Partnerships

Most partnership frameworks assume two companies with known categories and comparable unit economics. Bitcoin and frontier tech rarely offer either.

So the usual sequence runs backwards. You don’t win a marquee partnership and then earn credibility; you build a product that already works for smaller customers on measurable terms, and the partnership becomes the formality that follows. Uptime numbers, transaction success rates, and real support response times close these deals, not vision decks.

The essays and notes here work through where the standard playbook breaks and what to do instead: when to pursue a partnership at all, how to find a champion who can point to concrete results, and why the strongest position is a product that doesn’t need the deal to survive.