When New Tech Drops Overnight
When I woke up this morning, I intended to write a blog post about why Halloween is the best holiday to bring New Yorkers together for community-building on the block. But then I logged into Slack and saw my colleagues posting about some of the experiments they had tried to run with the new ChatGPT search, which just launched yesterday.
When I opened up Twitter, I saw a similar thread of sentiments:
"This is the Google killer."
"This new tool changes everything."
"It will completely reinvent the way you use the Internet."
"Goodbye, old, hello new. If you're not keeping up, you're already behind."
By 8:05 a.m. I'd run a bunch of little chatlog tests on my own, searched myself successfully on ChatGPT search, and added the browser extension to my Chrome instance to replace Google search as my default on my own machine.
Damn. That happened fast.
That's when I decided to scrap my old post idea and write about this instead.
If you woke up this morning and also felt some version of, "Well shit. Here we go again..." trust me when i say that you aren't alone. So let's take a deep breath and dive in together.
How to Avoid Falling Into the Trap of "I Can't Keep Up"
It's stressful to wake up and see paradigm-shifting commentary like this flooding around you. That these seemingly earth-shattering changes are happening on a monthly, if not weekly, basis, makes it feel overwhelming, if not impossible, to parse..
I'm a bit of an impulsive extremist, so whenever something like this happens, I have to immediately fight against the urge to do one of two things:
Fight or Flight?
My Two Polarizing Instincts When Confronted with Something New
Scrap everything old that I already had in motion and dive into the new thing with gusto, quickly onboard my entire team, and immediately start exploring partnership opportunities to try to get ahead of the game. This is the new world order now, there is no going back.
Reject the new thing entirely, throw in the towel and vow to permanently turn off all technology and completely shift course to start imagining myself living out an entirely agrarian, disconnected lifestyle somewhere upstate while awaiting the inevitable robot apocalypse.
This, in a nutshell, captures the “fight or flight” mentality that new tech often triggers. But, as I’ve learned, the reality of what I actually do always lands somewhere in between.
In my 15-year career working in and around technology startups and venture-backed business, I've been on the receiving end of more than my fair share of "game-changing! nothing like it before!" technology emails. Unfortunately for me, I'm very easily persuaded by visionary builders and entrepreneurs who look at the world from a "decades-long" view of what will happen next. Which meant, when I worked in VC, there was a period in 2018 where I honestly thought that companies would never need to go public through traditional banks again, that no new social media apps could ever cut through the noise, and that Ethereum was going to be the game over technology for blockchain.
Of course none of that exactly turned out to be true.
What I’m learning is–after the initial hype–there’s a much longer, more challenging phase of habit-building and strategic integration. This is the phase that unfolds over months or even years. While a small group of early adopters might capitalize on new opportunities overnight, unless you're among that top 5% (which I’m not), there’s no sense in chasing every new trend.
Instead, I’ve shifted my focus to embracing the inevitability of change. While I can’t control what’s changing, I can control my response to it. Rather than feeling existential dread of deep "fear of missing out" anxiety around every new push or trend, I approach change from a place of playfulness and curiosity—a mindset I credit to my time in crypto.
Lessons Learned from Crypto Communities
This isn’t my first time feeling the FOMO or battling impostor syndrome in a new tech space. My three-year deep dive into working closely with crypto communities taught me that even when I felt behind, there was value in showing up and leaning into curiosity.
I'll be the first to admit that the FOMO ("fear of missing out") was a big part of what first drew me deeply into this ecosystem. While I'd been around crypto-native builders for many years, it wasn't until 2021, a year after my first baby was born, that I felt an itchiness to get a peek under the hood firsthand.
But because I hadn't been building firsthand in crypto for years, as it felt most of others had, I entered the space with a lot of impostor syndrome. I felt like a non-technical, non-crypto-native outsider. I honestly believed that unless I somehow developed the expertise to debate the finer points of blockchain consensus or governance on a whitepaper, that I wasn’t "smart enough" to belong in the space.
This mindset is a trap. As soon as you start believing the story you tell yourself that you aren’t "smart enough" or "brave enough" to do something, you adopt a fixed mindset toward it. And let me tell you, that really gets in the way for any future growth potential.
When I first told myself I was ready to dig into learning more about crypto, I started joining Discord channels and scrolling Twitter 24/7 like the best of them. My computer pinged me all day and all night with notifications of new crypto tokens, new communities, new business, new conference, new technologies. I added every single one to a massive to do reading list.
Should I be in Denver or Amsterdam for this developer conference? Better not risk missing out. Should I pre-empt this airdrop or that one? Hedge my bets and go for both. Had I heard of this DAO yet? Read the latest on on-chain governance? Attended that demo day? Not yet, but I’d get to it. Obviously.
In those early days, I often found myself wondering:
The Existential Dread of Playing "Catch-Up" In Crypto
How am I already feeling behind when I thought I was just getting ahead?"
"Was all that work on the last thing a waste of time?"
"How can I even tell which tools and trends are legitimate versus peripheral?"
"How will I ever find the time to keep learning something new, again?"
What I didn't realize was, in my intense commitment to figure stuff out, what was actually happening on the side is that I was leveling up. It happened slowly, and then all at once.
You see, as I was learning, I was also working. I helped venture capital firms coordinate questions and community among builders in their networks. I helped deeply technical teams use plain English to talk about the work they do. And then I helped hybrid businesses (like crypto-native foundations) conceptualize strategies that leaned upon best practices from both traditional and nontraditional case studies.
As it turned out, I didn’t need to suddenly acquire some deep scientific expertise to succeed in this space. I just needed to understand how to apply my existing strengths in a new context.
It took me a long time to shake off that fixed mindset, but I’m glad I did. Now I know I can do it again—no matter what industry comes next.
Finding Calm in the Chaos of New Technology
This morning when I saw that first slack message, "ChatGPT search is the Google killer," I did feel that familiar pang of, "I'm falling behind" hit me by surprise. But by now, I’m so familiar with that feeling—and I’ve learned what usually comes next—that it’s not as scary or unsettling as it once was.
That's why what I did instead was... pour myself a second cup of coffee, test out a bit of ChatGPT Search for myself, and write this blog post.
So, is this latest and greatest innovation the world-changing, "game over" technology? Who knows? But in the meantime why not just play around with it a bit on your own to find out what you think? I promise that the rest of the world isn't as far ahead as it might appear at first glance. After all, we’re all still in the same first 24-hour release window here. Just wait until what's in store for next week...
