Go-to-Market · AI · Bitcoin · Frontier Tech upshiftco.com · sideband.pub
Even the sharpest critics of extraction stop at monopoly power and regulatory capture. They ask how platforms become extractive, but not why extraction becomes the rational choice across every industry, every decade. Break up a monopoly and you get smaller companies running the same playbook. "This time is different" is the oldest delusion in financial history.
What works for products in Bitcoin works for partnerships: win on the basics first. Make Bitcoin's advantages the bonus, not the trade-off. Partners won't sacrifice reliability, product design, or economics for Bitcoin's native properties. They'll choose Bitcoin when it comes with better products, not instead of better products.
You can't close deals if buyers can't explain what you do. You can't position if you don't know who actually buys. The sequence: market clarity, positioning, sales motion. Break a link upstream and everything downstream fails.
At any given time, most people aren't ready to hear what you're saying. Not because they're stupid—because nothing in their world has broken yet. They're not evaluating alternatives because they don't need alternatives. People start looking when something in their world shifts. For Bitcoin, that shift is usually painful.
We can't win by being better at one thing (self-sovereignty) while being worse at everything else (speed, cost, UX, features). We have to be better at everything—or at minimum, comparable on the basics while being superior on self-sovereignty. The best protocol in the world accomplishes nothing if nobody uses it. We have to win commercially to win ideologically.
The company that helps prospects navigate internal politics and stakeholder complexity wins the deal. The one that just explains why Bitcoin is technically superior doesn't. Those wins accumulate into expertise. They reveal which objections actually matter and which are smoke screens. They expose what moves deals forward versus what sounds good in theory.
Personal update: I’m on to new adventures, including starting up with a talented team of developers, product designers, and cypherpunks (ask me who when you see me).
Had this been an actual emergency, you would have been directed to your nearest relay.
