The dichotomy of success: a founder's meditation on what we're actually building

We don't talk enough about the religion of Silicon Valley.

Not the explicit doctrine—Paul Graham's "Do Things That Don't Scale" essay or the Sequoia deck on storytelling. Those are just the hymns. I'm talking about the deep liturgy: the unquestioned assumption that success looks like 16-hour days, back-to-back funding rounds, exponential growth charts that bend upward like a knee taking a genuflection.

Someone—perhaps many someones, across decades and geographies—decided this was the shape of winning. And we believed them. Just over eight billion of us on this planet, each wired differently, energized by different things, creative under different conditions. Yet here we are, genuflecting to the same altar.

The tech world has built its entire value system around a paradox it rarely acknowledges: the very markers of success we chase are often the forces that hollow us out from the inside.

This isn't abstract philosophy. It's operational reality—playing out every day across three interconnected layers:

In the founder's journey, where freedom and constraint dance a cruel tango. In the investor's dilemma, where success breeds the very caution it should eliminate. And in the market's paradox, where abundance often achieves less than scarcity ever did.

Let's trace each dichotomy to its source. Not to solve it—some paradoxes can't be solved, only navigated. But to name it. Because what we can name, we can at least choose consciously.

THE FOUNDER’S DICHOTOMY: FREEDOM AND ITS FAVORITE TRAP

There's a moment every founder dreams about: the term sheet you've rehearsed accepting in your head. The validation. The Techcrunch headline. The ability to finally say "we raised" without that slight apologetic tone.

And then the freedom shows its price tag.

You raised $50 million to build something audacious. But your cap table now has six logos on it, four board seats, and seventeen competing opinions about your roadmap. You wanted freedom from financial anxiety. Instead, you got a different kind of constraint: the obligation to grow at a pace that justifies everyone else's assumptions about your future.

This is the founder's first dichotomy: the freedom that comes from success is also the trap it sets.

Consider the founder who achieves product-market fit—that mythical threshold where customers start pulling your product into existence rather than you pushing it onto them. It's intoxicating. Finally, validation that you weren't delusional. But validation is a narcotic. It whispers: you've figured it out. And in that whisper lives complacency.

The market doesn't care that you found something that works. It cares whether you can find the next thing that works before someone else does. Product-market fit is the finish line that immediately becomes the starting line. Success doesn't let you rest—it just redefines exhaustion.

Or take the founder who scales to a $500M valuation. Suddenly, you're not building value anymore—you're defending valuation. Every decision gets filtered through a new question: Will it be enough to get 2.5x valuation step up in the next round? Not: Is this right for our customers? Just: Will this hit the markup our next round requires?

The dichotomy deepens: you started a company to build something real, but success demands you spend more time managing perception than reality. The more you win, the less you can afford to be honest—with your board, your team, sometimes even yourself.

Who decided that was success?

THE INVESTOR’S DICHOTOMY: CONVICTION IN THE AGE OF CONSENSUS

If founders lose freedom to their cap tables, investors lose conviction to their track records.

Venture capital is allegedly the business of asymmetric bets—of seeing what others miss, of backing founders before the world believes. Yet the more successful a fund becomes, the harder it is to actually do that.

A fund hits a home run—let's say they backed a company early that became a category-defining giant. What happens next? Pattern recognition masquerading as insight. The partnership starts looking for "another one like that." Same founder archetype, same market motion, same growth metrics at the same stage.

Herd mentality doesn't come from stupidity. It comes from success. It comes from having something to lose.

Capital abundance creates a strange inversion: a scarcity of conviction. When everyone can write checks, differentiation comes from where you place your bets, not whether you place them. But consensus feels safe. FOMO feels rational. And soon, the most successful funds are all chasing the same handful of deals, bidding up valuations, convinced that because everyone else is interested, the risk must be mitigated.

This is the investor's dichotomy: venture capital is built on power laws—extreme concentration of returns in a tiny fraction of bets. But the more a fund wins, the more it fears variance. The more it defaults to the middle of the distribution, where conviction is replaced by committee, and boldness by benchmark hugging.

The irony is painful: the funds best positioned to take asymmetric risk are often the least willing to do so. Success doesn't breed courage. It breeds caution dressed up in the language of "discipline."

THE MARKET’S DICHOTOMY: WHEN ABUNDANCE SKIMS THE SURFACE

Let's zoom out. Beyond individual founders and funds, there's a broader systemic paradox at play—particularly visible in emerging markets, where capital moves in violent, cyclical waves.

Abundance vs. Allocation

In 2021 alone, Latin America saw nearly $16 billion in venture capital flood the region. Record-breaking numbers. Headlines everywhere. "LATAM's moment." "The next frontier."

