There is a growing voice inside me that acts and talks like an entrepreneur but isn’t one. He lives and operates in a realm where he is friends with fellow entrepreneurs like Chamath, David Sacks, Kunal Shah (just to name a few). He feeds off Shark Tank India and Silicon Valley to supplement his entertainment diet.

He dunks, valuates, re-evaluates public and private markets, government bonds, crypto narratives and everything that can be valued from an armchair. He reads Stratechery, popular VC Substacks, free Economist articles and listens to The All In With Besties, My First Million, Time Ferris show and hopes that satiates the ever-growing needs of his thought leader personality.

He can’t disassociate from anything that has capitalistic manifestations, even remotely. He thinks of building a cosy SaaS startup by using Stripe for International payments, RazorPay for domestic payments and using its wide catalogued products of running the company (all the accounting stuff), AWS for scaling the servers and databases, New Relic for monitoring the systems, Mix Panel for marketing and tracking, Figma for designing and making mockups and other gazillion building blocks for that non-tangible business idea that has been conceived just a few hours ago which in turn will be destroyed in a few minutes from now.

This Wannabe entrepreneur is a state of mind. It’s like being in a state machine where the inputs are just keeping in those self reinforcing loops. It’s completely normal for this Wannabe to argue about every aspect of macroeconomics and capitalist machines.

The only way the Wannabe is going to get out from the self-loop is taking some advice from someone like Ashneer Grover(not kidding). “Chalo ab dhande ki baat” is the call to action that knocks you out of that cosy fictitious world. Yeah, you need some cynics like Antonio Garcia Martinez to spill the beans over that world. Otherwise, you continue living in a world where you’re friends with every VC, entrepreneur in SV and BLR. And when that world starts to fall apart, there is a blood bath waiting out for you.