🪞Delusional Flameout? Or Legend in the Making?

Note To Self (April 2, 2025)

Dear 40-year-old Kaeya,

You’re 32 right now. It’s 9:15 PM. You’re sitting in Mummy and Pappa’s basement, getting ready to open DC HQ.

But before you make that move, I’ve forced you to do a few things—starting with this: write a rough intro to the memoir we plan to publish when we’re 42.

I’ve created three separate draft endings, printed them out, sealed them in an envelope, and hid them in your usual spot in the house.

You’re going to open them on January 7, 2033: Blue Ivy’s 21st B Day 🐝 (and your 40th).
You know which ending I expect you to be on track for.

Don’t disappoint me.

After 15 quarters of $0 revenue, multiple near deaths (both the company AND yours…), torching every last bridge you possibly could, and your existential rebirth in January 2025, one thing is certain:

You are not the same person who started this company in 2020.

We killed her.

This draft is an unvarnished audit of who you’ve become since—written now, before the VERDICT (if you turned out to be a delusional flameout or a legend) is in.

You’d better rack up some fat wins under your belt regardless, otherwise your story won’t matter at all.

Because your story isn’t just yours. It’s for the founder mid-reckoning. For the one on the edge, who needs something to crack open, something to hold onto, something to remind them how to get back up and keep going.

Let’s begin.

The Letter You Allowed To Nearly Kill You

You had just lived the peak.

At Beyonce’s Renaissance World Tour.

With a handmade poster in your arms that read:

She saw it.

Placed a camera man near me (I didn’t understand what was going on)

Until he zoomed in.

And just like that I was blasted on the larger than life jumbo-tron.

Then the camera man zoomed further.

So “Proud Female Founder” filled the screen for 70,000 fans in the stadium to see.

10 full seconds.

She held it.
Raised her arms.
The crowd erupted.

The—best—10—seconds—of—your—life—Kaeya.
Read that again.

And. It was captured on video.

Watch the gif. Pause. Let it breathe.

You were still glowing. Sitting at the airport.
Beaming.
Eating a quesadilla.
Laptop open—ready to squeeze in an hour of work before boarding.

And then—like a bullet—

October 2, 2023.
The shutdown letter from your first and biggest investors your inbox.

The air left your body.

You cried uncontrollably from that moment until 4 AM.

Woke up at 7 AM.
Started crying again.

Your sense of self shattered.

In your investors’ eyes, you were too volatile. Too emotional. Too erratic.

🪞 But not in yours.

Instead of folding, you made a decision.

A ruthless one.

You would not walk away politely.
You would defiantly refuse the severance offer.
You would not let them write the ending.
You would keep them in court side seats as you wrote it.

You would pivot the company, not just toward viability,
But toward truth.

You would become the thing the industry didn’t want to admit it needed:
Not an advocate. Not an enabler.

A watchdog.

You turned around. Walked back into the fire.
Stayed until you could name every ember.

You didn’t flinch.

You got to work.

You studied the wreckage.
Documented.
Observed.
Tracked regulatory tremors.

Not just collecting data.
Not just processing grief.

Metabolizing it into structure.

It wasn’t poetic license.
It was mathematical.

And it wasn’t written in hindsight.

It was written while you were still bleeding.
Mid-fire.
Mid-reckoning.

The Nerves On Fire Pivot

Your pivot from Swaypay to SwayID in December 2023 wasn’t just painful.
It felt like third-degree burns across your whole body.
Physical. Mental. Emotional.

Remember that.

Before you could rebuild the product, you had to rebuild yourself.
You had to rewire your nervous system before you could rewire the company.

This wasn’t just a pivot.
It was a root-canal of the soul.

You weren’t iterating on features.
You were reprogramming the internal logic of the entire machine—
Not just the product and sales motion, but the psychology, the worldview, the compass.

Swaypay—the product you had initially launched in 2022—was meant to democratize influencer marketing.
Let any shopper earn rewards for posting about their purchases.
A new authentic growth engine for brands.

It worked.
Until it didn’t.

What you thought was real advocacy turned out to be optimized deception.

Fueled by good intentions,
but at scale?

It gave rise to fakery.
Cringe content.
Manipulation.
And—most dangerously—regulatory risk.

Your Inhuman Level of Will to Crack the Code

Your pivot from Swaypay to SwayID in December 2023 was reactive.
To your own lived experiences since 2020 with Swaypay.
It was also prophetic.

