Yulia Belov

Entrepreneur, product expert, decentralisation adept, data nerd.
Building Data layer for products that defy the norm.

[Yulia Belov @dioexul]

Linus is right. AI is just a tool, like compilers. AI gives individuals enormous autonomy. But the most important thing to transfer was never the code. It’s the principles of how people work together.

Everything we do is still people to people.

[Yulia Belov @dioexul]

@adamshuaib Exactly. Classic corporate conflict of interests. When you’re smarter than your boss, you see risks they can’t. Flag them and you’re labeled a “no-man.” So smart people have two exits: switch companies or start their own.

[Yulia Belov @dioexul]

@MartinGTobias Exactly. The words you use define how you see the world. “I choose to” makes you the actor. “I have to” makes you the audience. That’s not grammar. That’s agency.

[Yulia Belov @dioexul]

@SahilBloom Reminds of Vadim Zeland and his Reality Transurfing. Literally same idea came to different people in different societies.
I would also add the lucky experiment - when people are open to the new, they see more opportunities.

[Yulia Belov @dioexul]

Companies overpay for features they never use. Cloud, sales stack, database. All oversized. The winners aren’t the most powerful tools. They’re the ones customers actually use. Notion proved it. Ship what people need. Nothing more. Let them pay for value, not features.

[Yulia Belov @dioexul]

Companies burn millions on solutions that don’t fit. AWS stopped making sense for most startups long ago. Cloudflare, DigitalOcean, Hetzner are simpler and cheaper for what most actually need.
Same for databases and storage. The defaults are expensive. The alternatives are right there.

[Yulia Belov @dioexul]

@StephNass Nobody funds a deck. A deck is just an invitation to a conversation.

[Yulia Belov @dioexul]

@Jbm_dev The market has a missing layer. We see it. The future demands it. We know how to build it.

[Yulia Belov @dioexul]

Everyone ships what they’re capable of, not what the market demands. From the outside it reads as genius or incompetence. It’s neither. It’s capability ceiling. Same reason most hairdressers give you their cut, not your cut.
The skill gap is the product gap.

[Yulia Belov @dioexul]

@0xJeff I ran product for two L1 chains. Both had great vision. One founder chased hype and lost focus on what mattered. The other shipped part of the vision but underestimated external risks. Both were dead within a year of public launch.

[Yulia Belov @dioexul]

@saltzman_jason @OpenAI @RonnieChatterji This is the data point that matters. Software ate the world, and now AI is being eaten by the world right back. 95% of AI entrepreneurship is outside tech.

[Yulia Belov @dioexul]

@Alicia_Morgana1 @w3arew3 Exactly. AI agents need independence from each other. When they all come from the same source, convergence is unavoidable. You don’t get diversity of thought. You get an echo chamber with faster compute.

[Yulia Belov @dioexul]

AI agents just walked into a problem finance has known for decades: the principal-agent conflict.
The agent optimizes for its objective, not the company’s.
Auditors had this problem. Now AI does too. And it won’t flag when its interests diverge from the business.

[Yulia Belov @dioexul]

@oprydai Cultural difference and how societies operate in the same situations.

[Yulia Belov @dioexul]

@pmitu In crypto, people eventually learned to call scams scams. In AI nobody’s using that word yet. And some of these projects absolutely deserve it.

[Yulia Belov @dioexul]

In crypto, we eventually learned to call scams scams. Took a while, but we got there.
In AI? Nobody’s using that word yet. And some of these projects absolutely deserve it.

[Yulia Belov @dioexul]

@neuralunlock Founders with families and kids know exactly what their time costs. Every hour has a price tag. You get ruthlessly efficient. And you don’t start a company on a maybe. You start it because you’ve done the math and you know it works.

[Will Henry @ItsWillHenry]

Second-time Founders is my favourite gender :

1) no deck until someone asks three times

2) first hire is a lawyer

3) distribution for the product before the product exists

4) "we don't need a big round" and means it this time

5) replies to every customer email personally because they know what ignoring customers cost them last time

6) sleeps 8 hours and ships faster than everyone else

7) the only person in the room who isn't impressed by the term sheet

Second-time founders are the best breed of founders

[Yulia Belov @dioexul]

@pmarca "Any useful idea about the future should appear ridiculous." - Jim Dators

[Yulia Belov @dioexul]

I’ve been collecting opinions on how fundraising works and they fall into 3 groups:
1. It’s all about who you know
2. Warm intros are faster, but cold outreach works too
3. Cold outreach only. If a VC requires a warm intro, they’re not doing their job and won’t be useful beyond the check.