Why I won't join your startup

I've been working on my own startup pursuing building an empire for 7 years now.

I'm lean. I've spent over 10.000 hours pursuing my dreams on a budget under 30k a year.

I might not seem 'successful' yet, but I love the process too. And with every half-baked product, lessons are learned.

Nothing I've built has truly taken off. But I don't want to something to take off without truly believing in the finished product. Many ideas aren't as good in reality.

I've taken a build-first-then-validate approach, which is frowned upon, but it has made me an incredible builder.

Sometimes I've lost my mental stability and sometimes I've lost the ability to work on my startup for financial reasons, but I've never lost my drive to pursue what I believe in.

Humans are unreliable and hard to work with. I'd rather be part of an independent network of agents building the future,

Because of my strong technical opinion, I don't feel happy in someone elses tech-stack.

Because of my strong ethical stance, I don't feel comfortable in someone elses vision.

Where most startups require at least 500k and an entire team, I'm convinced to be able to build any product for less than 50k.

But only if I want it: passion doesn't occur when alignment is off.

What I want instead

When you build a startup usually you need a big amount of trust in each other and if this breaks, your startup often fails. You also need to align on vision, which is artificial and ends up being demotivating more often than not. With a reciprocal system maybe we can avoid it, and build a very independent one-man company that offers value to countless parties without requiring any trust.

Traditional Startup Model:

• Typically relies on a team of co-founders
• Requires high levels of trust and alignment
• Vulnerable to interpersonal conflicts and trust issues

My Proposed Model:

• Based on one-person companies
• Relies on reciprocal systems and contracts instead of personal trust
• Allows for more independent operation

How it could work:

• Each "startup" is essentially a one-person company
• These companies form a network of reciprocal contracts
• Each company provides specific services or value to others in the network
• The network as a whole creates a robust ecosystem of services

Potential benefits:

• Reduced interpersonal risk
• Greater individual autonomy
• Flexibility to pivot or change direction independently
• Ability to scale through partnerships rather than hiring
• Potential for more diverse and resilient business ecosystems

The main reason this doesn't exist yet, in my view, is because when we rely on something we cannot trust a 100% we often end up having to migrate away from it and exchange it for another service (or build it ourselves). This is a time-consuming effort and very human-involved.

This is exactly the thing ActionSchema is about to solve. By having a search engine for APIs and the tools to quickly replace an api with another, integrations become flexible and issues and bugs can be healed using AI workers.

In a time were we can trust systems more and more, maybe we don't need to rely as much on co-founders.