You haven’t talked to them in a few years and you have literally no idea what they’re up to except that they’re now, allegedly, a founder. They also have a full-time job, but don’t even sweat that because they reordered Founder to the top.

You check their X, and it’s a waterfall of posts about how their OpenClaw bot running on a Mac Mini just shipped 200 PRs in eight hours, and then figured out how to make popcorn by connecting to their microwave via bluetooth.

They’ve been grinding 24/7, outworking you, even while you sleep. You think to yourself, “I’m cooked.”

You notice, though, that even over many years of tweets, there is literally no product.

They’ve been performatively posting their “day in the life of a founder” videos, but you’re not entirely convinced they have anything to show for it.

I don’t know whether we should be proud of the ambition or cringing (or both), but the good thing is that this is only the loudest version of this founder-addiction.

Buttttt it’s not the only one.

“Founders” are popping up in every corner: tech, social media, trades, you name it. Ultimately, the core desire is identical: for my generation, a job title that doesn’t start with Founder or Chief feels like a social demotion.

We are, for some reason or another, a generation of optimizers who glorify the 6AM routine, the minimalist desk setup, and the aesthetic of peak productivity.

This has led to many, many, ultra-successful startups, but we can’t ignore the accumulation of ‘coming soon’ announcements that never see traffic.

The uncs before us.

I won’t be so self-damning, though, we’re not the only ones that have done this.

The Boomers had their own version of it in the 70s and 80s. High inflation, a reshaping economy, and the rise of the PC. The internet was hip, and everyone wanted a part of it.

They wanted to build something rather than work for someone. They were the original LLC generation and, honestly?

They entered markets with tangible needs where the barrier to entry was the technical moat, not just a Cursor subscription and a Stripe account, and succeeded.

But today, when an AI agent can ship 200 PRs in an afternoon, the title 'Founder' suffers from hyper-inflation. It’s easier than ever to claim the crown, but harder than ever to prove you didn’t order it on Temu.

There is a key difference, though: for them, status was the byproduct of success. You built a company, it made money, and the money gave you status.

The business was a tool to change their bank account.

For Gen Z, though, the business is the tool to change our social status.

We claim the title before the product exists, as if being a founder gave us more aura than the potential outcome…

does it?

Where did this come from?

Think back to Smosh and Ryan Higa.

Flip-out camcorders. Tripods on top of textbooks. Kids a few years older than us raking in more views than cable networks by yelling at food in their bedrooms.

You know, the good old days.

These good old days genuinely made a crack in our reality. For most people our age, we realized that the adults in suits, the ones that most of our parents became as we grew older, were just playing a character that they lowkey hated.

Then you turned your iPod on and saw Ian Hecox making millions by filming skits in a Pokemon costume with his best friend.

Let’s be for real: how many kids are gonna find suits cool after seeing that?

If suits looked like anything, they look like surrender.

Thankfully, this was not the experience I had, but I didn’t need to live it firsthand to see it all around me.

Parents brought work home, implicitly, weighing on their shoulders. The commute, the uniform, the quiet erosion of who they used to be a few years ago. We saw the sacrifices they had to make, how happy they were spending time with their hobbies, and heard them talk about how nothing - nothing - compares to their college years…

obviously we were all gonna ask, “do I want this?”

I’m not trying to be dramatic, obviously previous generations have also experienced this. This isn’t a completely new phenomenon.

What is new, though, is that now we can actually do something about it, not just a vague “maybe I can start an LLC”. We watched PewDiePie become a millionaire in his early 20s, saw three college buddies build out a $10B company in Mercor, and can scroll IG to find a 19 year old showing off “his” Porsche while promoting a shitcoin. Every few years a new proof of concept dropped: Vine, Instagram, Tiktok, and now AI, makes it even cheaper and easier to use any of those tools.

The pieces just keep aligning, and by the time we hit the job market the question was no longer “do I want this”, it became “why would I?”

If you’re not building, you’re losing.

57% of Gen Z would become an influencer if given the chance. One in four Americans aged 18-24 already run some kind of business.

