What every fintech founder must understand about ownership — before their users find out the hard way. The assumption If you deposit assets on a crypto exchange, you own those assets. This belief underpinned a trillion-dollar industry. It was held by retail investors, institutional allocators, venture funds, and — if their product
Why "build the minimum thing and learn fast" is the sentence that sends deep tech founders into the wrong valley entirely. The Assumption Somewhere between 2011 and 2015, the startup world reached a consensus. Eric Ries had published The Lean Startup. Y Combinator was producing a generation of
Why simple answers feel true — and what the complex reality is actually costing us. The Assumption A widely circulated narrative — recently amplified by IMF data — goes roughly like this: China's state subsidies, undervalued currency, and export-led growth model flooded Western markets with artificially cheap goods. That price divergence
Why the Doctrine That Opened the Door to New Entrants Cannot Tell You What Is on the Other Side The Assumption The signal has rarely been clearer in three decades. Governments across NATO are spending on defense at a pace not seen since the Cold War. The EU has committed
Why 'you've proven the technology' is the sentence that kills more deep tech founders than any other. The Assumption You built something that works. In the lab, on the bench, in the demo room — it actually works. The investors in the front row have just seen
You've been told Germany is de-risking from China. The delegation that flew to Beijing tells a different story — and the gap between the two is not hypocrisy. It is structural. 1. The Assumption The official position, repeated across Brussels, Berlin, and a dozen policy documents since 2023, goes
