Moses K.Tapfuma

Development, Capital, Economics, Politics, Business, Engineering and Technology.

[Polymarket @Polymarket]

JUST IN: Zimbabwe moves to regulate its cryptocurrency industry.

[Millie Marconi @MillieMarconnni]

A college dropout who became Robert Greene's research assistant wrote a book in 2016 arguing that the single thing destroying most tech founders is not the market, not the competition, and not bad luck, but the same enemy Marcus Aurelius wrote about in his journal 1,800 years ago.

The book is called Ego is the Enemy and its written by Ryan Holiday.

He dropped out of UC Riverside at 19 to apprentice under Robert Greene, the author of The 48 Laws of Power. He spent years inside the rooms where Greene wrote, reading every old book Greene was citing, watching how a serious researcher actually worked.

By his mid-20s, he was writing his own books. By 29, he had published the one that quietly became required reading inside Silicon Valley, the NFL, and the U.S. military.

The book he wrote came out in 2016. It is built on a 2,000-year-old philosophy called Stoicism, written down by three men who could not have predicted how relevant they would still be in 2026.

Marcus Aurelius was a Roman emperor. He kept a private journal he never intended to publish, writing to himself every night about how to stop being arrogant, how to stop being reactive, how to stop letting power destroy his judgment.

Seneca was an advisor to emperors who ended up rich, famous, and eventually forced to kill himself when the politics turned against him. Epictetus was a Greek slave who became a philosopher and taught his students that almost everything that destroys a person comes from inside, not outside.

The three of them, separated by centuries, all arrived at the same conclusion. The enemy is not the world. The enemy is the part of you that wants the world to confirm how important you are.

Holiday took that conclusion and built a framework specifically for modern builders. Founders. Engineers. Writers. Athletes. Anyone trying to do good work in public.

He says we are always in one of three stages. Aspire. Success. Failure. We cycle between them constantly. And the ego attacks us differently inside each one.

Stage one is aspire.

This is the stage where you are working on something nobody is paying attention to yet. The repo with 12 stars. The startup with no users. The newsletter with 30 subscribers. The book draft sitting on your laptop.

The ego in this stage wants you to talk about the work instead of doing the work. It wants you to post about the launch instead of finishing the launch. It wants you to argue with people on X about your future plans instead of shipping the next commit.

The reason this is so dangerous is that talking about your work produces a small dose of the same satisfaction that finishing your work produces. Your brain cannot quite tell them apart. So you tweet about the project, you feel a little hit of completion, and the actual work gets quietly pushed to tomorrow.

Holiday's prescription is direct. Talk less. Do more. Confidence is silent. Ego is loud.

Stage two is success.

This is the stage where the work starts to land. The repo crosses 1,000 stars. The startup gets the seed round. The post goes viral. The founder finally gets the press coverage they have been chasing for years.

The ego in this stage wants you to believe you have arrived. It wants you to stop learning, stop listening, stop questioning your own assumptions, because you have proof now that you were right all along.

This is the stage Holiday spends the most time on, because this is the stage that destroys the most careers. The founders who survive Series A and die at Series C. The maintainers whose project explodes and then quietly rots because they stop responding to issues. The creators who get one viral hit and chase that exact format for the next five years until nobody is reading anymore.

The line he uses is brutal. Success is intoxicating, yet to sustain it requires sobriety. You have to keep treating yourself like a beginner long after the world has decided you are an expert.

Stage three is failure.

This is the stage every founder and every open-source maintainer eventually lands in. The project no one used. The startup that ran out of money. The launch that fell flat. The github repo that nobody starred. The book that did not sell.

The ego in this stage wants you to blame everyone except yourself. The market was wrong. The investors were stupid. The users did not get it. The competitor cheated. The timing was off.

Holiday calls this the most dangerous response to failure, because it prevents the only thing that can actually pull you out of it, which is honest learning. The Stoic move in failure is to look at the loss with cold clarity, separate what was your fault from what was bad luck, fix what was your fault, and keep walking.

Now here is the specific framework for tech founders and open-source builders. Holiday does not write it this way in the book, but it is the direct application of his three stages to the work most of you are doing.

In the aspire stage of an open-source project or a startup, your enemy is the dopamine of attention.

You will be tempted to share screenshots before the product works. You will be tempted to tweet your roadmap before you have shipped a single feature. You will be tempted to compare your star count to other repos every morning.

The Stoic move is to detach your identity from the metrics. The work is the work. The stars are a byproduct. If you stop checking the stars, the work will not get worse. If you start checking the stars every hour, the work will absolutely get worse. The Romans had a phrase for this. Memento mori. Remember you will die. The point is that no amount of validation is going to follow you out of the room you eventually die in. The work might. The applause will not.

In the success stage, your enemy is the belief that you have figured it out.

If your project explodes, the danger is not that you will fail. The danger is that you will stop being a student. You will stop reading the issues. You will stop talking to your users. You will start giving talks at conferences about your "philosophy" instead of shipping the next version.

The Stoic move is to behave exactly the same after the win as you did before it. Same hours. Same humility. Same willingness to be told you are wrong. Marcus Aurelius wrote to himself, while ruling the entire Roman Empire, that he was just one man among many men, one mortal among other mortals, and that he should never let the throne change how he treated the people who served him. He was emperor. He still wrote this down every night. That is the standard.

In the failure stage, your enemy is the story you tell yourself about why it was not your fault.