But here’s the thing nobody really talks about: the flip side of glorifying the founder path is that it quietly made every other path feel like a consolation prize.

If you’re not a founder, you’d better be at McKinsey, Google, or some firm with a name people recognize at your SF house “parties”. Anything else and you might as well not have a LinkedIn. That’s genuinely what the culture feels like right now: a two-tier system where you’re either founding something or you’re a background character in the matrix.

We absorbed this NPC idea, and that framing quietly turned “employee” into a personality flaw. Not just a job description, but evidence that you weren’t interesting enough, driven enough, or creative enough to figure something better out.

Some people might call this ambition, but I’d argue that the urgency to have everything figured out now is doing the exact opposite of what we want it to.

What the crown actually looks like.

To be clear, the founder path is real. It can be a risk worth taking for many people, even if it doesn’t work on the first, second, etc. try.

But we've romanticized it to the point where people who aren't ready for it are chasing it anyway. Not because they've thought it through, but because it feels like the only option that doesn't come with an asterisk.

And I don’t completely blame them. No boss, no commute, you make your own hours, you own whatever you build. It’s definitely appealing.

But the reality is less dramatic then the movies make it out to be. A huge chunk of it is just boring operations and random miscellaneous tasks. Those long hours you were trying to avoid? You’ll probably be working even more now. And on top of that, you're also a full-time marketer for yourself. Your whole existence has to be packaged into something people want to pay attention to, all the time, because if they stop paying attention, it all stops working.

That last part is what I think gets undersold. In running from the cubicle, we skipped over the one thing it actually gave you: the ability to clock out. To have a bad day that three people know about, max.

When you are the business, that’s gone. The algorithm has a bad week and suddenly thousands of people, who you will never meet, think you’re a {insert insult} human.

Not everyone is ready for that. And the over-romanticization means a lot of people are finding that out the hard way.

Where are we at now?

When Boomers failed at starting their own business, they just went to salary jobs that paid relatively well. Not only was there no shame in that, but the average person could also afford to live off of the average salary. I’m not so sure we can say this is still true.

The stakes for us feel higher, and the safety net feels orders of magnitude thinner. And with AI getting increasingly smarter and everyone loudly debating what jobs will even exist in 10 years, it makes sense that people are striving to find a sense of meaning through something which they truly, fully control.

But maybe the solution that people need is to stop thinking their life is their career.

Not every interesting person needs to be a founder. Not every good idea needs a pitch deck. Not every morning needs a routine worth filming. Some of the most capable and most impactful people I’ve met are really good at their jobs and are building a life that isn’t for public consumption.

That used to just be called living. We somehow made it feel like losing.

This isn't anti-ambition; it's just worth asking whether the performance of ambition and the thing itself have gotten too hard to tell apart. It’s got real costs, both for the people chasing something they don’t actually enjoy, and for a culture that can’t tell the difference between genuine ambition and a well-optimized performance of it.

Sometimes the better move is just to slow down, figure out what you actually want, and stop performing for an audience that’s mostly performing right back at you.

Now, imagine a system that takes 0-5 seconds, costs 0.5-2% in fees, and goes directly to your recipient. Imagine that it was capable of doing $32T+ in transaction volume per year. That would be pretty amazing technology that, if it existed, surely everyone would flock to it, right?

well, only if regulators allow it.

The Blockbuster Problem

When Netflix launched streaming, Blockbuster literally laughed at them. Blockbuster didn’t understand why the change was necessary. But the competition inspired them, so they decided to make changes that would surely kill Netflix once and for all - optimized DVD delivery. Faster shipping times! More distribution centers! Better websites for reservations! Well, hindsight is 20/20, and now we look back and think -

why would you try to fix the past when the future is right in front of you.

When stablecoins were first introduced, traditional fintech companies introduced FedNow, faster ACH, and real-time rails. Things that, in their defense, genuinely do make the banking experience much more efficient for the average American. But trad fi is optimizing SWIFT when the problem is SWIFT. These “solutions” still think of money being trapped in its nationality, conceding that cross-border means complexity (that they don’t want to deal with) and that settlement requires correspondent banking.

