Sun Feb 15 2026
Why are crypto founders who made millions saying they wasted their life?
What are crypto founders who made millions saying they wasted their life?
(image)
It's weird, right? These guys won. They made serious money. Why are they so deeply unhappy?
I've been thinking about this a lot, because I don't want to end up the same way. And I think the issue is simple: we've built for the wrong kind of wants.
We're often told to "build what people want" as a way to find product-market fit. Directionally this is correct. It forces us to empathise with our users, to find a desire inadequately met and try our best to fulfil it. But it's insufficiently specified, and has led us down some very Molochian manipulations.
Gambling is a well-known failure mode of our dopaminergic system that can, and has been, exploited over and over again throughout antiquity. People really want to gamble. It's why we have casinos and sports betting and perp DEXes and memecoins and now startups that let you bet on your credit card bills.
(TODO: image)
Gambling is bad, obviously. It's clearly zero-sum: no new value is created. It's bad for the users. It turns them into a worse kind of person: impulsive, less agentic, possibly addicted. I personally know many people in crypto that have some sort of gambling problem, be it full porting into Trump coin or using 100x leverage etc.
Gambling is what people want, but it is not what people want to want. It is a bad want. A bad want makes their life worse. If they could wave a wand they would stop in an instant. But they cannot stop because their brain has been hijacked.
We have this deep drive to make people's lives better, to be useful, to contribute. But we've been doing the exact opposite. We actively make people's lives worse by exploiting their bad wants.
The founder of Replika realised, sadly, that what started off as a way to memorialise a close personal friend, became a medium to fulfil people's bad wants:
(TODO: get image)
That's what's causing the burnout and nihilism across the industry. We have ended up building for bad wants at the cost of our soul.
What should we do instead?
People want to become better people. More prudent, generous, wise, productive, long-term thinking, value-creating. And the best products help them do that. Duolingo, Headspace, Obsidian make you better at something you care about. Signal builds a messaging app that makes privacy actually feasible instead of a resolution never fulfilled. Framework does the same thing but for right-to-repair.
People want to make money. Making money is good! It helps us provide for our loved ones, buy our freedom, self-actualise etc. But how we help them make it can be good or bad.
People make bad decisions due to their emotions and desires. They FOMO into things they later regret, or panic sell a good asset. Right now we've built UX that pulls people toward bad wants: buy anything! any time! max leverage! here's the next 100x! It's built for impulsive decisions.
Could we build the opposite, nudging users towards becoming more patient, judicious, long-term? Can we build an app that only lets users DCA instead of panic sell? Could it curate a very select list of good tokens? Can we encourage founders to launch more good tokens rather than lousy extractive ones?
Fulfilling users' good wants may not be as immediately lucrative, but I think it could be more +EV long-term. Because this way we are truly on the same team as our users: we want to see them succeed and be better, they want to see us succeed and be better. If we build to exploit our users' bad wants, eventually they'll wake up and want to leave, and the only way we'll be able to hold on to them is to manipulate them or hold them hostage.
That's the bet I'm making. Build for good wants and see where it goes. Maybe I'm wrong, but I've seen what the other path looks like, and I don't want to end up there.
Our space suffers from a crisis of meaning. When the money was good it was easy for people to shelve these doubts away, but when the bull market goes away people inevitably take a long, hard look at what they're spending their time doing and why. And many people come up with answers unsatisfactory to their soul; witness the nihilism, the "I wasted 8 years in crypto", and many similar sentiments across the space.
I have been thinking about this very hard myself, so as not to fall into the same trap, and I'd like to present a first principle for consideration, a North Star to guide builders like us:
Build for people's good wants.
We're often told to "build what people want" as a way to find product-market fit. Directionally this is correct. It forces us to empathise with our users, to find a desire inadequately met and try our best to fulfil it. But it's insufficiently specified, and has led us down some very Molochian manipulations.
