Building a company is challenging in any field. Every company's trajectory will have peaks and troughs, and every successful company will have great luck and opportunity as well as incredibly strenuous periods.

In Bitcoin, while you have the key advantage of building on or alongside a secure, reliable, and consistent protocol (vs. alt-protocols that may have significantly more downtime, security gaps or uncertainties, and broad malleability), you're also building in a field that is undercapitalized. There are fewer venture dollars available for Bitcoin startups than for crypto startups. (Note that we expect that this will change over time.)

While money seems to be deployed without study in the Web3/crypto/token field, the same is not true in Bitcoin. Founders have to prove more to access the same resources as their peers in the "crypto" field.

The strongest founders use these constraints to their advantage. They get to breakeven quicker by focusing on revenue and cash flow, rely on careful treasury management to extend runway, and go heads down on customer feedback - both qualitative and quantitative - to accelerate product-market fit, revenue growth, and the company's independence quicker than others who've had the luxury of depending on easy cash from venture investors.