In July of 2025, Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan, said “I think they’re real, but I don't know why you'd want to [use a] stablecoin as opposed to just payment.”

JPMorgan didn’t understand why the change was necessary. But the competition inspired them, so they decided to make changes that would surely kill stablecoins once and for all - JPMD, their own stablecoin-like asset, just one month earlier in June 2025. It’s not innovation; it’s a defensive reaction.

why would you try to fix the past when the future is right in front of you.

Global, or Stagnation

$190T in cross-border payments annually. $685B in remittances supporting more than 800M people annually. $39T in cross-border B2B annually. SMBs pay 2-3x what large corporations pay for the same transfers.

this isn’t just an inefficiency in the edge case. this is the market.

If I want to send USDC from US → US, it costs me ~$0.01 and it settles in seconds. If I want to send USDC from US → Mexico → Philippines, it costs me ~$0.01 and it settles in seconds.

That’s exactly why Stripe, the fintech unicorn, bought Bridge, a stablecoin infrastructure startup, for $1.1B. That’s exactly why Mesh is able to save companies doing cross-border payroll 40-60% on FX. And that’s why big banks are sprinting to join the game, even if super late and in their own backwards ways.

The Regulatory Moat

If stablecoins are so efficient for payments, why isn’t everyone using them?

because you can’t just rewrite payment infrastructure. you need permission.

50+ state money transmitter licenses and with multiple banking partnerships, you’ll still face (antiquated) KYC/AML frameworks, capital reserves, and fed oversight, to name just a few. Then multiply that for every single country in which you’d like to operate in. And then factor in costs to get fully licensed?

millions in the hole before you process even a single transaction.

Some countries are making genuine advancements in streamlining the process. The EU passed MiCA in 2023, Singapore finalized their framework for SGD and G10-pegged stablecoins, and Hong Kong launched their regulatory regime in 2025. These frameworks bred maturity and trust for the tech.

But one step forward doesn’t always mean it was in the right direction. MiCA’s strict requirements forced exchanges to delist non-compliant projects. Singapore mandated exclusive local operations initially. The bar got set so high that only well-funded players could clear it.

And now we’re seeing the exact same thing play out in the US.

Circle spent years fighting the licensing game, and now USDC is the “safe” institutional choice while Tether, even though operating with the highest market cap of all stablecoins, still faces legal scrutiny. Paxos built for compliance, Paypal leveraged their existing licenses to launch PYUSD, and Stripe preferred paying $1.1B for Bridge rather than dealing with the mess themselves.

Let’s not even name the vast graveyard of stablecoin projects that chose the “ask for forgiveness later” route, ultimately pivoting or dying in regulation limbo.

but regulation isn’t really stopping “bad actors”. it’s creating a barrier so high that only the big banks can play.

JPMorgan went from calling Bitcoin “fraud” in 2017 to launching JPMD in 2025, all while admitting they still don’t understand what or why they’re doing what they’re doing. They’re stubborn in their ways, following along hesitantly out of necessity, hoping for a miracle that allows them to capture the market.

and there is - become the licensed issuers, and force everyone through your ramps.

Not only does licensing take years and costs millions, you then need to convince banks that don’t even understand what you’re doing to partner with you, all while small players get hammered with oversight and big players carelessly run pilot programs.

Just look at the CLARITY act. It got so watered down by big bank lobbying for change (in the name of safety) that Coinbase, originally the biggest advocate for it, literally pulled its support and turned into the biggest advocate against it. Brian Armstrong described the changes as “regulatory capture by banking interests”.

Look, regulation matters. Consumers need protection from scams, risky projects, and bad investment decisions that could drain millions overnight and crash the market. Nobody is arguing against that.

