#009 : BETWEEN CAPITAL, CODE, AND THE CURRENCY OF PERSEVERANCE

For most of my career, I assumed that capital was the fodder for building. You raised money, you hired engineers, and then you built. Without funding, the game never even began.

That story has shaped startups for decades. But the more I build RiftX, the more I wonder if it is still true.

When I first picked up Replit, it was not part of a master plan. It was necessity. Pulse needed a fix and I had no one to hand it to. So I grabbed Replit as my axe and went to work. A few hours later I had a social monitoring app running. It was not elegant, but it solved the problem. After years of designing systems without ever writing code, it felt liberating to make something myself.

That first rush gave me confidence, but the next step was humbling. I tried to go bigger, to stitch together a backend and APIs, and it fell apart. Not because Replit was broken, but because I did not yet understand the foundations. The failure forced me to slow down. I began learning coding basics on the side while keeping one eye on the bigger vision for RiftX. It was clear that the platform had to grow into a serious full stack with AI built in and gamification layered on top. That level of work would take engineering talent. Which meant capital. So I made my peace with raising.

Then Agent V3 arrived. I was curious again. This time I had just enough literacy to see what was happening under the hood. Instead of rushing, I went systematically. Databases first. Break logic into smaller parts. Build each piece and then let the agent stitch them together. Suddenly things that felt impossible a few months before began to take shape.

What surprised me was not only the progress, but what it demanded of me. Building RiftX this way has taken patience and grit. Endless redos of functions. Managing context. Attempt after attempt to get the frontend right. Learning how to instruct the agent clearly. Learning to think in components so the architecture does not collapse under its own weight. Watching for technical debt. Checking that security holds at every turn.

You end up thinking like a team of specialists, except you are alone, and you are the generalist. It takes perseverance to instruct an AI in a way that gets your idea to hold together. Yes, the paradigm is empowering. But it is not easy, not with the tools we have today. Maybe in the future everyone has their own personal Jarvis. Today it takes grit of steel and boatloads of patience to build.

That is what I mean when I say patience has become a currency. Capital still matters, but what carries you across the early thresholds is persistence. The willingness to try again, to hold the vision through frustration, to keep pushing until the code begins to hold.

I see the same thread in other stories. Base44 began as a solo founder’s experiment, built without capital or a team. The early product was scrappy, half-finished, and imperfect, but it worked just enough to gather momentum. Day after day, the founder kept refining, fixing, and showing up. Patience stretched further than money would have at that stage. Eventually, the persistence turned into traction, traction turned into users, and users drew the attention of acquirers. What started as one person pushing alone became a company worth buying.

Base44 is not just a footnote. It is a signal. The gates that once required millions to open are now cracked, and in some cases wide open. The leverage has shifted.

So here I am, still building RiftX piece by piece. Some days it feels like progress. Other days it feels like walking into walls. But the walls are moving. The gates are lower. Capital is not gone from the equation, but it is no longer the first barrier to pass.

The question I keep circling back to is simple. If patience, grit, and persistence can take a founder this far, is capital still the gatekeeper? Or has the game already shifted to a world where the true entry ticket is drive?

Because if that is the case, the story of entrepreneurship is changing in front of us.

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