Former Ethereum Foundation Member Abbas Khan States That Excellent Founders Understand Foundations Cannot Help Them Find Product-Market Fit
Former Ethereum Foundation Member Discusses Founders' Independence
Former Ethereum Foundation member Abbas Khan stated that excellent founders understand that foundations cannot help them find product-market fit, and success relies entirely on themselves.
Truly exceptional founders have a clear direction and needs, only making specific limited requests; others expect to launch and forward solutions to distribution problems and view this as a core plan. Foundations should provide basic support such as introducing liquidity, connecting investors, and entrepreneurial guidance, but cannot build products or determine the fate of teams.
Resources and expectations are shifting from reliance on foundations to founders executing independently, benefiting self-sufficient teams driven by events, while those who over-rely face pressure.
Source: Public Information
ABAB AI Insight
Abbas Khan previously worked on founder support at the Ethereum Foundation, experiencing multiple projects from early engagement to growth; after his departure, he publicly expressed his observations on founder responsibilities in open networks.
The viewpoint distinguishes between "specific requests" and "complete reliance" to clarify the boundaries of foundations, motivated by correcting the excessive expectations of support functions within the ecosystem; similar emphasis can be seen in other public chain foundations adjusting their positioning in project incubation.
Benchmarking self-sustaining projects like Aave and Ethena, as well as successful cases in the Solana ecosystem, current crypto entrepreneurship is transitioning from foundation-centric support to founder-led maturity.
This essentially represents a structural change: in permissionless open networks, success depends on execution rather than external empowerment, with the mechanism being that foundations can only provide marginal help, while core competitiveness still lies in the product and distribution itself.
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