I just finished Jimmy Soni’s The Founders, the story of PayPal, built from years of interviews with the people who were actually in the room. And I could not stop seeing my own company in it. So this episode is a reflection — the real PayPal story held up next to Sourceful’s own messy history, told straight, as a mirror.

It starts with a gadget.

A gadget in my hand

I owned a PalmPilot around the year 2000, when I was a cadet. I loved it. I felt impossibly modern. But here is the honest truth I can only admit twenty-five years later: I did not actually need it. I used it for notes and a calendar, and a plain paper notebook was better at every one of those things. My email I did on my computer, like everybody else. The PalmPilot was a gadget. It scratched a deep technical itch. It did not solve a real, valuable problem. I wanted it far more than I needed it.

And some part of me knew it, even then. The notebook was better. I just spent the next twenty-five years, and an entire company, learning that lesson again the hard way.

Because around that same time, a small company called Confinity was about to make the exact same mistake — with a few hundred million dollars riding on it.

A pivot is not a decision

Confinity’s flashy idea was beaming money between two PalmPilots over infrared. A beautiful demo. They even hired Scotty from Star Trek to launch it. And almost nobody used it. The thing that actually worked was a throwaway feature in the corner of the website: sending money by email. eBay sellers found it on their own and started pasting “pay me with PayPal” into their auctions.

Nobody decided that. There was no meeting where someone said “we pivot from PalmPilots to email.” The afterthought ate the main product because the afterthought was the only thing connected to anything real. We tell startup stories as a chain of brave decisions. Read honestly, they look much less like decisions and much more like this:

> A pivot is not a decision. It is the system showing you where you actually have a grip.

Contrarian about the destination, empirical about the route

Peter Thiel’s famous question — what important truth do very few people agree with you on? — is necessary but nowhere near enough. The man who wrote the most-quoted line about contrarian vision ran a company that survived by abandoning its vision for whatever users were already doing. A secret is a reason to exist. It is not yet a product.

So the whole job is holding two opposite things at once: be contrarian about the destination, and empirical about the route. And the hardest part of being empirical is that the value is so often hiding in the place you find most annoying. PayPal thought it was building a Western Union; it turned out people were sending ten dollars for Beanie Babies on eBay. Max Levchin was tempted to block those low-value users off the system. The friction is not noise. The friction is the signal.

Rådighet: the variable underneath

There is a Swedish word that English keeps failing to translate: rådighet. Control is too weak, authority too legal, leverage too financial. It means the right and the real ability to dispose over a thing — to reach it, command it, change it. You have rådighet over what your hand actually touches, not over what you merely have an opinion about.

A company can only stand where its control surface meets the physics. PayPal almost died of fraud, and the thing that saved it was the one capability it could fully command: real-time fraud defense, a system they named Igor after a fraudster they could never catch. PayPal’s moat was rådighet over the one loop that could not wait.

Sourceful learned the same lesson the expensive way, asset by asset. We were believers in DePIN — paying a crowd in tokens to build infrastructure. (For the record: we never burned tokens, only rewards and the promise of future ones, and I’m proud we never confused the token for the product the way most crypto projects do.) The Nordics looked at a wallet in their energy app and said no. So we built a genuinely good consumer energy product — and ran straight into a wall, because to charge for it we’d have to beat Tibber and Greenely, who already bundle it for free. Better product loses to better position, every time. Then V2X, which failed for the cleanest reason in the whole story: we had no rådighet over the charger. A perfect lever, bolted to nothing.

Most pivots aren’t pivots

Here’s the word I want to retire from the startup vocabulary, or at least handle with care: pivot. We use it for everything — new pricing, new segment, new channel. But most of that is not a pivot. It’s just running a company. The real job of an early startup is a loop: build, measure, learn, adjust — with your sights locked on the same destination the whole time. A real pivot is when the product itself becomes a fundamentally different thing, and those are far rarer than the war stories suggest. The token was never our product. Letting it go was the loop, not a pivot.

And you can usually only tell the difference in hindsight. “Pivot” is a word we paste on afterward, when we sit down to write the clean story — which is the exact same thing the PayPal myth does when it turns a chaotic, near-death stumble into a tidy chain of brave decisions.

The clean story is written by the survivors

So where does it land? PayPal didn’t become crypto or a bank. It became the boring rail, went public in the middle of three simultaneous near-death threats, and got bought by the very host that had spent years trying to kill it. The grand vision survived by becoming infrastructure nobody could route around. Sourceful is now going where we finally own the asset and command the flow — commercial batteries and the financial engineering around them. I genuinely don’t know yet if it works. It’s the first place the lever is connected to something, which is a weaker claim than it sounds. It might be the same mistake in a more expensive suit.

The honest question is the one I can’t fully answer: how do I know which of my dead ends were wrong, and which were just early? Musk’s X.com vision wasn’t wrong — he’s rebuilding it now, twenty-five years later. Neither Thiel nor Levchin nor Musk could tell, at the time, with the outcome still unknown. The clean story is always written afterward, by the survivors, who mistake their survival for foresight.

A company is the long search for rådighet — for the one place your hand actually reaches. What looks, from the outside, like a string of pivots is really just that search: one stubborn destination, tried against one locked door after another, in the dark, before anyone knows how it ends.

That’s the search. There isn’t another one.

Listen to the full episode on Coordinated with Fredrik.

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