The Voices in Your Head

It was 2pm on a Thursday when Justice, my cofounder, sent me the photo. His son, just a few weeks old, asleep with him.

I stared at that photo for at least twenty minutes. Not because it was touching, though it was, but because I felt the full weight of what we were doing. Not just building another product. Carrying the ghost of everything that came before.

Writing this in the early hours of January 1st, 2026, somewhere over the Atlantic at 40,000 feet on my way to London.

The Voices in Your Head Aren’t Yours

If you know me, you know Lazerpay. A crypto payments company that raised money, got traction, had users, and then… didn’t make it. I’ve written about the pivot, the wind-down, the lessons. What I haven’t written about is what it did to me. How it created a debt I felt I had to repay, not in money, but in proof.

Proof that I wasn’t just lucky the first time. Proof that I could do it again. Proof that everyone who believed in me wasn’t wrong.

That invisible debt changed how I built. Every decision became a referendum on my competence. Every product choice was shadowed by: “What will people think?” I was no longer building for users, I was building for the audience in my head. The VCs who passed. The founders who made it. The people who watched Lazerpay end and wondered if I had what it took.

The Lazerpay Shadow: The Debt That Isn’t Real

Let me be specific about what the Lazerpay aftermath felt like.

There’s a kind of founder who fails and bounces back immediately with “learned so much, on to the next!” energy. Good for them. I’m not that person.

I was 21 years old when Lazerpay ended. The hardest conversations weren’t with investors or the press. They were with the team. Telling people who’d trusted me that I couldn’t pay them anymore. Watching people older than me, with families and bills, process what my failure meant for their lives.

Something broke in me after that. Not permanently, but deeply enough that it took years to rebuild.

We started working on PNS (Phone Number Service) right after and built it completely. Got 3,000+ people on the waitlist during the ENS and NFT boom. Perfect timing. But I kept delaying the launch. Weeks became months. I was paralyzed.

Justice finally confronted me directly: “Guy, what are we doing with PNS? Are we launching or not?”

I told him the truth: “I don’t believe I’m capable of being a founder right now.”

Even when I eventually went back to building, the confidence wasn’t there. With Lazerpay, we’d built MVPs in weeks and launched immediately. After Lazerpay, I overthought everything. Every launch needed perfect timing. Every decision needed bulletproof justification. I was performing competence because I didn’t actually feel it.

It’s only in the last few months that the old confidence has started coming back.

Here’s what I learned: the people I thought I owed a redemption arc, they’d already moved on.

The investors? They wrote it off and deployed the rest of their fund. The team members? They got jobs at places where they’re thriving. The users? They found other solutions.

The only person still carrying that debt was me.

And that debt changed everything.

I overthought every product decision because I was terrified of failing publicly again. The yield aggregation product? We spent months on design refinements that users didn’t care about.

I chased signals instead of conviction. When VCs said “yield is interesting,” I leaned in, not because I believed yield would change the world, but because someone with money said it was interesting. When people asked “why not just build a neobank?”, I seriously considered it, not because I wanted to, but because I was afraid of seeming contrarian or difficult.

I shipped slower because I was performing competence. Every launch had to have the perfect narrative. Every pivot had to have the perfect justification. I couldn’t just say “we’re trying this because it seems cool.” I had to construct an airtight case for why this was The Right Move, Actually.

The performance was exhausting. And it nearly stopped me from building anything worth building.

The Turning Point: Whose Expectations Am I Meeting?

We were having an office hour with one of the mentors at the FR8 residency in Helsinki, a reputable investor in the Nordic region. We’d just built the autonomous yield agent, the thing I was actually proud of, and I was pitching him and asking for feedback.

He said: “This is nice, but what’s the endgame? Yield is crowded. Are you going to add trading? Become a neobank? I need to see the path to $100M revenue.”

And I heard myself say: “Yeah, we’re thinking about adding agentic trading, enabling people to create AI agents to trade tokens while they slept, could expand into…”

I stopped mid-sentence. Because I realized: I was about to commit to building something I didn’t believe in, from someone whose opinion I didn’t even respect, because I was afraid of looking like I didn’t have it figured out.

That night, I went on a walk with Justice. “I think we’re building the wrong thing.”

“What do you mean? The yield product is working.”

“It’s working, but I don’t care if it works. I’m building it because I think I’m supposed to. Because it checks boxes. Because it looks like a reasonable next step after Lazerpay.”

“So what should we build?”

And that’s when it hit me: I’d spent so long trying to build what would rehabilitate my reputation that I’d forgotten to ask what I actually gave a shit about.

The Expectations Audit: Who’s Really Asking?