But when banks lobby to ban platforms from offering stablecoin rewards, calling it an unsafe loophole, they conveniently omit that stablecoins offered 3.5%+ returns while their savings accounts only pay 0.01%. So if you can’t compete on rates, just ban the competition.

this isn’t consumer protection. this is competition stifling dressed up as safety.

Stuck with Fast DVD Shipping?

The technology for next-gen payments already exists. It processes trillions in volume every year. It solves cross-border payments the way email solved mail. The question was never whether it works. It already does.

we just made it illegal to compete with banks unless you already are one.

But here’s the thing - infrastructure wins eventually. Some company will inevitably rewrite the piping from the ground up and force banks to adapt, or else.

The real question is just the timing. Do we allow payment systems to evolve now, or do we waste another decade protecting incumbents before the inevitable, even if not stablecoins, happens anyway?

the next generation of payments is here. it’s just unevenly distributed, and deliberately so.

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In 2017, if you wanted to buy a graphics card for gaming, you were out of luck. Walk into any store or check any website and chips were sold out. The culprit? An army of cryptocurrency miners gobbling up every GPU they could find, turning gaming hardware into money-printing machines.

And Nvidia? They were quietly raking in billions while pretending it wasn’t happening.

Nvidia and Crypto Miners

Nvidia started as a gaming company. Their bread and butter was selling GPUs, graphics processing units, to gamers who wanted better frame rates and prettier pixels. For years, that was the whole story: make chips that render video games really, really well.

Then came Ethereum.

What made the GTX 1080 so desirable for gaming was ultimately also what made it so desirable for mining: Nvidia’s Pascal architecture. The Pascal architecture made the chips incredibly power efficient, making them perfect for mining Ethereum and other cryptocurrencies.

Nvidia Pascal architecture was released in 2016, so what made 2017 the year for mining Ethereum?

A boom.

Beginning the year at around $8 and ending the year at over $700, people frenzied to get a piece of the pie. GPU’s flew off the shelves, as rigs 4, 6, or even 10 GPU’s became the norm. Gamers were furious, as both AMD and Nvidia chips were impossible to find. Miners were ecstatic, though, as the price of Ethereum just kept going up.

Winners all around

The numbers do the talking.

In Q2 of fiscal 2018, Nvidia’s gaming revenue jumped 52% year-to-year. The next quarter, Nvidia’s gaming revenue jumped another 25% (CNBC). Their market cap skyrocketed from $14 billion in 2016 to $175 billion by 2018, a more than tenfold increase in just two years (Futunn). A particularly impressive (and suspicious) feat for a gaming chip company considering that Sony and Microsoft also crushed it with the PS4 Pro and the release of Xbox One X in November of 2017 (its GPU was based on AMD architecture :0).

Nvidia’s fiscal 2018 revenue hit a record $9.7 billion (Futunn). CEO Jensen Huang was riding high, praising how their GPUs powered “the largest distributed supercomputing network in the world”, or the blockchain (Futunn).

But here’s the thing; while Nvidia publicly acknowledged that crypto existed, they weren’t being honest about how much money they were actually making from it.

A later analysis by consulting firm Prysm Group revealed that from May 2017 to July 2018, Nvidia earned approximately $1.73 billion from selling GPUs to cryptocurrency miners. Of that, roughly $1.1 billion was quietly shuffled into their “gaming” revenue category instead of being properly disclosed (Wccftech).

And they hid it.

Investigating Lies

The SEC wasn’t particularly thrilled by this.

For two consecutive quarters in fiscal 2018, Nvidia had presented surging gaming revenue without telling investors that a huge chunk of those “gaming” sales were actually from crypto miners. This mattered because crypto demand was particularly volatile at this time. If investors knew that a substantial portion of Nvidia’s growth was tied to the boom-and-bust cycles of cryptocurrency prices rather than steady consumer demand, they might have valued the company differently.

The SEC launched an investigation, in which they concluded that Nvidia management wasn’t just passively aware of the importance of crypto mining sales, rather that they were also actively complicit in this by tracking mining sales and hiding them from investors. The dead giveaway? Internal studies on GeForce Experience, an application included with all GeForce chips that had data on how chips were actually being used (Wccftech).