In August 2024, the FTC dropped the hammer:

🚨 $43,792 fines per non-compliant post
🚨 AI-fueled UGC deception accelerating
🚨 Class action lawsuits exploding

The fantasy—that UGC and influencer marketing were low-risk, high-reward—
collapsed overnight.

But you had already spent three years inside the torture chamber.
You knew the contours of this minefield better than anyone.
You nearly died on that battlefield.

You saw it before the regulators did.
Before the agencies did.
Before anyone did.

You had traced every gear.
You had metabolized every flaw.

And now, you knew how to build the fail-safe.

You renamed the company: SwayID.
You repositioned the product: the compliance layer influencer marketing can’t survive without.

You didn’t raise a bridge round.
You didn’t beg your investors to return.

You built.

The Letters That Became Your Lifeline

While rebuilding, you started publishing essays.
Long ones. Introspective ones. Ruthless ones.

They weren’t press releases.
They were emotional ledger entries.
A public audit trail of your judgment calls—messy, real-time, unvarnished.

You thanked your mentors by name.
Even the ones who left.
Especially the ones who left.

Not out of politeness.
Out of presence.

To George—your first mentor, who spent two years until 2020 drilling into you that there’s no such thing as absolutes—you wrote:

To Nisha—your mirror for two years until 2023, who helped you reflect and evolve—you wrote:

There was no blame.
No bitterness.

Just clarity.
And the quiet gravity of mentors who held their gaze on you long enough to help you name every ghost—without flinching.

For nothing in return.

Remember, we hold unconditional positive regard for every teacher who stayed long enough to leave an imprint.

Don’t lose sight of that.

You Don’t Just Build Product.

You Build Safety.

You don’t sell fire alarms.
You sell the feeling of sleeping through the night, knowing your house won’t burn down.

You don’t push buttons.
You reroute nervous systems.

That difference clicked the first time your own nervous system caught on fire—in June 2023.

That’s when the real shift began.

Not in the company.
In you.

You stopped caring about selling software.
You felt compelled to build and sell a shield.

A shield made of everything you’d metabolized—
Every meltdown.
Every betrayal.
Every gut-punch you catalogued in real-time.
Every legal threat you felt in your throat before it hit your inbox.

And when your body finally began to calm down in March 2025?

So did your customers.

Because trust doesn’t start in the market.

It starts in the limbic system.

And you’ve had no choice but to rewire yours—
Publicly. Visibly. In real time.

You Don’t Pitch “Authenticity.”

You Pitch Survivability.

Because the truth is—your buyer personas aren’t CMOs or legal teams.

They’re people.
People on the verge of getting dragged.
People who know what’s coming—and don’t want to be the ones holding the bag.

Their Slack channels are blowing up.
Their influencer just posted a wildly deceptive (and illegal) TikTok that cracked a million views overnight.
Legal is pinging. Twitter’s circling.
And they’re already sweating, already spiraling, already calculating who they’ll need to throw under the bus to survive.

That’s who you built SwayID for.

You don’t give them a feature list.

You give them a transformation—
From exposed → to protected.

That’s not SaaS marketing.
That’s trauma-informed go-to-market architecture.

You Don’t Build Sales Collateral — You Transmute Scar Tissue.

You figured something out the hard way:

Most founders wait to tell the story after they’ve won.

You told it while you were bleeding.

That’s why your writing hits different.
Why your sales convert.
Why investors who walked away nearly two years ago still read every single thing you publish the moment it drops.

Because you never pretended to be above the collapse.

You metabolized it.
And you shared that process—openly, precisely, without shame.

You took every ghost.
Every betrayal.
Every moment you wanted to disappear—
And turned them into frameworks. Blueprints. Infrastructure.

You made the fire your raw material.

You turned survival into system.
Scar tissue into software.
Chaos into category.

Kaeya—it's impossible to look away from you.

Endings V1 to V3: Delusional Flameout or Legend?

If you’re 40 right now, go to the hiding place.
Open the envelope.
Read the three outlines for how this ends.

I hope you’re a legend.

I hope you’re just about ready to polish off the rest of your memoir.
Maybe a year or two out from publishing it.

I hope it breaks the internet.

But if you’re a delusional flameout…

Honestly?

That’s okay with me too.

Be gentle with yourself.

I know you left no stone unturned.

— You, age 32
April 2, 2025
Packing for DC HQ

PS: We’re emotionally open, but not softies. I designed this so you’d be forced to either fail or succeed—in public—for a reason. Chop chop.