Not because I enjoy what is happening. A lot of it is disappointing, exhausting, and strangely hollow. But I cannot ignore what moments like this reveal.
They reveal people.
They reveal what was real and what was only being held together by easier conditions. Who actually believes in something and who only liked the image of belief. Who stays grounded and who drifts the second things get uncomfortable.
As a founder, you spend a lot of time building in uncertainty. You live with pressure, risk, and the gap between what you can see and what the world can see today. That process makes you less impressed by polish without depth.
You start paying attention to different things.
Who follows through.
Who stays honest when the truth is inconvenient.
Who keeps their word under pressure.
Who can sit in ambiguity without becoming weak, fake, or reactive.
That is where my respect goes now.
Because a lot of masks are coming off. There is so much noise. So much branding. So much performance. And underneath it, not always a lot of substance.
Dysfunction has a way of forcing the issue. It strips things down. It exposes weakness. It reveals character.
I have watched people I respected fold the moment conditions got hard. Not because they lacked talent. Because they lacked weight.
And when standards fall, the people who still carry them become impossible to miss.
That does something to me. It makes me more serious about what I am building, who I want around me, and what kind of person I want to be when things are not easy.
I do not want to build something that only holds up in good conditions. I do not want to confuse polish for substance or momentum for meaning.
I want to build something real. Something with weight. Something that can hold up when people are being tested.
So yes, there is dysfunction around us. Some days it is discouraging. But it is also clarifying.
Because in a world that keeps lowering the bar, the people who still hold one become impossible to ignore.
Randall Yang Co-Founder & CEO, BuildLogIQ