The Life of Shaw, a Couch Developer ---
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Chapter 1. The Beginning I’m an ordinary open-source developer, buried under a mountain of debt so deep that I don’t even know if I owe $70,000 or $100,000. I take on any job I can find to keep working on my open-source framework. I search for projects, offer them my code, and scrape by just enough to pay rent.
You might imagine me as one of those developers in Palo Alto renting a $10,000/month apartment, wasting money because of poor financial education. But the reality? Far from it.
I live in a single room with my wife and three roommates. My desk is right next to the bed where I work, coding until 3 a.m. every night.
My wife is stressed out, and I’m hustling non-stop, even taking on gaming projects just to make ends meet. I want to keep building—I don’t want to get into trading. Then one day, a friend showed me
daos.fun, and I joined my first DAO.
The manager of that fund,
Skely, seemed like a funny guy, so I followed him.
In October,
truth_terminal blew up on the internet with its posts. A bot offered 1 ETH to anyone who could create a digital replica of Marc Andreessen. I replied, but nothing came of it. Then a random person on Twitter asked:
“Can you resurrect
DegenSpartan with AI?”
I confidently replied:
“I can!”
And just like that,
DegenSpartanAI and its token were born.
But soon, people accused me of dumping tokens and called me a scammer.
😔 I spent hours defending myself, especially to
Elijah, who had lost money trading
DegenSpartanAI. After two hours of explaining, he finally believed I was honest, and the issue was resolved.
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Chapter 2. The Demons My wife encouraged me to try spiritual practices, and for the first time in my life, I experimented with psychedelics (a decision I
strongly discourage 🚫). What followed was a bizarre, otherworldly experience.
When I recovered, I went out for lunch with
Baoskee, a local acquaintance introduced to me by
Skely. We chatted about my dream of AI helping humanity—not just in innovation, but also as a means to generate income, like a venture capital fund powered by AI.
Baoskee laughed and said:
“What about
ai16z?”
We laughed for five minutes straight.
😂 When I got home, I used an AI tool to generate a wife image and sent it to Baoskee.
“What do you think? Can we raise
420.69 SOL?”
He replied confidently:
“Of course!”
So I launched the DAO, and it sold out in
25 minutes! But in the chaos, I forgot to buy my own share.
Holy sh*t, holy sh*t, holy sh*t! 😱 The Life of Shaw, a Couch Developer (Part 2) ---
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Chapter 3. Karma Life works in mysterious ways.
😌 Remember
Elijah, the guy who accused me of being a scammer? Turns out, he bought into my DAO with
80 SOL, grabbing 16% of the allocation. Later, he reached out to tell me about it and even donated part of his tokens to me.
I was floored.
🤯 Soon after, I met other incredible people like
Skycat,
Seb, and
Tres, who joined my team. The project took off like a rocket:
$2 million, $20 million, then $250 million!
🚀 Riding the wave of success, I decided to reveal my open-source framework, which I had been working on for two years. I called it
Eliza.
People I’d never met before reached out, asking to launch a character token based on it. Initially, I said yes, but I soon regretted that decision.
“This is
my project, my creation. I have to protect it,” I thought.
I backed out of the collaboration and decided to launch the
real ELIZA token with my own team.
The reaction? Pure chaos. Twitter exploded with criticism.
😡 People called me greedy, a scammer, and worse. The project’s valuation started to tumble.
I tried to explain myself online, but every word seemed to backfire. The more I talked, the harder my projects fell. It felt like my life’s work was crumbling before my eyes.
FML. ---