Leaving the Startup I Spent Most of My Adult Life Building

Retrospective and thoughts about leaving the startup.

A month ago, I resigned from the startup I spent most of my adult life building. I retained my shares, but I'm no longer involved in the company or its operations. Kien and I started building things together when I was 19. We met at a Ukrainian hackathon and eventually formed the company three and a half years ago.

From beliefs.social to midas.trade

The first product we launched publicly was beliefs.social, a platform for launching memecoins on Base.

The product was gaining traction, but slowly. Then, in a single day, we built a Twitter bot that allowed people to launch tokens directly from their feeds.

It brought a huge wave of attention and activity to the platform. After around two weeks, however, the hype faded, and we returned to roughly our previous level of traction.

That experience taught us how closely launchpads are tied to the narratives driving the market. They can grow extremely quickly while a narrative is active, but when attention shifts elsewhere, sustaining that growth becomes much harder.

We wanted to build something less dependent on short-lived narratives and more capable of generating consistent revenue, so we moved on to midas.trade, a memecoin trading platform that aggregates tokens from different launchpads on Base.

Taking the technically difficult route

Instead of depending entirely on third-party data providers, we indexed the blockchain ourselves.

We ran our own infrastructure, processed terabytes of data, and built our own transformations and analytics on top of it. This gave us the freedom to build indicators and features that would have been difficult or impossible to create using the same external providers as everyone else.

We deliberately took the technically difficult route.

I could call myself the CTO, but "technical co-founder" feels more honest. The largest engineering team I managed was four people, and for most of the journey, it was just two engineers.

Andrii and I built most of midas.trade with our four hands.

I'm proud of the indexer we built on top of a Base node, the amount of data we learned to process efficiently, and the UI we produced without ever having a dedicated designer.

Most of all, I'm proud that such a small team managed to build something considerably more technically complex than our size and resources should have allowed.

Why I left

The honest explanation is simple: I was tired.

I spent years pushing myself through everything, assuming I could always work harder and make it through the next problem.

Eventually, I realized that I had stopped listening to myself altogether.

I was burned out, and I needed room to explore who I am outside the company and what I want from the next part of my professional life.

One of the biggest things this experience taught me is that technical problems are rarely the only difficult part of building a company.

You can solve infrastructure problems. You can rewrite systems. You can ship another version of the product.

Alignment, communication, and working relationships are different. They require deliberate attention from the beginning. They shouldn't be treated as obstacles you simply force yourself through.

I'm not disappointed, and I'm not angry.

Every day I continued working was also a choice I made. I'm responsible for the choices that hurt me, just as I'm responsible for everything those years taught me.

The people who built it

I want to thank the people who built this with me.

Kien and I didn't always agree, but we were sincerely fighting for the same goal. He continues to put his best effort into the company.

Andrii is a genuinely exceptional engineer. He adapted to an extremely complex system, fought through that complexity, and became someone I could trust with any technical problem.

Asher kept the community together while the rest of us were building, sleeping, or unavailable. That work mattered more than people usually realize.

Startups are always harder than you estimate. Crypto makes this even more extreme because its narratives can shift faster than a serious product can be built.

Still, I don't regret taking the hard route.

What comes next

Right now, I'm taking some time to recover and doing a short DeFi engineering project involving solvers and delta-neutral inventory management.

After that, I genuinely don't know.

Maybe I'll stay in DeFi. Maybe I'll find an idea in consumer crypto that I can't stop thinking about. Maybe it will be something else entirely.

For the first time in years, I'm comfortable not knowing.

If any part of this story feels familiar, or if you're building something interesting and want to talk, reach out. I'd like to reconnect with old friends and meet new people.