The Dance Until Dawn is a series about what keeps founders going. After five years of building a company, with every intention of building for many more, I've watched many founders come and go. Along the way I've formed opinions about what it takes for a founder to last, and for the company to last with her. I see founder longevity as resting on a few core pillars. Each essay in this series takes one of them. Take what's useful.

There's a phrase in tech and startup land that goes "believe in something." People throw it around as a joke. To me, this is very very serious.

Starting a company is a bet. Your investors are betting on you, and you're betting on some thesis. Not every founder works this way, but most of us need to believe it will work, because otherwise there's no reason to get up and take on the day's problems. Money doesn't explain it. There are far easier ways to make money, and the founders who end up rich are the exception.

I'm not particularly religious, so I'll be careful here. But religion runs much of the world, and it's where many people turn in times of trouble, or when they can't explain what's happening to them. Founders spend a lot of time in that condition. This essay is about a plainer kind of faith: the belief that what you're doing is what you should be doing, before you have proof of it.

It's a hard moment to hold on to that. Scattered, global wars today, decisions made by a few people are landing on everyone else, and fear travels with them. AI is changing how we work and live, and it hands founders a question: whether their company will still be worth anything. Software is being commoditized. In some cases I think that's true. In others I think the impact will be slower than people expect, because our systems are slow to change. Nobody can tell you for certain which case you're in.

Crypto has been a trial of faith for me. Five years ago it was a much more positive and creative industry. Since then I've lived through the bull and bear cycles, the hacks and scams, the headlines, and the opinions of everyone outside the industry. Many founders have left and many companies have shut down. What I find saddest is the negativity among the people still building, aimed at each other.

There have been many points when I lost my good opinion of the space. My faith in Webacy is what kept me going through them.

I believe we deserve to feel safe in this world. The world around us is becoming more tokenized and onchain, and feeling safe means being able to trust what you're interacting with. That's what gets me up. It has never depended on crypto being liked.

That belief was tested from another direction when Webacy changed course. We started in consumer wallet safety. The market moved, along with who was actually using blockchain, and today we build risk intelligence for institutions. Plenty of people called it a pivot, and it felt like one. But the vision is the one I started with: people should be able to trust the (digital) world around them. The vision remains the same.

When the world changes around what you believe, you have to decide whether to keep believing or adapt and believe in a different way. I find that decision easier if I know what my faith is actually in. A product is a hypothesis, and the market is allowed to kill it. The reason you built it is a different matter.

A vision can be broad enough to survive anything. Every founder who can't admit a product is dead can say the vision lives on. If the belief has never cost you a product, a customer or a story you liked telling, it may be protecting you from reality.

Have I held on to things for too long? All the time. We get attached to what we build, and the more time we've spent on it, the harder it is to walk away. Everyone does this, partly because the opposite mistake is just as real: maybe you gave up too early and needed a little more time. You're always in a fog of war between the two. There's a very fine line between faith and denial, and you only learn which one it was from the outcome, in retrospect.

That decision gets harder because you're rarely making it alone in a friendly room. People tell you your idea won't work. Customers disagree with you. Your team has to believe along with you for as long as possible. People lose faith and leave, or you lose it and change course, or you stop believing in yourself.

I should know, because I've left too, but for a different reason. I spent a few years at Cirque du Soleil, and after a certain amount of time, leaving was the right decision for me. Stanford's two-year leave of absence gave me a deadline, which helped. But I had also reached the top of what that industry could offer me in the role I could play. I looked at the people around me, some twice my age, and knew I didn't want to do the same thing every day for the next twenty years. For them it was a beautiful life. I had other interests I really wanted to pursue.

Our lives are long, but our working years are short. Many people who are building in AI were working on something else a few years ago, felt called to the next wave of technology, and now have to believe every day that it's worth their time. The same question applies to anyone in any field. If you only get so many years to do something with your life, is this how you want to spend them?

Faith won't tell you whether you're right. The outcome will do that, in hindsight. What it gives you is a reason to work today that doesn't depend on the market, the headlines or anyone agreeing with you. Know what your faith is in, and expect everything built on top of it to change. If it's still how you want to spend your limited years, get back to work.

Believe in something.