ceo, dad. building companies by day, home for bath time every night.
Singapore
Joined December 2014
- Tweets11.3K
- Following4.1K
- Followers62.8K
- Likes16.3K
Raising too much too early feels like winning at the time.
It's often the exact mechanism that strips founders of the outcome later, diluted past the point of meaningful upside, stuck running a company that’s not theirs anymore.
Watched too many friends end up on the exact treadmill this is warning about, bigger house because their peer group upgraded, nicer car because it felt like falling behind otherwise. None of it was really about the stuff. It was about not wanting to look like they'd fallen behind.
Funded doesn't mean focused. What separates the founders who compound from the ones who just stay busy is timing, knowing when to go all in versus when to sit tight and let the setup finish building itself. Most founders never learn patience because urgency feels more productive.
i see so many founders operating like broke people trying to make money.
chasing every opportunity.
taking random gigs.
doing everything themselves.
optimizing for quick cash instead of long-term leverage.
and the crazy part? these are funded founders from top accelerator programs.
i feel like accelerator quality has gone downhill.
being busy isn't a strategy. having funding isn't a strategy.
great founders think in systems, build leverage, and focus on what compounds.
Will Fan🕊 retweeted
BIG STEP FOR STABLECOIN ADOPTION IN THE US
🇺🇸 The US banking regulator has finalized its stablecoin rules under the GENIUS Act, effective Jan 18, 2027.
This will help more banks and financial institutions issue stablecoins under clear rules.
Nobody puts "be a good, helpful, honest person" on a business framework slide, but it's probably the single highest leverage thing you can actually control.
Will Fan🕊 retweeted
99.3% of the people telling you that “distribution is the only moat remaining” have never distributed anything except that opinion.
Will Fan🕊 retweeted
Be profitable and run your company with maximal agentic loops
You don’t need to sell more of your co anymore
$10M profit per year reinvested is like an annual Series A no dilution
The best startups do this now. No whinging about the Series A/B crunch.
You don’t need saving.
Series A and Series B are the hardest rounds for founders today.
Founders launch a vertical AI SaaS company. They reach $1M-$3M ARR in 2 years or $5M-$10M in 3-4 years.
They go out to market with their 1x-3x growth. Almost no interest from investors.
If it's not the right category or a deep, long-term conviction bet, most investors stay away.
Founders are stuck with large pref stacks and a market that doesn't value this growth. They are neither sustainable (at their current burn) nor venture-fundable (without growth).
The exit options (if available) don't leave much for the team. In most cases, founders are required to join the acquiring company (but they aren't interested).
I talk to many founders who have been misadvised, and they keep grinding without making progress.
The Series A or B that didn't happen won't magically happen in 1 year with a little more progress. If the market moves much faster than your company progresses, you will always be behind. If you are told today to hit some metrics and come back, the market will have already moved by the time you return.
The founders who last don't fall in love with what they built. They fall in love with the problem that made them build it in the first place.
Will Fan🕊 retweeted
Tokenizing a US $4.75 trillion education industry, especially across emerging markets, is a vision that is becoming more achievable with the rapid evolution of technology.
Decentralized educational protocol @opencampus_xyz is building a brighter future for students that covers learner AI agents built with @hellominds_, student loans that are funded and repaid on-chain, and seamless digital credentials that you can carry effortlessly with you everywhere you go.
More to come! 📚
Will Fan🕊 retweeted
Significant developments with .@opencampus_xyz
• $EDU buybacks funded by education revenue, verifiable onchain. TinyTap ($30M+ revenue)
• First fully onchain student loan with 6,600+ students, repaid with yield
• 50M academic on EDU
• AI learner agents with @hellominds_ – at Central Region, Singapore
AI can write your pitch, build your product faster, and analyze your funnel. It still can't replace the founder who genuinely enjoys the relationship behind the sale. That human layer is the moat.
People chase 6 month wins and forget the actual alpha in business is survival measured in decades. Health is the compounding asset nobody puts in the deck. You can't build for 20 years on a body that gives out at 45. The long game requires a body built for the long game.
There's never been a better time to bet on yourself instead of waiting for a term sheet. Tools, audiences, and distribution used to be locked behind capital. Now they're mostly just a decision away. Go prove the demand yourself, and the funding conversation changes entirely, if you even still need it.
Even founders who built their whole identity around going against the grain struggle with this one. I want my kid to think differently about status and grinding, but I was built inside the exact system I'm trying to protect him from.
Every time I consider the safer play, I think about what my parents actually risked, leaving everything behind with zero guarantee it would work out.
My biggest swing doesn't come close to that. Playing it safe now would be the real waste.
Immigrant parents spend their whole lives sacrificing for their children
As their kids, the burden we carry is making them proud and making that sacrifice worth it
When I told my parents I left investment banking for the startup world, they freaked out
“Why would you leave JPM for a no-name company?”
Hard to explain how much experience I gained at that no-name company
They really thought I’d lost it
“Do you have healthcare?”
“Do you have a 401k?”
“Are you paying yourselves?”
We had just raised $7M
I was confused by the questions, but they were just being sweet, so I went with it
When we later raised $10M, $20M, and then $40M, they honestly didn’t believe me
“Be so careful”
“Don’t do anything wrong with the money”
“God bless you”
They didn’t understand startups or venture funding
They understood faith, family, hard work and protecting their kids
I understand their questions a lot more now
A lot of what drives me is making their sacrifice worth it
Nobody warns you how much clarity having a family actually gives you. Every decision gets a filter it didn't have before. The stuff that used to feel important quietly sorts itself, and what's left is obvious in a way it never was before.
Will Fan🕊 retweeted
On-chain student lending works, and there is now a full cycle to prove it
$1M was deployed as student loans and repaid by borrowers, with yield returned to everyone who put up the capital.
Nobody had taken student lending all the way through on-chain before.
We are happy about this one, most of all because of who it reached.
6,600 students across 118 schools and universities in the Philippines and Indonesia, where just over half had never borrowed formally in their lives and 93% came from lower-income households, so there was no credit history for a bank to score.
An independent study by 60 Decibels went back and asked them how it went:
- 9 in 10 said their quality of life improved
- over 90% said they could take their education further
- 97% said they had no good alternative anywhere else
With the cycle closed, the same capital can go straight back out to the next group of students, and the people who funded it have every reason to do it again.
A student in Manila got funded, someone on the other side of the world put up the capital, and both could watch it happen in real time.
Student lending now has a completed on-chain track record rather than a projection, which is what makes the next one easier to fund and faster for the students waiting on it.
Funded by Open Campus with @animocabrands and NewCampus, deployed through ErudiFi on @pencilfinance_ ↴
animocabrands.com/announceme…
Rediscovered my love for basketball after a decade and a half away, and the timing feels almost prophetic given where AI is taking everything else. Sports don't get optimized away. They're one of the few places left where the effort is real, the outcome is real, and so is the person guarding you.
The market's finally pricing in what players have known for a while. Nike stopped innovating and just started remarketing the archive. Meanwhile boutiques and Chinese sportswear brands have been out-designing and out-pricing them for actual performance gear.
BREAKING: After falling -80% from its record high, Nike, $NKE, will be removed from the S&P 100 at the end of this month, ending a near 18-year run in the index.
The stock has now erased -$230 billion in market cap since its all time high.
A collapse for the history books.