After that conversation, I did something uncomfortable. I wrote down every voice in my head telling me what I should build, and I named whose voice it really was:

• “Build something with clear PMF this time” was the VC who passed on Lazerpay.
• “Just build a neobank, there’s a clear path there” was the mentor at our FR8 office hour.
• “Make sure it’s technically impressive” was my own ego, trying to prove I’m smart.
• “Pick something that can scale to $100M” was some imaginary Series A investor I’ve never met.
• “You’ve pivoted a lot, don’t pivot again, it looks flaky” was someone who has never used any product we built or has not built anything themselves.

When I actually named whose expectations I was trying to meet, I realized: none of these people are in the arena with me. They’re not coding at 2 AM. They’re not dealing with Justice’s baby crying in the background of calls. They’re not the ones who will feel it if we fail.

So why the fuck was I giving them a vote?

The only opinions that mattered:

• Mine: do I believe this is important?
• Justice’s: can we build this, and does he believe in it?
• Users’: will this solve a real problem for them?

That’s it. That’s the whole list.

Everyone else’s expectations, the VCs, the other founders, the people who watched Lazerpay end and formed opinions about what I should do next, those aren’t obligations. They’re just noise.

The Yield Product: Building Something Great That Didn’t Matter Enough

After that realization, we kept building Liquid, the agentic yield product, but my relationship to it had changed. I wasn’t building it to prove anything. I was building it to learn.

And we learned a lot.

We built for six months and shipped something genuinely good to our early users. What we achieved:

The cleanest interface for DeFi yield I’d ever seen. No jargon. No long onboarding. Just sign up, deposit USD, and start earning.

A truly autonomous yield agent. Not some marketing AI bullshit. Actual intelligent capital allocation across protocols. Users averaged 13.5% returns while the agent rebalanced their positions automatically.

Zero user funds lost. Even when yield markets went to shit in late 2025, when protocols were blowing up and liquidity was evaporating, our users stayed whole. Not one dollar lost.

The highlight came when I learned my friend’s mom was a Liquid user. If you can build DeFi that someone’s mom can use without their kid holding their hand, you’ve done something right.

So why did we walk away?

Because once I stopped building to impress people, I could see clearly: yield doesn’t scale in a way that matters without adding banking initiatives, and with AI agents, it becomes even more expensive to run and scale.

The margins compress as you grow. You’re competing with every neobank and fintech app that can offer 4-5% with FDIC insurance and zero gas fees. We could see the path ahead: incremental improvements to a fundamentally limited opportunity.

We considered adding trading. But trading without a sustainable moat meant competing against every well-funded exchange on earth. We’d need to be 10x better just to be considered. And honestly? There are already brilliant teams building beautiful neobanks for crypto.

But here’s the difference between this pivot and the previous ones: I wasn’t afraid of how it would look.

Old me would have thought: “Shit, if we pivot again, everyone will say we can’t stick with anything. Better to keep pushing on yield and hope it gets better.”

New me thought: “We learned what we needed to learn. Now we move.”

The voice that used to say “don’t pivot again, you’ll look flaky” got a new response: “I’d rather look flaky than waste years on something I don’t believe in.”

For Builders Carrying the Weight

If you’re carrying the ghost of a previous startup, I see you.

If you’re building under the weight of other people’s expectations, I feel that.

If you have a cofounder with real stakes, a baby, family responsibility, a life that depends on this working, and you’re terrified of letting them down, I know exactly what that 2 AM anxiety feels like.

Here’s what I wish someone had told me:

The debt you feel you owe to investors, users, people who believed in you? It isn’t real. They moved on. You’re the only one still carrying it.

The expectations people have of you are their projections, not your obligations. They’re telling you what they would do, what they’re afraid of, what they need to believe. None of that is your responsibility.

The voices in your head aren’t yours. You’ve internalized other people’s fears and called them wisdom. But wisdom doesn’t make you smaller. It makes you braver.

The only way out is through. Ship, learn, pivot. Repeat until you find something that matters enough to be worth the weight you’re carrying.

What I’d Tell Myself 12 Months Ago

1. Other people’s expectations are usually projections of their own fears.

When people said “you should build something safer,” they weren’t giving me advice, they were revealing what they would do. They wanted me to validate their worldview that calculated, incremental progress is how you win.

But some of the best companies are built by people who looked reckless from the outside but knew exactly what they were doing.

2. Overthinking is just fear wearing a productivity costume.

All those hours I spent “strategizing” and “analyzing” the market? That was procrastination. I was terrified of shipping something and watching it fail publicly again. So I analyzed. I refined. I “validated assumptions.”

But really, I was just avoiding the discomfort of putting something real into the world.

3. The debt you feel you owe isn’t real.

The investors who lost money on Lazerpay? They’ve moved on. The users who were disappointed? They found other solutions. The people who are still judging you for it? They’re not building anything themselves.

You’re the only one still carrying that weight. And you can put it down anytime.

4. Pivots aren’t failures. They’re expensive education.

Every pivot hurt. Yield to trading to insurance to margin. Each one felt like admitting the last thing was wrong.

