you know, I've been thinking about how there's a shrinking window of time to jump social classes and why I'm leaving my j*b in a few months I'm going to explain why by showing you the bullshit I have to deal with at w*rk corporate software engineering has never been as cucked as it is today. and it's only getting worse large-scale software is a completely different game than building your own projects at w*rk, I sit through useless meetings for at least 2 hours a day: - managers actively waste your time so they can seem productive - bureaucratic red tape makes it so that small changes take weeks - everything requires tons of reviews and approvals - anything done different from the norm is too risky - anyone you upset is risky so everyone is treated like a child - any disagreement is risky so always say yes np I don't have to waste much brain energy right? just smile-nod-agree to everything plus, every time I have a problem, I can just throw it to a team that deals with that problem: - pipeline issue? not my problem, gl devops - database slow? database admins are on it - auth? we have an internal security team - incident monitoring? on-call SREs - customer support? filipino VAs - testing? let QA deal with it - network? IT and cloud guys imo this is fine if you want to do nothing. some people might even call me retarded for giving up easy money. "bro I'd love to coast, send me your lead's @" but it's soul-sucking to do shit work, and it makes you half-ass everything else in your life. every action creates a habit which affects your identity I only have one life, and I don't want to waste it when I can create something magnificent and beautiful, while pursuing freedom and excellence even if you don't buy that, staying at a bullshit j*b is becoming higher risk because AI will just replace you but there's no way your boss is going to tell you that your position is a ticking time bomb. yeah it's nice for a little while, but it's eventually going to be "move up or move out." evolve or die and I'm not even factoring in the opportunity cost of not building your own projects: 1. you'll learn nothing if every problem is handed to a different team 2. you can build stuff at lightning speed because no corporate monkey rituals, can use any AI tools, and because you'll know your own codebase way more than one that's handed to you 3. if you're context switching too often, you won't be able to focus. and every extra hour on yourself is worth more than the next because you're continuously improving the product and your knowledge imo I think these next few years will be the last chance to make an enormous amount of money before social mobility becomes extremely difficult think about it: wealth comes from being lucky or being early jeff bezos is a good example of this. left a comfy senior VP position at a hedge fund to yolo all-in on amazon during the beginning of the internet era you have one last chance now to take the same gamble as him. the future belongs to those who are willing to take a bet on the future we will probably get to a point where AI starts closing all market inefficiencies and innovates much faster than you can the only way to make money in the future will probably be with an eccentric invention, something culturally revolutionary, or becoming an entertainment star we're in a weird period where anyone from anywhere can make money because of the internet. if you look at any other point in history, you can see that most big money was made from: - industrial monopolies - stock market manipulation - resource exploitation - war profiteering - political corruption - land grabs - media control and this is why a lot of people hate money and think it's "dirty." only recently has the internet made it so that you can actually make a lot of money legitimately because of network effects and open information but this won't last long. I can't emphasize enough that competition is increasing across everything everywhere people are becoming more comfortable using AI to replace humans on a mass scale. plus they're using it to learn any skill with AI tutoring. it's harder to stand out when everyone levels up, AND when there's way more AI-generated slop to sift through I mean have you seen how much more competitive high-paying careers have become? like med school, law school, investment banking, management consulting or even university admissions. getting into harvard used to be simpler for boomers. "I like apples, apples fall from trees, gravity makes apples fall, I want to learn more in your physics program" -> congrats accepted under our 36% acceptance rate (now 3.6%) now you need to go work in a foreign country building houses, "publish" (ghostwrite) an NYT bestseller, author a research paper, have internships, play two instruments, speak three languages, be a multi-sport athlete, have exceptional grades in every subject, perfect exam scores, impeccable interview skills, and partake in whatever other nonsense song-and-dance I remember even getting a software job in the 2000s was more like "I like computers, can I work here?" we're reverting back to the income inequality in older civilizations like in europe and asia: - most wealth concentrated within old elite families - intense segregation between rich/poor - one mistake and you're cooked for life. "C students hire A students" meme doesn't exist without the internet - decreasing standard of living like small bug apartments with multiple people - regulations are always added, never removed and if you think the competition isn't that bad, you probably haven't reached the upper tiers. it's easy to become complacent when everyone around you is a monkey but the margin for error at the top is razor-thin. elite performers do *every single thing* nearly perfectly that athlete you're trying to compete against? he's eaten the same hyper-calculated meals for the last two decades, engineered for peak performance, with AI analysis of his genetics and the latest studies and if you're struggling with the basics? rip in peace! my point is that elite competition is brutal, so every minute right now is more important than you think it is minimize the time you waste on stupid bullshit and unhelpful people–the smallest improvements are going to make the biggest difference think of it this way: you know Usain Bolt is the fastest man in the world… who's number two?

now is when the fun starts ecosystem is stacked, team is cracked joined @sophon to build the destination for consumer experiences onchain guided by fundamentals, shaped by community, built for the long-term the last few months have been the first time I can easily explain to friends/family what I do in crypto. enabling real, immediate use-cases for crypto rails, solving problems everyone recognizes. taking crypto to the people not building hype, building stuff that works - and doing it in public this is day zero. we build 🫡 oh, and holy shit every team building on Sophon is cracked too bullish @sophon bullish consumers