Valeska is one of those projects that taught me more after it started working than while I was building it.
Most people know it as a crypto education company. That is only half the story. The original idea was never crypto. The original idea was education.
Where it actually started
When I was in school I became obsessed with one question. Why does college do such a poor job of preparing ambitious people to build things? I did not have a great answer, but I knew I wanted to spend my life trying to find one. That obsession became so strong that I even applied to Y Combinator with an idea around rethinking undergraduate education. I got rejected. Not surprising, looking back, I was a teenager with more conviction than credibility. But getting rejected did not make the idea disappear. It only made me realize I needed another way to fund it.
That is how Valeska started. The plan was simple: build enough cash flow to eventually build the thing I actually cared about. At the time, crypto education was growing rapidly. People wanted to learn, people were willing to pay, so we leaned into it. For the first time I had a business that was not just an experiment. People were buying. Revenue was growing. On paper, everything looked like progress.
The realization
But something felt off. Every week we became slightly better at running a crypto education business, and every week we became slightly further away from building the education company I actually wanted to exist. I had accidentally optimized for the wrong problem. The business was succeeding. The mission was not.
One evening I remember looking at the numbers and having a strange realization. If this business kept growing, I probably would not leave. I would hire people, expand, launch more products, maybe even raise money. I would become known as the crypto education guy. There was only one problem. I did not want to become the crypto education guy.
Walking away from what works
Walking away from something that is not working is difficult. Walking away from something that is working is much harder, because suddenly you are not giving up failure, you are giving up certainty. You are giving up revenue, momentum, and the version of your life that other people would probably tell you to keep pursuing. From the outside it looked irrational. From the inside it felt obvious. Every month I spent building the wrong thing was a month I was not spending on the thing I actually wanted to dedicate my life to.
Revenue is a metric, not a compass
That experience permanently changed how I think about businesses. Revenue is an incredible metric, but it is a terrible compass. It tells you whether people value what you have built. It does not tell you whether it is the thing you want to spend the next ten years building. Those are completely different questions, and I think founders confuse them more often than we admit, especially when we are young. The first business that makes money has a way of convincing you that it deserves your life. Sometimes it does. Sometimes it is simply preparing you for the thing you are actually meant to build.
Looking back, shutting down Valeska was not a business decision. It was a life decision. I was not choosing between two companies, I was choosing between two identities. One version of me would keep following whatever generated the most revenue. The other would keep following the question that refused to leave my head, even if it was slower, riskier, and much harder to explain. I chose the second one.
I still do not know where that decision will eventually lead, but I know this much. Whenever I look back at the projects I have built, I have never regretted making less money. I have only regretted spending time building something that did not matter to me. If I am going to spend the next twenty years building, I would rather chase a problem I cannot stop thinking about than an opportunity that is simply profitable. Money can tell you what is working. Only conviction can tell you what is worth building.