You didn't see it coming

You Didn't See It Coming 24 Sep, 2025 It started with the hiring posts. A friend, call him Dev, began writing on LinkedIn and Twitter/X about his intentionally small team. How they moved faster, knew each other deeply, avoided the bureaucracy that kills startups. His posts got traction. The story felt authentic because, at the time, it was. What I knew, and his followers didn't, was simpler. Dev couldn't hire. His runway was tight, his equity offers weren't competitive, and the candidates he wanted kept choosing better-funded competitors. The small team wasn't a philosophy, it was a constraint. A year later, the layoff headlines started. Big tech cutting thousands, venture-backed startups imploding, bloated teams getting slashed. Suddenly, Dev's posts multiplied. Thoughtful threads about choosing culture over rapid growth, the wisdom of staying lean. He wrote about how he'd "always believed in sustainable team building and praised his foresight in avoiding the growth-at-all-costs trap. I watched this transformation with fascination. Dev had become the prophet of his own past. Source:Internet I started noticing it everywhere. The founder who couldn't afford an office now posts about remote-first culture. The one who couldn't hire senior engineers writes threads about growing talent from within. The startup that stayed in their home market because international expansion was too expensive now shares insights about deep local expertise over global sprawl. We've all become heroes of our carefully edited stories. Nobody wants to admit their big decisions were driven by fear, circumstance, or luck. We want to feel like we have agency, like we're smart enough to see around corners. Social media gives us the perfect platform to curate evidence of our judgment, to turn our anxious stumbling into confident striding. But something darker emerges. I think about founders reading Dev's small team philosophy, especially those facing similar hiring challenges. What do they learn? That Doubt is failure. Feeds become echo chambers where everyone is always right, and the messy reality of decision making is sanitized into personal brand moments. What do we need? Real guidance. That comes from honesty about constraints, the times when your "strategy" was actually just making the best of what you had. It demands admitting that many successful decisions weren't visionary choices but creative responses to circumstances beyond your control. But that kind of honesty doesn't get shared or saved on LinkedIn and X/Twitter. Still, I couldn't shake the feeling that something important was being lost in all this performed wisdom. Maybe the most valuable thing we could share wasn't evidence of our foresight, but honest accounts of how often we're all just figuring it out as we go. Maybe the real prophet in my feed was the person brave enough to admit they didn't see it coming. What I've been Learning: The $10 Trillion AI Revolution: Loved the "flops per knowledge worker" concept and how uncertainty can become competitive leverage. The idea of building investment thesis around what others see as risk resonated - turning ambiguity into advantage. The Stubborn Genius of James Dyson: Dyson's obsession with doing things differently rather than following trends was fascinating. His point that breakthrough success isn't quantum leaps but persistent iteration that just looks sudden from the outside is a great learning. Note: Written from my own experience, with Claude helping me structure my rambling thoughts into something readable