Setting the Standard

Founder life can be lonely. Very few understand the level of the game you are trying to play, fewer understand what the wins actually feel like, and almost none understand the guilt that sits inside the failures. The part I find hardest to explain is that I spent most of my life building a standard for myself, not because I wanted to be different, but because there was no one around who could help me get there.

I never really had mentors. I had few opportunities to meet the people I admired, and the ones I did meet usually started by doubting me. It was only through action that I ever proved them wrong. Maybe that is part of carrying an ego from early on, the kind that can guide you but take from you just as easily. The ones I admired most I never got to meet at all. They are mostly long dead or shells of their former selves, and all that is left is their memory and the highlights of their legacy. So the standard got assembled the only way it could, in pieces, a virtue taken from one person, a discipline taken from another, none of them ever in a room with me, none of them able to tell me whether I was getting it right. When your goals are this ambitious and no one else is setting the benchmark for you, you end up responsible for setting it yourself, which means the standard is held and measured by you and no one else. It looks like confidence from the outside. From the inside it is mostly just alone.

Objectively I am in a better place than I have ever been, and still it doesn’t register. I have watched plenty of people reach a point like this and be perfectly content to stop there. By my own standard I haven’t earned anything yet, and that gap is the thing I actually live inside. People call me out for it, they tell me I don’t appreciate what I have, and from where they stand they are right, but it still feels like a drop in what I actually want to go and do.

None of it was ever really about the money, and I can’t fully explain why. I would burn it without thinking twice, because it’s immaterial to the end goal. Large sums would probably come anyway, as a byproduct of getting the real thing right, but money on its own was never going to be what fulfills me. If it was, there were a lot easier ways to get there. Some days, honestly, I wish it was, because at least then the goal would be legible to both me and the people I love.

For a long time I told myself it was circumstantial. Get into the right rooms, surround yourself with people playing the same game, and the loneliness resolves itself. So I spent years trying to get into those rooms, and when I finally got in I realized the stakes had changed but nothing underneath them had. The circumstances remain exactly the same. None of this is loneliness, not really. I am not short of people, I am surrounded, and still none of them are standing where I am standing. Getting into the top 10 percent you aspire to does not mean anyone there understands the 0.1 percent standard you hold yourself to, and if anything it has only gotten worse the deeper in I go. That is the part I keep failing to explain.

The people around me are not short on ambition, they are some of the most driven people I have ever met. What unsettles me is where all of it points. The pull is always toward the same things, vanity metrics, what investors think of you, whatever the room has decided matters. Right now it is AI, everyone running toward the same fire, nobody slowing down to ask whether it is warmth or the thing about to burn them. It is not that anyone has stopped trying, they are trying as hard as I am, they are just trying for the wrong things, and I feel that same pull constantly, I just refuse to make peace with it. Maybe the rooms never changed and what I kept waiting on was never going to come from them. Maybe it wasn’t them that changed, it was me.

So holding myself to my own standard has become more important, not less. The standard has to come from me, set for myself and not for anyone else, not measured against the people next to me and not by the markers everyone has agreed to care about. That unwillingness to compromise on it will either be my death or my savior, and I have chosen it knowing it could be either. It means not chasing trends for the sake of chasing trends. It means suppressing sides of yourself and accepting a deeper isolation, even from the people I worked so hard to finally reach.

Maybe that is just how it goes. The standard keeps shifting no matter what, always sitting a little further out than wherever you happen to be standing. What changes is whose hands it sits in. Hold it to the room and it moves every time the room does, every new round, every new set of peers, every company you build. Hold it to yourself and it stays constant, even as everything around it turns over. That constancy is the whole point, and the isolation is the cost of it. The debt was already paid before I could recognize it, but whether it was ever the right way to live, I still don’t know.

Check out this Podcast Episode!

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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