i initially had this baked into an update to the DARK X community today but thought it deserved its own post: i've had a couple chapters in my entrepreneurship career at this point, and what's been so exciting (or better put: fascinating) about building more in public this time has been dealing with the intense public scrutiny every step of the way. a lot of builder friends i've talked to have looked at what i've been doing with @darkresearchai and have said, "hell no i'd never do that". traditionally, a lot of how startups find their direction as they grow often happens in the shadows. this means "mistakes", "pivots", or anything "less than ideal" happens quietly, you can sneakily get through these starting chapters (and honestly, all the chapters of mistakes & pivots that inevitably come later) without the publicity related to it. what's even more interesting -- when you're building less in public, the people who do see your mistakes, pivots, etc. are professionals who have had previous experience in similar situations, so they react a lot less violently. i've never had an investor or a coworker freak out in suboptimal situations like the public internet audience. there's a couple pieces to this that are really interesting to understand: 1) professionals in early stage venture (builders and investors alike) understand the odds required to win. every single startup venture i've worked on that's "succeeded" has been a journey 90-95% filled with mistakes -- but all that matters are those hits that 1-5% of the time. internalize that: that's failing 9 out of 10 times, and that puts you in the top echelon of entrepreneurs. iterate, fail, iterate, fail, iterate, fail, iterate, fail, iterate, fail, iterate, fail, iterate, fail, iterate, fail, iterate, fail, iterate, hit. 2) the public's lack of understanding the above drives value-creating entrepreneurs to avoid giving the public exposure to their work early on, and it gatekeeps the public from that wealth. putting aside the strategic distribution benefits i get from building @darkresearchai in public, i'm something like 100% sure i'd be personally feeling better every single day if, instead of [very boldly] tying a pumpfun coin to my work and building in public, i had just run a traditional fundraising round and raised venture. why? because I’d be swimming in conversations exclusively with professionals who understand the game, & they’d naturally be overall supportive / inspirational / overall encourage my motivation to keep going and iterating. they’d also have a grounded understanding of typical timelines — that product usually takes 3-6 months to get off the ground (minimum), the first year is usually the minimum it takes to build up a userbase, community, partnerships, hires (!), etc. Instead of you know, lol, the death threats I get in my DMs when token price goes down (particular shoutout to the people who publicly then state their diehard support of DARK when the price goes back up). #2 is particularly crazy to me: because it’s the public working against itself. you want early access to the best deals, right? —— I’ll write more in the future on how I think about handling the process of building in public, because I think there is emerging + growing benefit to entrepreneurs who do so (I’m certainly exploring those benefits live in production right now). For the time being, I’m grateful that I went into this journey eyes wide open haha — I think we have a good process at @darkresearchai of filtering for helpful information that comes from the internet on our efforts as we tackled decentralized AI infrastructure, and I’m excited to have the data to back that up in the future. and as far as how DARK is going: i think we're hitting way above the 1-5% we need to be hitting, so i'm pretty stoked on that too 😈.