Some people say that entrepreneurship is a rich folks' game. You become an entrepreneur and get into business because you have a safety net that will prevent you from failing (a wealthy family, most of the times). Even if your business fails, you've just burnt a few thousand dollars from your rich parents and can go back to living with them if things don't work out.

While I would like to think otherwise, I am faced with countless examples of this being the norm and an insufficient number of counterexamples disproving the claim. So I might as well go with this somewhat populist claim.

Heck, I'd even go as far as to say that everything is a rich folks' game. The rest of us have to fight to survive.

Let me give you another example.

I had a hard rock band in my late teens, going into university. We were broke and had all the time in the world to practice and move around. We found almost no opportunities to play and obviously no big bands wanted to play with us. We were nobodies. We could barely afford to rent a place to rehearse and that was it.

We also sucked big time, but not a lot of people knew that. We ended up playing three or four shows and disbanding after three years.

Fast forward to 2021. I co-founded a punk rock band called RES!

In two years, we played a bunch of shows - the first one being barely a month after creating the band -, made a name in the scene, published two albums on Spotify and even appeared on printed press and in a main show in mainstream TV (Joc de Cartes - Min 3:31 - our song "Kebab de proximitat").

When we created the band, I leveraged my social presence to create our instagram. I had a few thousand followers, so we gained a solid fanbase right away. That helped us to forge new friendships and eventually, we landed a few gigs and cross-promotion agreements with other bands.

When we decided to make merch, I paid for it all upfront because I could afford it. I also booked venues that had a cost and made the money back from tickets. Other people can't afford to do that, so I had an unfair advantage.

I even came up with the idea of paying bigger bands to bring them to Barcelona so we could be their openers. I knew I could put together a concert, book a venue, bring in a somewhat well-known band, sell tickets and make the money back. A few thousand euros? No problem for me now. But for most bands - especially in punk rock - that’s completely out of reach.

It felt like cheating. It is cheating.

Unfortunately, this applies to everything else in life. It’s like when you’re clearly winning in poker and brute-force everyone else out of the game.

In poker, aggressively going all-in repeatedly to force other players out of the game is often referred to as "bullying" or "steamrolling" the table. You're applying maximum pressure through aggressive stack leverage.

You're using your chip stack as a tool to exert pressure on opponents, forcing them to make difficult decisions.

And in the poker game of life, a lot of people have only one chip, while the rich have infinite chips.

Actually, to stick even closer to reality, 99.9% of people aren’t even invited to the game. Or they work their asses off just so the upper classes can keep playing this unfair poker match, where once in a while, an underdog is begrudgingly allowed to enter with a single chip, just enough to maintain the illusion of meritocracy and the culture of effort.

That being said, if you have money, you can buy your way to an advantage in nearly everything.

I don’t like it, but since I’m not going to change the rules, I might as well adapt, live with it, and try to right this wrong. One chip at a time.

Recommended content

• 🎙️ Really enjoyed two episodes of My First Million this week. One about Silicon Valley's darkest secrets and one about TikTok strategies (even though I don't have TikTok).
• 🎙️ Digging the Founders podcast more and more. This week's special on Charlie Munger and Warren Buffet is brilliant. I also enjoyed the one about Jerry Jones, the owner of the Dallas Cowboys.
• 📖 The new announcements from Microsoft & Amazon are pretty wild, regarding AI & quantum (1, 2 and 3).
• 📖 Five years ago, I wrote a piece on mental health: It's ok to be vulnerable. One of my most popular blog posts ever.
• 📖 Surprise? No surprise: Grok is censoring Musk & Trump scandals.
• 💰 Congrats to my friends at 4Founders for raising a new fund!

My projects

• 🚀 We're still hiring at MarsBased: PM, Web designer, React & CSS dev and a Tech Lead (no opening on the website yet). Reach out to me if you want to try!
• 🔥 We have announced the full speaker line-up for the Corporate Innovation Summit 2025 (March 4th, 7pm). Only 20 tickets available.
• 🎙️ Life on Mars: We interviewed my friend (and now client) David Arroyo, co-founder of Everesting.
• 🎙️ Foc a Terra: We discussed internships, entry-level jobs and how to progress in a remote environment (in Catalan).

Gratitude & asks

• Thanks Mariano Najles (CEO @ Las Muns) for allowing me to invest in your new round. Proud power user (eater) of Las Muns for well over ten years now.
• Thanks to everyone who signed up yesterday and congratulations to the winners of the raffle of the MWC / 4YFN tickets I gave away!
• Thanks to whoever recommended the Founders podcast to me! I can't recall who!