A contemporary but archetypal story is that of a technological founder, creating an amazing company that is profitable. And then they realize that they've done it and decide to invest in other companies or shitcoins and get rekt hard.

I am writing partially from own experience of course.

The fact that you understand technology does not mean much, it's not the technologically best that wins. Network effects beat technology most of the time and they are much harder to build than tech.

Over and over again, technologically inferior company (usually inferior in just one aspect that turns out but to be important) wins because they have done something else right.

Google-Gemini, Microsoft-Windows phone, Cardano, Solana, Betamax, ICQ vs email, ...

Of course it is easy to make fun of them in hindsight, it takes a lot of courage to have foresight that your brilliant tech idea is not interesting to anyone. Past performance does not guarantee future results.

Bitcoin is successful despite being "slow and expensive", Nostr is not very decentralized and not very smart way to do social media. But if someone knows how to use cryptocurrency, they probably know Bitcoin. If someone is on decentralized media, they are not on the overengineered ones, but on Nostr. Why? Because they have soul? I don't know.

For sure it's not about the tech...