Happy Hour 43 — "Being a founder's hard"

Mike dropped into a Regens space the night before and was told "you need to hear your song" — community members are getting AI tracks made from their scraped social posts. Liz argued rock and roll; Jed insisted Sinatra vibes; Sinatra won. Bored Osaka hadn't heard his yet and asked Mike not to spoil it, which Mike then spent the rest of the show not spoiling, loudly.

Mike relayed advice from the Welcome Apes room: don't sign up for everything, you'll be winded by the first night and you're sitting on a waitlist spot someone else wants. Tim had independently landed on the identical plan — Ape Balls, then the Stonkbrokers tailgate, then ApeFest — and the two started negotiating a shared Uber. Tree added that a Sunday boat outing is in the works, Luma link pending.

Tim asked whether Bored Osaka was really going to camp by Beeple's studio. Squiddy backed out. "I was so looking forward to a bunch of apes camping out in the back of the studio. And now we're all staying in hotels and Airbnbs and beachfront mansions and all of that civilized." Mike then eulogized Lisbon's central HQ, including the wall where you knocked and a monkey hand passed you a drink at any hour.

Mike set up the night's question by contrasting founder styles — one who promises streamers millions and asks to be held accountable in a year, versus one who says this is an experiment, I think it works, but you have to market it. His thesis: every founder has an ego, it just presents differently, and the presentation shapes the project's fate whether the founder likes it or not.

Tim said he spent the day reflecting and then selling, sometimes paying more in gas than he received. His read: NFTs became a place for people to run an early-stage startup with a built-in exit and no consequence, and the projects that survived — he named Claynosaurz, Quirkies, Pudgy Penguins — were the ones whose founders had an IRL skill to apply. "I think people had too many dreams. No one had the skill to back it."

The night's most-felt stretch: businesses have been starting and ending since the dawn of currency, and the act of attempting one — pizzeria or conglomerate — is itself the success. He spoke from 17 years of small businesses and burning through millions, going from solidly well off to not much, and noted in passing that he sold the first spirits-as-NFT around 2019–2020.

Mike pressed the analogy: if he buys a pizza and the shop later fails, he got his pizza. Is that different from launching a chain and telling streamers they'll be millionaires? Bored Osaka's answer: the pizzeria never asked you to walk down the block and phone your family about the pizza. The difference isn't failure, it's the ask.

Fourteen years as a serial entrepreneur after a decade in banking, with spirits, a music label, film and TV behind him — and plenty of businesses he had to close. His argument: 2021 minted a generation of "entrepreneurs" who'd never been through feast and famine, and are now getting punched in the face by the thing everyone else calls Tuesday. He later tied the current wave of L2s and tokens to VC pressure for a revenue stream, and praised both Figgy and Luca for turning back toward their core products.

Pushing back on the word "extracting": her NFTs were sold as merch, and businesses have operating costs that come out of sales. "You can't buy a t-shirt from a company or Levi's jeans and then walk into their offices and demand to see the CEO. You'll be escorted out on your ass." The bonus in web3 is that access to the founder is real — but the product still has to be funded from somewhere other than the mint.

Answering Mike's question about whether the space taught itself to behave this way, CeoTim.eth argued the bigger casualty was the artists, who were pushed out for not being businesspeople — and that decentralized art was the bedrock everything else got built on. At 2:00:30 he posed the thought experiment of the night: strip the floor price off OpenSea entirely, go back to before flywheels, and ask which project people would actually buy.

Dialing in late from Portugal, he reframed the whole conversation as expectation management — money matters, he's 45 with two kids, but it isn't all of it. Without minting his Stonkbroker he'd never have met any of these people. That opened a long IRC/ICQ nostalgia run with CeoTim.eth — mIRC commands, FTP servers, 28.8 modems, 45 minutes for a 3MB MP3 — and the conclusion that the first peer-to-peer networks were basically web3's trial run.

Mike rejected a Cam Newton-adjacent claim for baseball on the grounds that hockey players do NFL-level collisions while the opposition carries weapons and everyone is standing on knives. Asun made the case for the NRL — 80 minutes, no pads, no helmets — and noted the NFL has been importing rugby tackling technique. Mike's closer came from a former Broncos fullback he once taught to bowl, on what Monday feels like.