryptocurrency with my crypto hedge fund” — Sam Altman (mockingly)A deferred life plan founder will have 2 companies in mind. Their dream company, that is deferred, and an interim company, which acts as a means to an end.
They will have a fuzzy idea of a banal SaaS or crypto company (interim), but a much clearer idea of flying cars and AGI (dream).
To avoid the nightmare of actually having to work on the interim company for any prolonged period of time, founders avoid building a long term vision. This usually leads to a get rich quick company being criminally undifferentiated and difficult to recruit for.
The vision of the dream companies hiding behind the interim companies are as crazy as they are clear, since they are the product of years of rumination and obsession. Paradoxically this makes them far more likely to succeed than the undifferentiated interim companies.
Unsurprisingly, dreams born of passion are painted in brighter colours and with more detail than dreams born from business plans. The more passionate you are about your idea, the clearer and more differentiated it can be.
Surprisingly, realism ends up being a poor indicator of whether a vision will succeed. The more obsessed you are with your idea, the clearer and more differentiated it will become, and the better you will be at communicating it to your users, employees, and investors.
This is the double edged sword in the deferred life plan. What would’ve allowed your deferred startup to work is also why your interim company struggles. The deferred life plan means working against this effect rather than leveraging it.
As you continue to work in startups and discover the hardships that come with them, you may realise as I did that only moonshot companies could justify that level of pain. There needs to be an oversized upside to warrant the destructive effect that startups have on your life. Given their significant chance of failure, better to have failed at something great, than to have gone to war for a B2B SaaS or for crypto degens.
This lifeplan is not limited to the crypto industry but you will find it less common in industries tackling immensely challenging problems. The apparent delusion of companies tackling space or nanotech often hint at the child-like naiveté of the founders behind them.
To the non-believers, this dream reads as delusion, but for the right people, these dreams sound like a battle-cry rallying them to join something meaningful.
Most crypto startups promised a world of free access to financial systems. A world where Cubans and Americans alike would have equal access to banking services but few did anything to improve accessibility in their products.
Complicated user experience and embraced volatility often meant these products were used by an even more elitist class than the traditional financial system. Whereas TradFi could benefit 401k retirees and municipalities, crypto struggled to service a larger audience than degens with disposable income, a demographic that occasionally grew to the tune of / at the pace of / with stimulus checks and the promise of free money offered by the latest memecoins. [1] a demographic that only grew in tandem with infrequent stimulus checks or the promise of free money offered by the latest memecoin.
The (not) chosen ones
If ideas could choose us, it’s fair to assume they would pick those best equipped at bringing them to life. There are lots of people with more money than you, but are they all better candidates ? No. There is no shortage of over-funded and failed startups in the valley to remind us that funding is a poor indicator for future success.
If your dream idea is worth it, people will fight hand over fist to fund it anyways. If you can’t convince people it’s worth their money, perhaps you are the wrong sales person to sell this dream.
If you cannot build a small scale prototype to demonstrate its moonshot potential, perhaps you are not the right engineer or designer to build this dream.
The right candidate for an idea is not likely to be the one with enough money, but rather the most qualified to handle the specific challenges associated to it. You are more likely to encounter those specific challenges by working on the idea at a small scale and early on, than by building up funding in an unrelated domain.
Leap of faith
If choosing the deferred life plan is your form of procrastination, which I suspect is the case for many, then the direct path is your leap of faith. The upside is that the direct path is a much faster and less expensive mistake when your initial vision is incorrect. If it doesn’t work at a small scale, it won't have worked at a larger one so long as the fundamentals are the same. In both cases your resources will have to run out before you realise they weren’t enough.
I left crypto because I decided that the resources I had today were sufficient to do something that actually mattered, and it was time to encounter the specific challenges related to my vision. I would rather learn that that was a mistake in 2 years than in 20 years.
Note to self: have a strong bias towards leaps of faith. Either it works, or you will get to the bottom much faster. [3]
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[1] I suspect if crypto people cared more deeply about accessibility, more of them would work in FinTech, or take lower paying jobs in the many companies addressing remittences, developing countries, off-ramps, etc.
[2] It might not be the truest belief, but that doesn’t matter as long as it’s the belief that holds the highest expected return. c.f Pascal’s wager.
[3] A corollary to this piece of advice is: look down before taking a leap of faith, if there is a pile of dead bodies, you may first want to figure out how they got there.