Don't Be First

A Russian billionaire recently said something that cuts against everything Silicon Valley mythologizes: you don't want to be first. He believes in "founder's magic": right place, right product, right time. Maybe that comes from growing up Soviet. Or maybe it's just what surviving three market cycles teaches you.

I agree. And I learned it the expensive way too.

The cost of seeing early

I've been fortunate enough to see things ahead of time, specifically when it comes to digital trends or tech waves. It's helped me prepare for futures before they arrived. But capitalizing on foresight, or even helping others see what I see, is a different skill entirely. Because when you're too early, three things happen:

1. You over-invest. Capital goes in before the market can receive it.
2. You extend yourself prematurely. Energy, reputation, attention: spent on a wave that hasn't formed yet.
3. You lose steam before the light appears. Then you abandon the idea, often right before someone with worse insight but better timing makes it work.

Being early only kills you if you deploy as if the market were already there. The seer's job is to prepare cheaply and wait patiently.

What the Bitcoin era taught me about "smart" money

During the Bitcoin mania years, I stayed close to a lot of very wealthy people. I watched billionaires pump their cash in on momentum and emotion. Very few, even the richest among them, were rational. The best operators in the room were the ones who stayed clear-headed. A whole "religious movement" around Bitcoin formed at the same time (understandably).

It reminded me of the line attributed to Newton after the South Sea Bubble: "I can calculate the motion of heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people." Even geniuses make foolish decisions when investing or gambling, because it's a different "skill" from whatever made them rich. Being good at making money once doesn't mean you'll be good at it forever. You just have more capital to make mistakes with. Masayoshi Son built SoftBank into an empire and still made some of the most expensive mistimed bets in history through his Vision Fund.

Rationality under mania is rare. It's also trainable, but only if you accept that timing is a quality you can study, something you develop a feel for.

The ancients knew this

This is what exploring my own cultural roots, specifically learning Vedic traditions (only recently have I been digging into my Indian side), has given me: a deeper awareness of the larger timing mechanisms. Time is a dimension of reality (even if one we've constructed), and it has seasons.

The ancients treated time as qualitative. Certain periods favor building; others favor consolidating. Certain years you extend; others you hold. Modernity has its own timing systems — earnings cycles, product roadmaps, election seasons — but they're shallow and externally imposed. We kept "now" and "hustle," and dropped the seasons. The old systems gave people a way to ask: is this the season for this seed?

Reminds me of the show Resident Alien, where the protagonist (Harry, an alien who crash-landed on Earth) had to time the sending/receiving of his messages "home" based on planetary and star alignment. So if timing doesn't matter, why might aliens themselves need to 'align with the stars/planets' in order to send or receive messages at large enough distances? How and why did humans stop paying attention to the importance of timing?

Small bets, long fuses

My structural answer to the seer's dilemma has become small bets, the philosophy behind communities like Small Bets. Ironically, that community is now suffering an exodus after Gumroad bought it. Attention is the scarcest resource in the AI era, even for communities about betting small.

That philosophy is what led me to start microempires.cc years ago. The idea was good. Arguably it still is, long-term. But I abandoned it, because I ran the early-seer pattern on myself: invested energy early, lost steam, had no one to hand the reigns to. The lesson was about succession more than timing: if your energy dries up, someone capable should already be holding the other half of the rope.