@itsbasil

when the world around you is crumbling, pick up a hammer. i get the hesitation reading this from me — someone who burns hot, cares too much, has a lot to say. but you can’t be a critic if there’s nothing left to critique. you can’t spend your days fighting for something that can’t be won. that’s just reality. we spent years in this space. so much effort. only to get the rug pulled, over and over, from every angle, across many micro cycles and missed opportunities. yet we still showed up, operated with blinders on, and still believed. but look around. even i can read this room, and it’s quiet. the world is in a horrible spot domestically, internationally, economically. the industry is spiraling. people who’ve been here for years are leaving. everything is collapsing. so when things are crumbling, pick up a hammer. distract yourself from the chaos. but more importantly — rebuild. do whatever it takes to keep going. move forward. tunnel anew. maybe this wasn’t it. maybe things have changed and those growth opportunities don’t surface again. maybe this doesn’t turn out the way we had hoped and maybe that’s ok. it’s all part of the process. but when no one can get off the ground, the move is not to dunk on everything. the move is to build a new court, a new game, a new sneaker company. you can and will lose your mind reading every article, watching every talking head, getting lost in epstein files and iran and ice and bitcoin drama and ai chaos. it’s all happening at once and it’s only going to get weirder. not better, just weirder. and you can sit around complaining about what could have been, whose fault it is, how it could have succeeded but the reality is its changed. the inputs have changed significantly. we knew this volatility was coming. we knew truth would become obfuscated. we knew this but we existed in our little world trying to make things better anyway — building things people could enjoy, that could scale, that improved lives, that resisted censorship. we tried for a long time. but there’s nothing left to yap about. only things left to build.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

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