Why are crypto founders who made millions saying they wasted their life?
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.
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 she had built became a medium to fulfil people's bad wants:
This is what is causing the burnout and nihilism across the industry. We have ended up building for bad wants at the cost of our soul. Worse yet, the more you win, the more you lose! The more successful your bad wants product gets, the more people you're harming. The better you do, the worse you feel.
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.
My bet is to build for good wants and see where it goes. I may be wrong, but I've seen what the other path looks like, and I don't want to end up there.