Nvidia claimed they had “limited visibility” into end-use cases.

In 2022, the SEC settled with Nvidia for $5.5 million over charges that the company failed to properly disclose how cryptocurrency mining was driving their explosive growth (CNBC).

A slap on the wrist that paled in comparison to the momentum that cryptocurrency mining generated for Nvidia.

Bitcoin and Ethereum Crash

By early 2018, Bitcoin had already started its infamous nosedive, plummeting from nearly $20,000 to half that in January alone. Ethereum followed.

The mining gold rush was over.

Nvidia had already ramped up production to meet mining demand, but when crypto crashed, that demand evaporated overnight. To make matters worse, suddenly, the market was flooded with used GPUs from miners liquidating their rigs.

Nvidia stock dropped 17% in a single day, and Goldman Sachs removed Nvidia from its list of top stock picks (Cointelegraph).

In Q3 of 2018, CEO Jensen Huang had to admit what everyone already suspected: they had a “crypto hangover” (Cointelegraph).

The crypto boom that had seemed like free money turned into a liability. Nvidia executives started downplaying mining’s importance. They’d learned their lesson: it was too risky to publicly embrace the wild, wild west that was crypto in 2018.

No more mining?

Then came the final nail in the coffin.

In September 2022, Ethereum completed “The Merge”, a long-planned upgrade that transitioned the network from proof-of-work (which required processing power) to proof-of-stake (which didn’t) (PANews). Overnight, the most profitable GPU-mineable cryptocurrency no longer needed graphics cards.

The era of GPU mining for Ethereum was over.

For Nvidia, it was actually good news. No more boom-bust cycles tied to crypto prices. No more angry gamers blaming them for shortages. No more regulatory scrutiny over undisclosed mining revenue.

The crypto chapter was closed.

History Repeats Itself

Fast forward a few years, and the pattern looks eerily familiar.

A new technology promises to revolutionize everything. Companies scramble to get in early. And once again, they’re gobbling up every Nvidia chip they can find.

This time it’s artificial intelligence. Training large language models like ChatGPT requires the same massive parallel processing power that made GPUs perfect for crypto mining. Tech giants like Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, Meta are locked in an arms race, each betting billions that AI will define the future of computing.

The money flowing into AI makes the crypto boom look like pocket change. Nvidia’s data center revenue exploded from around $3 billion in 2020 to over $47 billion in 2024 (Nvidia Investor Relations). The company’s market cap has now surpassed $3 trillion. Jensen Huang, once dodging questions about crypto miners, is now celebrated as a visionary who positioned Nvidia perfectly for the AI revolution.

Yet the parallels are impossible to ignore.

Is this just another cryptocurrency bubble waiting to pop?

Sources

• CNBC - “Nvidia, SEC reach deal on cryptocurrency disclosures in 2017” (May 6, 2022) - https://www.cnbc.com/2022/05/06/nvidia-sec-reach-deal-on-cryptocurrency-disclosures-in-2017.html

• Futunn - “The $5 Trillion Rise of NVIDIA” (November 2024) - https://news.futunn.com/en/post/64166317/weekend-reading-the-5-trillion-rise-of-nvidia-from-gaming

• Wccftech - “NVIDIA Sued For Misrepresenting $1 Billion Of Cryptocurrency Product Revenue” (May 17, 2020) - https://wccftech.com/nvidia-sued-cryptocurrency-mining-revenue/

• Cointelegraph - “Crypto Winter Survivor: Inside Nvidia’s Difficult Relationship With Mining” (February 19, 2019) - https://cointelegraph.com/news/crypto-winter-survivor-inside-nvidias-difficult-relationship-with-mining

• PANews - “The world’s first company to surpass a $5 trillion market capitalization” (November 2024) - https://www.panewslab.com/en/articles/6e96a482-a55f-4fe3-b664-804663f2fbd3

• For specific figures, reference Nvidia’s investor relations: https://investor.nvidia.com/