Capital, Crypto, and Chaos: Why Discipline Matters More Than Hype
The past two years have been a stress test for startups, investors, and markets. Capital is still out there, crypto is flashing signals, and founders are being forced to learn the difference between energy and execution.
This week, let’s unpack three themes:
how venture money is really moving
why BTC.D and Total3 matter more than hype tweets
how not to run your startup into the ground.
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VC Money Is Still Flowing — But It’s Selective Now
Look at the Crunchbase chart:
• Early 2023 → funding hovered around $12–16B per quarter.
• Mid 2024 → jumped to $25B+ per quarter.
• Q1 2025 → exploded to a record $60.2B.
• Q2 2025 → cooled to $40.6B, but still nearly 3x 2023 levels.
On the surface, it looks like a new golden era. But here’s the real story: this money isn’t for everyone.
Founders who raised fat rounds in 2021–2022 on story and hype are now stuck with flat revenue curves, rising churn, and confused roadmaps.
They raised, they hired, they scaled burn — but they never solved the core problem of building something customers can’t stop using.
Contrast that with the startups pulling in fresh rounds today:
• Cohere ($500M) – enterprise-grade GenAI with paying customers in regulated industries.
• Cognition (~$500M) – building Devin, the AI engineer, with real adoption.
• NetBox Labs ($35M) – AI-powered infra automation with a strong open-source base.
• Felt ($15M) – AI mapping platform with practical geospatial use cases.
• Ryft ($8M) – data governance for the modern stack.
Notice the difference? These aren’t “we’ll figure it out later” stories. These are operators who are disciplined, focused, and proving value now.
Capital is still pouring in — but it’s flowing toward execution, not dreams.
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BTC.D and Total3: The Crypto Signals That Actually Matter
Forget the noise on Crypto Twitter. If you want to understand the market’s heartbeat, you need to watch two metrics:
• BTC Dominance (BTC.D): When dominance rises, investors are moving back into Bitcoin. That’s a risk-off signal — altcoin rallies stall. When it falls, money is rotating into smaller tokens — a sign of risk appetite and speculation returning.
• Total3: This is the market cap of all crypto except Bitcoin and Ethereum. It’s basically the “altcoin index.” If Total3 breaks out, it’s a signal that both retail and institutional players are pouring money beyond the two giants.
Together, BTC.D and Total3 tell you when to be cautious and when to lean into risk. They’re not perfect, but they’re miles better than listening to hype influencers screaming “next 100x gem.”
Everyone loves to chase the next altcoin pump, but the real signals aren’t in your Twitter feed — they’re in the charts.
Take a look at TOTAL3 (the market cap of all crypto except Bitcoin and Ethereum):
A while back, it printed a double top, which kicked off a brutal downtrend.
That decline ended with a falling wedge that eventually broke upward.
Then came the inverse head & shoulders — one of the strongest bullish reversal patterns in technical analysis. That breakout gave altcoins a real shot of momentum.
Now, we’re in a rising wedge. That’s a warning sign: momentum is slowing. Rising wedges often resolve downward, though not always.
This is where BTC Dominance (BTC.D) comes in. When BTC.D is rising, it usually means money is flowing back into Bitcoin — a risk-off move. When BTC.D falls while TOTAL3 rises, that’s the green light for altcoins.
So what’s the takeaway?
TOTAL3 shows that altcoins have staged a genuine recovery.
But the rising wedge means the market is at a decision point: either we break higher and altseason ignites, or we break lower and capital rushes back into Bitcoin.
Watch BTC.D alongside TOTAL3 — together, they tell you where risk appetite really is.
In short: ignore the noise, follow the dominance and the total cap. They’re the heartbeat of crypto.
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How Not to Destroy Your Startup by Winging It
Let’s be blunt: one of the fastest ways to kill your startup is by winging it.
Too many founders mistake energy for execution. They assume passion, speed, and endless pivots will somehow add up to traction. Spoiler: it doesn’t.
The founders who raised big a few years ago are proving the point — lots of money, lots of hires, lots of “exploration,” but now revenue is flat, churn is up, and the board is asking hard questions.
The antidote?
• Clarity of Direction: Define the problem you’re solving and stop chasing every shiny object.
• Metrics That Matter: Focus on customer adoption, retention, and actual revenue. Vanity metrics don’t pay salaries.
• Operational Discipline: A hackathon spirit is great for prototyping. It won’t build a business. Systems, processes, and repeatability will.
Vision inspires. Structure sustains. The startups that survive this cycle will be the ones that stop winging it.
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TL;DR
• Capital is pouring into AI and data — but only for disciplined operators, not hype merchants.
• BTC.D and Total3 are the true signals of crypto’s risk appetite. Watch them, not Twitter noise.
• Startups don’t die because they lack passion. They die because founders confuse chaos with execution.