There was a time when the world had a charmingly old-fashioned sequence for making a star.
First: you did the thing.
Then: people noticed.
Then: you became famous.
In sports, you won medals and then got sponsors.
In startups, you shipped products and then got customers.
In art, you painted masterpieces and then got galleries.
Nowadays? It just struck me during the Olympics, and after some reading about new massive AI startup rounds. We’ve inverted the causal chain.
Today you often become famous first, on social media, and only then do you win the medal, raise the round, or launch the product. Jutta Leerdam perhaps being the shiniest of examples, lately.
And the uncomfortable part for an old geezer like yours truly is this:
It’s not a glitch. It’s the new system.
In both elite sports and tech entrepreneurship, the modern career ladder increasingly looks like this:
0. Create attention
Convert attention into legitimacy
2. Use legitimacy to access resources
3. Use resources to create actual results
4. Retroactively rewrite the story as “inevitable”
This is why we now see:
0. Athletes becoming “brands” before they become champions
Founders becoming “thought leaders” before they have product-market fit
2. VCs investing in charisma, narrative, and distribution as much as code
3. Sponsors and partnerships being awarded to potential fame, not performance
We’ve moved from proof-of-work to proof-of-audience.
The athlete today is expected to be:
a media company
a lifestyle brand
a narrative engine
and, occasionally, well, an athlete
It’s not enough to win. You must also be seen winning... and ideally, you must be seen training, suffering, recovering, laughing, crying, branding, posting, and performing “authenticity” (whatever that means these days, right?).
The medal is still the medal ...but the attention is now the real currency.
Startups, of course, were always narrative-driven.
Let’s be honest, venture capital has always been part finance, part some kind of Westend theater act.
The pitch deck is basically a modern monologue, that Shakespeare would sometimes envy (Wework, Theranos, Segway!).
The demo day is a stage.
The founder is the lead actor.
But something has shifted.
A founder can now:
go viral
become “a builder”
become “a visionary”
become “the future of nn” or the “Spotify of nn” or the “Klarna of nn”
…without having a product that works, customers that pay, or even a business model that exists.
The launch is no longer the launch.
The announcement is the launch.
The thread is the launch.
The brand is the product.
And sometimes, honestly, that works!
because distribution is half the battle. Or as my friend Johan Siwers would put it: content is king, but distribution is King Kong.
We have entered a world where we reward the performance of competence more than competence itself.
Picasso wasn’t just a painter.
He was an event.
He didn’t merely produce art... he produced the idea of Picasso.
This is where modern founders and modern athletes feel oddly familiar:
they are not only producing results ...they are producing a myth about themselves.
The story becomes the object, as Gertrude Stein might have put it.
Warhol is the prophet of this entire era.
He understood that:
reproduction beats originality
fame beats depth
surface beats substance
branding beats craft
He also understood something even more important:
The medium is not a channel. It’s the message.
The algorithm is the new curator.
The timeline is the new gallery.
The viral moment is the new exhibition.
Neil Gaiman has always insisted (explicitly and implicitly) that stories are not decoration. Stories are infrastructure. They are how humans.
Because in an attention economy, the story is the mechanism by which resources move.
As Charlie Munger said - show me the incentives and I will tell you the result. When attention comes first, you get:
founders who optimize for applause instead of customers
athletes who optimize for followers instead of training
investors who optimize for narrative instead of fundamentals
sponsors who optimize for reach instead of excellence
And in the end, I’d argue that you get a culture that slowly forgets what excellence even looks like.
The internet can crown people early ...yes!
But reality is still undefeated.
Eventually, however, I need to remind you that the medal still has to be won, the product still has to ship, the customers still have to stay, the company still has to survive.
The story can get you to the starting line.
But the finish line still belongs to those who can do the work. Most of us, we’re just trying to build something real, in a world that rewards the trailer more than the movie...
Jutta Leerdam did, after all, win the gold medal in the end.
To the immense joy of her 6 million followers on Instagram.