Much of that capital wasn't strategic though. It was momentum capital—hot money chasing global liquidity, cheap rates, and the fear of missing the next Nubank. Tourist funds arrived fast. They left faster.

Success stories like Nubank, Mercado Libre, EBANX and Quinto Andar proved the region's potential—but their very success attracted capital that misunderstood the playbook that built them. Those companies succeeded despite the infrastructure, not because of it. They built their own payment rails, logistics networks, credit models, regulatory relationships. They were institution-builders, not just app launchers.

The capital that followed didn't get that memo. It priced LATAM startups as if the region's infrastructure—regulatory, credit, logistics, data, FX—were already Silicon Valley-grade. When rates rose and the cycle turned, the outflow was brutal. The underlying absorption capacity was never there.

Abundance in headlines rarely translates to thoughtful allocation. True progress demands patient capital, not momentum capital. And LATAM's story keeps repeating: capital arrives faster than the scaffolding to hold it.

The Strategic Capital Gap

LATAM needs more unicorns and breakout publicly traded companies—no question. But just as urgently, it needs a sustainable middle class of tech companies.

The boring infrastructure plays: B2B SaaS, credit analytics, health data platforms, logistics software and other “software for plumbers”. The connective tissue that makes the next generation of unicorns possible.

But that's not sexy. It doesn't generate headlines.

And in a world where success is defined by valuation milestones and exit multiples, the unglamorous work of building capacity gets defunded first.

You can't deploy $100M into a market that doesn't yet have the talent density, the SaaS ecosystem, the M&A appetite, or the late-stage LP base to recycle that capital intelligently. The region doesn't lack innovation—it lacks mechanisms to metabolize capital efficiently when it arrives in waves.

The Scarcity Beneath The Surface

Despite proven success, global strategic investors—Big Tech, financial institutions, major corporates—remain underexposed to LATAM.

Most M&A still comes from within the region or from private equity, not from global acquirers. The appetite for strategic capital—the kind that brings ecosystem leverage, distribution, technology partnerships, not just liquidity—remains painfully low.

LATAM is rich in opportunity but poor in conviction from global capital. The challenge isn't attracting money. It's attracting intentional money. Money that understands the 20-year game, not the 36-month flip.

Which leads to a more insidious problem: success brings visibility, but in volatile markets, visibility becomes vulnerability. The same global attention that inflated valuations in 2021 amplified the correction in 2022. LATAM tech became a beta play on global risk-on/risk-off cycles—a leveraged bet on U.S. interest rates—rather than a differentiated asset class with its own fundamentals.

For LATAM to mature, it needs to decouple its innovation cycle from Wall Street's interest rate cycle. That requires deeper, stickier capital. It requires institutions, not just funds. It requires building for decades, not quarters.

Resilience as a Cultural Advantage

But here's the brighter side—the part worth celebrating:

If volatility is the price of entry, resilience is the native edge.

LATAM founders are already fluent in navigating inflation, currency swings, regulatory chaos, and capital scarcity. These aren't hypotheticals—they're Tuesday.

The next generation is turning those constraints into competitive advantages. They're building with less. Moving faster with smaller teams. Thinking globally from day one—because local opportunities were never the ceiling.

The market's challenge is to catch up—to build capital systems as resilient as the founders they serve.

WHOSE MOUNTAIN ARE YOU CLIMBING?

So where does this leave us?

Founders trapped by the success they chased. Investors paralyzed by the returns they've already earned. Markets flooded with capital that arrives fast and departs faster, leaving little structural change in its wake.

The dichotomy of success in tech isn't that it's hard to achieve. It's that achievement itself reshapes the terrain in ways we don't anticipate—and often don't like.

The real question isn't How do I succeed?

It's Whose definition of success am I chasing?

Because maybe—just maybe—the 16-hour grind, the growth-at-all-costs mentality, the obsession with valuation over value, the FOMO-driven capital deployment... maybe that's not your religion. Maybe it never was.

Maybe success looks like building something sustainable instead of something fundable. Maybe it looks like a life where creativity comes from rest, not exhaustion. Maybe it's a fund that makes five contrarian bets instead of fifteen consensus ones. Maybe it's a market that values depth over hype, patience over speed.

We're all different. Over eight billion of us. Each energized by different things, thriving in different environments, motivated by different visions of what a well-lived life looks like.

So why are we all climbing the same mountain?

The dichotomy of success is this: the summit everyone points to might not be the one worth reaching. And the real courage—the real contrarianism—is admitting that out loud, turning around, and carving your own path.

Even if no one writes a headline about it.

 P.S. If this issue was valuable to you please share it with a founder who needs to hear it. Let’s build LATAM’s next tech leaders—together

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