I Was Inside the Last Hype Cycle. Here's How I Read This One.

Most people in AI would bury what I'm about to tell you. I'm going to lead with it.

I didn't watch the Web3 wave from the outside. I was in it. Close to the founders making the calls. Not the famous ones. Mostly smaller projects. That turns out to be the better seat for what I want to tell you.

I wasn't a commentator. I was the person founders called when the stakes were high and the path wasn't clear. I'm proud of that work. And I won't pretend I was a sceptic all along. I believed. I was good at it.

That's the reason to keep reading. Not the reason to stop.

Work on enough of these bets in a short space of time and you stop seeing projects. You start seeing the machine. You watch belief get manufactured. You watch a technology stop being a tool and turn into a religion. You watch good founders, clever people, make calls they'd never make with a clear head, because everyone around them is screaming that they move now or miss it forever.

I know that pressure from the inside. I'm not describing other people's mistakes.

Here's what the work teaches you. The hype isn't the signal. The hype is the weather. It moves the same way every time, whether the thing underneath is real or not. The founders who come through are the ones who can tell real ground from a good story.

Somewhere in 2024, I started noticing something. The projects landing on my desk were AI projects in Web3 clothes. I'd look closely, and every time, the AI was doing the work. The Web3 was just the wrapper. The value had already moved. Most of the room was still facing the other way, cheering the old thing.

That's what this piece is about. Not that I swapped one wave for another. I'd learned how to spot where the substance was moving. The expensive way. From the inside. So when it moved, I followed it instead of chasing the next wave.

That's the whole skill. It's the only one that counts in a hype cycle. And almost nobody has it, because almost nobody gets enough goes at learning it.

So here's what I'll tell you about AI, from someone who watched this kind of excitement get built up close.

The signal is real. AI isn't Web3. The thing underneath does what it says. That wasn't always true last time. But most of the AI adoption I'm watching is theatre. Same machine. New paint. Companies announcing AI to move a share price. Vendors selling what they can't deliver. Founders adopting it because the room is loud, not because they've worked out where it changes their numbers.

You tell the difference the way you always could. Ignore the announcement. Look at the consequence. Real adoption shows up where a wrong answer is expensive and the technology lowers that cost. Theatre shows up where the technology's main job is to get mentioned. If you can't find the place it changes a real decision with real stakes, it's paint.

Here's my prediction. Over the next two years, a big chunk of the loudest AI initiatives will quietly produce nothing. The ones launched for the narrative. Same pattern. Same reasons the loudest Web3 projects did. The real value will land somewhere quieter, with the people using it where the stakes are high and barely saying a word about it.

I've seen this film. That's why I think I know how it ends.

If you're making a high-consequence call on AI right now, and you want someone in the room who's watched this pattern run and isn't selling you the wave, that's the work I do now.

The domain changed. The job didn't.