But looking back? Each pivot eliminated a hypothesis that seemed good but wasn’t. Each one got us closer to something that actually mattered.

The founders who “never pivot” either got lucky or aren’t being honest.

5. The weight never goes away. You just get stronger.

Justice’s son is now 11 months old. The Lazerpay shadow is still there. The pressure to succeed is still real.

But I’ve stopped trying to make the weight disappear. I’m just building the capacity to carry it while still moving forward.

The weight is part of the game. Accepting it is how you stay in the game.

6. Build the thing that scares you most.

Not because it’ll definitely work. But because at least you’ll be proud of what you attempted.

7. As entrepreneurs, we can rationalize anything.

We see opportunities everywhere. We can construct compelling narratives for why X market is the next big thing. We can convince ourselves, and others, that this time is different.

But here’s what I’ve learned: the narrative doesn’t matter as much as the commitment. The rationalization is just noise. What matters is that you put something out there and refuse to give up. You ship, you learn, you adjust. Repeat until something works or you run out of rope.

The winners aren’t the ones with the best thesis. They’re the ones who kept trying when everyone else quit.

The Current Bet: Wandering Into Prediction Markets

After we decided to walk away from the yield product, I took some time off. Not a vacation. Just… space. To think without the pressure of needing to have the answer immediately.

I looked at DeFi primitives we hadn’t touched. Derivatives, options, structured products. Everything felt either too crowded or too niche.

I started looking at prediction markets again.

Polymarket was in the news constantly during the election cycle. My Twitter feed was full of people sharing market screenshots instead of polls. During the US 2024 elections, my non-crypto friends were asking “what’s the Trump odds on Polymarket?” I watched billions of dollars flow through these markets.

Then something clicked for me about markets themselves.

I’d always understood markets as discovery engines for truth. Every price is a hypothesis tested continuously by capital. Every trade is a vote weighted by conviction.

Prediction markets extend this logic to probability itself. They answer questions that polls can’t, that experts hedge, that institutions won’t touch: what will actually happen?

During that election cycle, I watched this play out in real time. Polymarket was pricing Trump’s odds more accurately than any poll. Billions of dollars flowing through these markets, people putting real money behind their convictions. Not sentiment. Not vibes. Actual capital allocation.

This felt familiar. Not the prediction markets themselves, but the moment.

I remembered 2017 DeFi. You had this asset class, ERC20 tokens, with real liquidity and real users, but the infrastructure wasn’t there yet. No lending. No margin. No derivatives. Just spot trading. Then protocols like Maker, Aave, Compound, and Uniswap launched, and suddenly you could do more with your assets than just hold them. The infrastructure unlocked the asset class. Capital efficiency changed everything.

Prediction markets are at that exact moment. Billions flowing through. Real liquidity. Institutional interest forming. But stuck at 1x capital efficiency. No leverage. No margin. No sophisticated tooling.

Here’s what I know. Markets are discovery engines for truth. Prediction markets extend that to probability itself. Right now, $9B flows through these markets monthly at 1x capital efficiency. The infrastructure to unlock this asset class doesn’t exist.

Here’s the thing about being an entrepreneur: we’re good at rationalizing anything. We can construct elaborate theses about market size, competitors, revenue models.

But I’ve learned the narrative matters less than the commitment. What matters is you put something out there and refuse to give up.

So we built it. A margin trading layer for prediction markets. It’s live. A handful of traders are testing it. We’ve processed $12K in volume, earned $100 in fees, executed 2 liquidations with zero bad debt. The vault has $1.5K, all team capital.

This is it. Not because I know it’ll work. But because I finally stopped asking permission from voices that don’t matter. I’m not trying to prove I can be a founder again. I already am one.

The difference this time isn’t the product. It’s that I’m building from conviction, not compensation.

What’s next: we’re making this available to 100 traders soon and scaling the vault TVL to $100k (still team capital for now). If DeFi taught us anything, it’s that the infrastructure layer is where new asset classes mature. Where retail becomes institutional. Where $10B markets become $100B markets.

I still think about that photo Justice sent me, his son asleep. The weight is still there. The Lazerpay shadow hasn’t disappeared. The stakes are real.

But I’ve stopped trying to make the weight disappear. I’ve stopped asking permission from voices that don’t matter. I’ve stopped building to prove I can be a founder.

The weight doesn’t make you weak. How you choose to carry it makes you who you are.

Build the moonshot. The safe bet can wait.

“Peace to all those engaged in the struggle to fulfil their dreams.”

Ben Horowitz, The Hard Thing About Hard Things

We’re launching a beta of the first margin layer for prediction markets. If you’re a trader on Polymarket and want early access, DM me. If you’re a founder carrying your own weight and need someone to talk to, also DM me. We’re all in this together.