What Do You Do When You've Made Everyone Else Rich But Yourself?

What do you do? Seriously, what do you do when you've spent years making other people money, and not a single one of them has turned around to help you?

I've been asking myself that question a lot lately.

I've issued pitch decks to people who turned around and built the concept themselves. I've had partners steal ideas straight out of our collaboration. I've had people come to me asking for concepts, promising me a percentage of the next fund they raised and I never saw a dime. One of those companies made it to a B round. Tens of millions of dollars. I watched it happen from the outside.

Those ones sting. But honestly, the ones that hurt the most are the friends.

That's where it gets complicated. Because once money gets involved, that's when you see who people really are. The mask comes off. The true character pops out. And sometimes, a lot of times in my experience, you don't like what you see.

The most recent situation hit different. This was someone who had already come to me multiple times before. His own concept had failed and I was the one who helped him build it from the ground up. I built the base. I wrote the code. I built everything that they continued off of. That foundation was mine. Then I had an accident. While I was down, he took my concept, my code, everything I had built and ran with it behind my back. He even used software I personally trained him how to use.

I lost the project for a moment. But worse than that, I lost a friend. Because I can't trust him anymore. And that's the part nobody talks about when they romanticize entrepreneurship. The loneliness of realizing the people closest to you are capable of that.

Here's what I've come to understand though, and this is where the real entrepreneurial mindset has to kick in. You don't get to fall apart over it. You can't. Getting angry, getting bitter, going to war immediately, that's not the move. You let it ride. You document everything. You know your rights. Any code you write is yours. Any concept you develop is yours. Unless you've signed those rights away, and a lot of entrepreneurs forget that because they're thinking creatively instead of legally, it belongs to you. There is recourse. Plenty of it. But timing is everything.

The world of entrepreneurship is, to put it plainly, a shitty place sometimes. People don't want to see you win because your winning makes them feel like they're losing. So instead of building their own lane, they'll take yours. They'll wear your success like it belongs to them.

But here's what I've also noticed. Most of them fail anyway. Almost every person who has taken from me, the concept thieves, the fund raisers who ghosted, the friend who built on my back, their versions didn't succeed. There's something that happens when you build on a stolen foundation. It doesn't hold.

I've learned from every single one of these situations. I'm still here. Still building. Still the one with the ideas. That doesn't go away just because someone tried to take it.

We'll see what happens next.