Fear and Loathing from the Trough

I grew up reading Warren Buffett's annual letters. The idea that you could find undervalued companies, understand their fundamentals, and build wealth through patient analysis felt like discovering a superpower.

Now I'm building a startup in 2025, and the entire venture capital industry has decided that Warren Buffett was just… wrong.

Every morning I wake up questioning everything I thought I knew about business. You've seen the headlines: AI companies raising hundreds of millions with zero revenue while execution-focused businesses like mine struggle for attention. The market has bifurcated into two completely different universes with entirely different physics governing capital allocation.

The atomic value swap; the core transaction between what customers pay and what they receive has become irrelevant in one of these universes. Companies can't explain what value they're delivering beyond promising to "make everything 10x more efficient," yet they command billion-dollar valuations. Meanwhile, other companies solve specific problems for specific customers who pay specific amounts of money, measure ROI, and renew because the value is obvious. This used to be the foundation of all business. I believe I'm solving specific problems for specific customers who pay specific amounts of money, measure ROI, and renew because the value is obvious.

I used to think this was the foundation of all business. Now I'm not so sure.

There are fundamentally two kinds of companies: top-down and bottom-up. Top-down companies are built by visionary founders with big ideas who pursue multiple product lines. These are the companies that promise to revolutionize entire industries through breakthrough technology. Bottom-up companies catch lightning in a bottle, one specific insight that expands beyond anyone's imagination. They find product-market fit and scale what works.

The market is currently obsessed with funding top-down visions. Every pitch deck promises transformation at unprecedented scale. VCs are betting on founders' ability to execute perfectly across impossible technical challenges, which historically has been the hardest type of company to build successfully.

Meanwhile, I'm here building bottom-up with crystalline product-market fit feeling like I'm from a bygone era.