The startup that did not work. The launch that fell flat. The project that nobody starred. The instinct will be to blame the algorithm, the timing, the competitor, the funding climate, the platform, the audience. Some of those things will be partially true. The Stoic move is to ignore them anyway.

The Stoics taught that you only have two things in your life that are fully under your control. Your judgments and your actions. Everything else, including how your work is received, is outside the wall. If you spend your time arguing with what is outside the wall, you are wasting the only resource you can actually use, which is the next decision you make.

The deeper insight buried in all of this is the one most readers miss the first time through.

Ego is not the same as ambition. Ego is not the same as confidence. Ego is the specific failure mode where your sense of who you are becomes attached to outcomes you do not control.

The repo getting starred. The startup getting funded. The tweet going viral. The press calling. The job offer arriving. The moment your identity gets attached to any of these, you have handed the steering wheel of your life to a public that does not love you and that has the attention span of a goldfish.

The Stoic move is to take the wheel back.

Do the work because the work is worth doing. Ship the project because shipping is its own reward. Build the company because building is the only part you can actually control. The outcomes will be whatever they are. The applause will arrive or it will not. The press will cover you or it will move on.

None of it is yours. The work is yours.

Marcus Aurelius wrote it down in his journal almost 1,900 years ago, expecting nobody to read it.

The reason every serious founder you admire is quietly reading Ryan Holiday is that the most important sentence in modern startup advice is still a Roman emperor's private note to himself in the year 170.

The enemy is inside the gates. And most days, the enemy is wearing your own face.

[Timmy | Evolution @timmyisagod]

If you are a founder who is building, never raised money but have plans to raise , you should watch this video by @ycombinator Startup school , it teaches you everything from A-Z about how fund raising works
https://t.co/wu5kCUGIMI

[Moses K.Tapfuma @moses_kt]

https://t.co/vyaP53YKev

[Abhishek🌱 @Abhishekcur]

This article is literally wow.

i read it 2 years ago, and coming back to it today, it still feels new.

few tutorials teach computers in a way that permanently changes how you think. this is one of them.

If you've never built a VM before, you're missing one of the biggest "aha" moments in computer science.

[Justin Bgoni @BgoniJustin]

Excited to get approval to launch the SME Exchange. Very different from current exchanges and tailor made for entrepreneurs

[Busisa Moyo @BusisaMoyo]

So excited that this will be based in Bulawayo but serving the whole country. It’s a game changer for every discerning entrepreneur, business leader and investor. I hope we don’t respond with skepticism & ambivalence. The VFEX is going like Boeing

[Busisa Moyo @BusisaMoyo]

Laptop assembly company in Zimbabwe!

#BusinessAngelzZW

[Gartner @Gartner_inc]

Today’s enterprise cost structures are shaped by increasingly complex forces, making cost decisions more multidimensional than ever.

Discover the three core dimensions of modern cost optimization: https://t.co/mbwuQeQypu

#CostOptimization #CostManagement #Innovation

[Moses K.Tapfuma @moses_kt]

@zan_diva ++

[Moses K.Tapfuma @moses_kt]

Simple Zimbabwean bridge pricing

[David (TalkingCents) @talkcentss]

Either the Rand is worthless or someone is inflating costs.

A R6.9 million Rand bridge was handed over to the Mdantsane NU 3 community on the 27th May.

I see the problem, do you?

[Garry Tan @garrytan]

Everyone building AI agents is focusing on building the prefrontal cortex. Planning. Reasoning. Multi-step chains. There's value here. CEO-stuff.

But also, a reframe: there is value in building the cerebellum. It's offloading boring tasks into reflex so the complex thought can focus.

Your mortgage gets paid by a standing order, not a committee. The things that are not fun, not interesting, but have to be done? Done. Most agent frameworks will fail because they treat all cognition as high cognition.

The winners will nail the boring stuff first.

[Jostein Hauge @haugejostein]

The notion that developing countries can bypass manufacturing — and leap straight to services instead — ignores how every major economy actually developed.

[Microsoft 365 Developer @Microsoft365Dev]

✨ The future is multi‑agent, context‑aware, and enterprise‑ready

The Work IQ API public preview opens the door to smarter agents, assistants, and workflows - grounded in how work actually unfolds.

📘 Read more → https://t.co/AKpOSRBnVZ

#Copilot #Microsoft365

[Warp @warpdotdev]

Warp is now open-source.

[Vinícius Apolinário 🇧🇷🇺🇸 @vrapolinario]

🚀 AI is changing how IT/Ops teams run modern infrastructure, so we built a hands-on lab to help you try it today! Check out the AI for IT/Ops repo with scenarios and labs examples 👇

https://t.co/3rmiLbIWAr

Open-source. Practical. Built for IT/Ops.

#AzOps #Azure #ITPro #AI

[Audrey Chanakira  @AudriezWorld]

Thanks for the featured article @technewszw

https://t.co/F9TYR2Byy7

[Dr Edwin Masimba Moyo @EdwinMoyo13]

These are some of the Zimbos controlling global Financial institutions and influencing global opinion.

[Michael Levan👨🏻‍💻☕️ @TheNJDevOpsGuy]

This is what your Agent Identity will look like in a nutshell. It gets automatically created when you create an Agent in Foundry.

[Google for Startups @GoogleStartups]

Building powerful, scaled apps just got a lot simpler. At #GoogleCloudNext, we were shown just how seamless it is to develop a robust, multi-agent app using Google’s suite of developer tools. ⚙️

From low-code agent design to secure, scaled infrastructure, here’s a look at the easy path from concept to completion: