Money, Ego, and Unnatural Acts

We’ve become enthralled by the money itself — how it moves, who controls it, how to mimic its language. Because money equals power, and power feels like proof.

We don’t actually want Patagonia vests and khakis — but we’ve absorbed what they signal: authority by proxy. The restaurant meals, the business travel, the panels and photo ops. The illusion of conviction without customers.We’ve mistaken the optics of comfort for the rewards of creation.

Somewhere along the way, we forgot that people build things — and help customers — and that this is the real work. Managing money looks cleaner. It promises a better quality of life: no payroll, no product recalls, no sleepless nights over churn or cash flow. But it’s a spectator’s version of entrepreneurship — finance as cosplay for building.

For many of us, that fascination starts innocently. Especially early on — when we’re ramen-profitable, building something from nothing — capital looks like an enabler. The first investor who believes feels like validation. But few founders understand the future unnatural acts that money can force: the pacing, the growth expectations, the performative milestones that follow once you step on that treadmill — and the near-impossibility of getting off after you’ve started.

We meet people — VCs who once built things, who still speak the language of making. Some truly earned it. Others trade on borrowed credibility and the social capital of other people’s money. They ride the coattails of past successes, or proximity to them, anointed by allocators as the next generation of check-writers. And in small-market ecosystems, that closed cohort becomes the story itself — a tiny, self-reinforcing elite defining what “building” means.

But the centre of gravity in technology was never meant to be capital.It was the community of people who build. People who stay up late because they have an idea they can’t shake — who share their code, fix each other’s bugs, or ship something weird just to see if it works. That creative spirit is what connected generations of makers before the money arrived.

At its best, technology empowers people in profound and extraordinary ways.But the more we listen to the money movers, the more the story drifts from that truth. Status follows capital. Ego grows from status. A generation of investors who once built things now orbit in bubbles of praise, protected by status and scarcity. Their goals become the story. Their portfolios become the point. And power, once earned through creation, calcifies into protectionism — especially in places like Canada, where the “moneyed class” guards its role as gatekeeper more than builder.

Venture capital was never meant to be permanent capital. It’s a model built on alignment through exit — a structure where everyone’s timelines converge, until they don’t. When it works, founders and investors share the same goal: create something valuable enough to be sold, merged, or taken public. And then the relationship ends.

That exit orientation isn’t malicious; it’s mathematical.
Funds have lifespans.
LPs expect distributions.
Returns must be realized, not just promised.
But it means venture can only stay aligned with founders up to the point of liquidity.
After that, the incentives diverge — the builder’s horizon stretches forward, while the fund’s closes.

That’s why venture isn’t built to sustain communities or companies over decades. It’s designed to find the next one. And that transience — the constant churn — quietly shapes how we all define progress.

It’s like letting a sport be defined only by the Olympics, or driving by F1 teams. There’s a place for that intensity, but it doesn’t define the field. Technology’s real power lives elsewhere — in the people and communities who use it to change their own worlds.

Yet somewhere along the way, we started treating finance as the craft — and the people who practice it as creators.That’s how the story got inverted.

“Writing checks isn’t writing code.” — Anil Dash

The treadmill feeds itself — it needs new companies, new rounds, new headlines. Because the status and attention that come from raising ever-bigger rounds have become the scoreboard. For many founders, it’s the only form of validation that registers — their families don’t really understand what they do, only that they’re always working. So they listen to the VCs whispering their siren songs: bigger, faster, growth, more.

That’s how soft power sustains itself — not through coercion, but through validation. We stopped celebrating inventors and started mythologizing investors. When money became the protagonist, mimicry followed.

Founders have learned to parrot the signals VCs look for — confidence, polish, scale instincts — until performance and authenticity blur.

For a long time, I thought the answer was teaching founders how the money works. Cap tables, reserves, power laws, pacing, structures, terms, portfolios, returns. The mechanics matter.But it leads to mimicry.

The ones who last don’t memorize the rules; they metabolize them. They adapt as the market reshapes itself — learning when to lean in, when to pivot, when to let go. They stay curious about what the money wants from them, and what they actually want for the company.

What I’ve learned is that all the pattern recognition and diligence and “picking better” isn’t about spotting outliers early — it’s about avoiding obvious non-outliers. Real outliers don’t look like the pattern. They rewrite it.

And the truth is, almost all of my work — across hundreds of founders and companies — has been with the non-outliers: the ones trying to change the slope. Helping them see how to survive long enough, learn fast enough, and maybe — just maybe — break away from the curve that defines them. Helping them stay curious when the world

That’s the real work: not pretending we can divine the next unicorn, but helping the rest become slightly less average. To stay curious in a system that keeps bending toward conformity. To build, despite the physics, the inertia — and the propaganda — of the money. To make again, when everyone else is performing.

Because in the end, venture funds outliers.Economic development funds averages.But curiosity — and craft — are what make escape velocity possible.

“So: beware of people conflating pushing pennies around with actually doing the hard work of building a business.Beware of those who pretend that venture capital and the VCs who run that industry are the voices of entrepreneurship — or that they’re even on the side of entrepreneurs.”— Anil Dash, Moving Money Ain’t Building a Business

It’s not malice. It’s the physics of growth. The structure of the money bends behaviour around it — a soft power that works through influence and propaganda. It seeds unnatural acts in planning and boardrooms: stretch budgets, impossible goals, headcount and more. And since each round requires the next, investors amplify the closed-loop feedback.

You don’t ask a barber if you need a haircut. Yet we keep listening to investors on what the future looks like —and somehow it always looks like another round of funding.

“The best way to predict the future is to invent it.” — Alan Kay

The quote is not: “The best way to predict the future is to invest in it.”

So the work now isn’t to reject capital — it’s to understand its physics. To learn how it flows, where it bends behaviour, and how to build companies that can survive its gravity. Learn how the capital works so you can decide what to take from it, and what to refuse. The builders who’ll outlast this cycle aren’t the ones chasing validation; they’re the ones who can see the machinery for what it is — a tool, not a truth. You don’t need to worship the system to understand its wiring.

Stay dirty. Real progress happens in the field, not the feed. In the code, not the deck. Just F'n build.