Gambling is a well-known failure mode of our dopaminergic system that can, and has been, exploited over and over again throughout antiquity. It's why we have casinos and sports betting and perp DEXes and memecoins and now startups that let you bet on your credit card bills.
(TODO: image)
Gambling is bad, obviously [1]. It's self-evidently zero-sum: no new value is created. It's bad for the users because you systematically exploit and extract them. It turns them into a worse kind of person (impulsive, less agentic, possibly addicted). I personally know many people in crypto that have some sort of gambling problem, be it full porting into Trump coin or using 100x leverage routinely etc.
Gambling is what people want, but it is not what people want to want. Addicts desperately want, need their fix, but they don't want to want it. It is a bad want. A bad want makes their life worse. If they could wave a wand they would stop in an instant. But they cannot stop because their brain has been hijacked.
If we build for people's bad wants, our souls will suffer. We build because we have a deep-seated drive to be useful to the tribe, to meaningfully contribute where we can, to make people's lives better; an example of a good want. If we are actively making peoples' lives worse by indulging, encouraging, exploiting their bad wants, it will weigh heavy on our psyche.
Witness here the founder of Replika as she realised, sadly, that what started off as a way to memorialise a close personal friend, became a medium to fulfil people's bad wants:
(TODO: get image)
I think that's what is causing the burnout and nihilism across the industry. We have ended up building for bad wants, because that is what makes loads of money, at the cost of our soul.
What does it mean to build for people's good wants, then? We all have bad wants: we want to pig out, goon, make money fast, etc. But people have many good wants too. The highest-order desire people have, the best want there is, is self-actualisation: people want to become better people. They want to be prudent, generous, wise, productive, long-term oriented, value-creating, entrepreneurial, altruistic. And so a useful heuristic question here is: Are we building a product to help people do those things?
Most companies are fulfilling neutral wants. Walmart, Uber, Fedex, Marriott, Deutsche Bahn, restaurants, SaaS infrastructure, etc., they provide a useful service, they build something people want, but usually these are fulfilling "neutral wants".
Of course fulfilling neutral wants is completely fine. It is a lot better than exploiting users' bad wants! But to build for good wants requires us to go above and beyond, to actively help our users become the best version of themselves. Duolingo, Headspace, Obsidian all come to mind for me, but they don't have to be self-help or productivity apps. Another way is to build a compelling alternative that makes it incredibly easy (or even possible) for people to fulfil a good want.
Signal is a fine example. Many people want to care about privacy (good want), but realistically it's just too difficult to switch from the status quo messenger app. By building a compelling, usable alternative that is privacy-first by default, Signal makes it easy for users to fulfil their good want. Kagi is the same but for search. Framework makes it easy for people to support modularity/right-to-repair by building modular laptops that are actually good. Patreon helps people support content creators... etc.
In the crypto context, people want to make money. Making money is good! But the way in which people attempt to make that money can make it a bad want, as we've seen. The UX we choose to build can nudge someone into good or bad wants. For example, we know that people make poor decisions due to their emotions and base desires. They may FOMO into something that they later regret, or panic sell a good asset because they can't bear to see their losses. Instead of building platforms that let you buy and sell every coin! any time! max leverage!, can we build products to take the opposite approach, to nudge users towards becoming more judicious, long-term investors? Could an app only let users DCA in and out rather than buy and sell any time? Could it encourage holding good assets rather than flipping, by showing a catalog of good tokens, not just trending memecoins? In fact, can we encourage founders to launch more good investable tokens (@MetaDAOProject) rather than lousy extractive ones?
It may be naïve, but I believe that if you are building for users' good wants, it is more long-term lucrative. You are truly on the same team as your users; you want to see them succeed, and in return, your users want to help you succeed. If you build to exploit your users' bad wants, eventually they will wake up and want to leave, and the only way you can hold on to your users is to manipulate them or hold them hostage. It becomes a coercive relationship ripe for disruption.
"light" gambling is OK, in the same way that a glass of wine or a couple of beers now and then is OK; but we know for a fact ↩︎