Exit the Cave

The only thing worse than 100% inhabiting your own cave is trying to fit into someone else's. I had a conversation this weekend with someone in an emerging startup that I initially wanted to join but increasingly didn't as I realized I had gone from starring cast to somewhere between entourage and sub 1% equity NPC. And at that point, startups are horrible bets when you have any sort of sure thing IMO.

But it was instructive to watch him neg, criticize, and dismiss all of my own ideas that weren't in service of his vision thing, occasionally pivoting to deflecting any criticism of the potential for his own vision to succeed. This week I pitched my vision to my current employer. They loved it. Case closed. Ideas are cheap, it's executions that deliver value. And I have a superb record on that.

Conclusion: if you poke your head up for feedback now and then, there's nothing with spending most of your time in the cave to avoid the samsara of influencers, rage bait, and social media algorithms. Anyone telling you otherwise is 'sus.

Reminds me of a couple things: Nils van der Poel (Olympic speed skater record holder) and his How to Skate a 10k [0]:

> It is not the one who suffers the most during preseason who prospers when the winter comes, but he who gets the most aerobically fit.

and Tyler Cowen on Nervous Nellies [1]:

> Yes. Because ultimately the nervous Nellies, they're not philosophically sophisticated, they're overindulging in their own neuroticism when you get right down to it. So it's not like there's some brute 'let's be a builder' view and then in contrast there's some deeper wisdom that the real philosophers pursue. It's: you be a builder or you're a nervous Nelly. Take your pick. I say be a builder.

and the classic Teddy Roosevelt speech [2]:

> It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

The Cave is fine, but at some point you need to test the thing you're in there for. At some point, refusing to test an untested belief is just protecting a fantasy.

[0] https://www.howtoskate.se/

[1] https://x.com/JosephNWalker/status/1452772819792642054

[2] https://www.worldfuturefund.org/Documents/maninarena.htm

You must have skin in the game. The real shame shall be cast upon those without the courage to try, not those who fail.

Or, put another way:

> I don't see how you can hate from outside of the club. You can't even get in!

The bar for what is worth bringing out of the cave gets higher every day. Unless you have a huge network of fans or a small network of foolhardy VCs, screaming into the market, with two million other voices, may as well be the void.

It's getting hard to even get a shrug.

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