A Space for Self Reflection

A couple of weeks ago, on a podcast, Marc Andreessen mentioned that he has no introspection and spends zero time on self-reflection, strictly focusing on moving forward without dwelling on the past at all.

As you would expect, this became somewhat controversial, with one camp fully agreeing with him based on his track record, and the other bringing up counterexamples like Marcus Aurelius and the Buddha. If you had asked me a couple of years ago, I would have been completely in the first camp, but over time I have started shifting toward some middle ground. Let me explain why.

One thing they never tell you when you start building a company is how much your company ends up being a reflection of its founding team. In the same way a child typically carries the strengths and flaws of its parents, a company carries those of its founders, and recognizing this early becomes pivotal, because it means you either grow in the areas you aren’t rounded out in, or you hire to compensate against them. Which I think especially in the age of AI becomes even more important. Given AI hands individuals even more leverage on every action they take, I would argue that both your strengths and your flaws get amplified and scaled right along with the company.

Which comes back to the take at hand. One could argue that continually taking action will reveal these flaws on its own, and that you will deal with each one as it becomes a real issue, so there is no real reason to stop and think about any of it beforehand. This has typically been how I have operated for the last three years, and it is not a bad approach. However, I think operating like this for long enough has shown me two fundamental issues. First, it requires a very high threshold of pain tolerance, which is not inherently a bad thing, but it also means there are scenarios where you keep repeating the same mistake over and over again, which comes right back to the flaws we talked about earlier. The second is that it feels like you are always playing catch up, which is something you can expect with startups, but it also means you are continually dealing with issues that have unnecessarily become bigger than they needed to be, when they could have been nipped through simple actions much earlier.

This is where, for me, starting to have some level of self-reflection has gone a long way, sort of in a similar way to how basketball players watch game tape so they can break down where to improve preemptively, the point being less about dwelling on the loss and more about catching the pattern before the next game.

That said, it is always a balance, and I always lean towards action first. Where I do agree with Marc fully is that there is no point in spending too much time reflecting on the past, because in the game of startups, where leverage is everything, there is no better way of getting leverage than taking action, since it gives you more information, a path forward, and some type of forward momentum. So the way I see it, ideally you get the lessons you need and move towards taking action as quickly as possible.

Of course, in all of this, there is also the moral argument one could make about stopping to think about the consequences of your actions before you take them. It is the thing people always reach for, and it has only gotten louder with AI in the picture, but it is not anything new, it has basically been a debate since the beginning of the species, and the reason it never really settles is that the people who move things forward are always the ones willing to act first and reckon later. That debate is quite literally the foundation of the Bhagavad Gita, where the whole opening is Arjun frozen on the battlefield, agonizing over the cost of the action in front of him before he takes it. What people forget is that the story never really resolves. The answer Krishna gives him, which is not to put down the bow but to act, to do what is his to do while holding it loosely enough not to be ruled by the outcome, sounds like a verdict, but whether it is the right one, who really knows, since the whole Gita is really one long questioning, a back and forth about how you are even supposed to act when you can already see what the action is going to cost.

Most do not have the same luxury as Arjun though, and the reality is that most of the greatest doers in history could only see the consequences after taking the action, not before. Ashoka built one of the ancient world’s largest empires the usual way, through conquest, right up until the war on Kalinga left over a hundred thousand dead, and it was only in the aftermath, looking at what he had ordered, that the weight of it landed and he gave up military conquest for good, trading what his own edicts called the sound of the war drum for the sound of dharma. More than two thousand years later, Oppenheimer reached for that same Gita as he watched the first bomb go off, the line about becoming death, the destroyer of worlds, and then carried what he had built for the rest of his days. Some can see this as a flaw of humans, but the way I see it, most of what we have ever built simply couldn’t happen if those responsible stopped to feel all of it first, for better or for worse.

Which is really all self-reflection is for, not dwelling on the past, but going back often enough to notice what your own actions keep showing you. For anyone who actually builds, too much of it was never the real danger anyway, because the pull back toward action is too strong, and most doers could not over-reflect if they tried, so the only amount that was ever truly wrong was none at all. History tends to repeat itself, circumstances change while human behaviour mostly stays the same, and the thing that tends to repeat is usually you. The flaws are the inheritance, and the little reflection you can manage was never going to spare you the weight of what you build, it only means the version of yourself you hand the company is one you have actually looked at, instead of one you keep running blind.

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In this episode of Building Blocks, we sit down with Emre Ertan, co-founder and co-CEO of Cenoa, a borderless super wallet revolutionizing how people in emerging markets access digital dollars.

Previously the CPO/CTO at Getir where he scaled the engineering team from 80 to 400 people, Emre shares his journey from a small town in Turkey to Silicon Valley, and how that experience shaped his vision for democratizing financial access globally.

He discusses Cenoa’s explosive growth in Nigeria (50K+ signups in first month), their innovative approach to simplifying blockchain technology for everyday users, and his perspectives on building compliant fintech products across 40+ markets.

Thanks for reading,

Daivik Goel