Why I just left my VP job to build in the chaos

Thursday was my last day at Blockstream.

Not because anything was wrong. Actually, everything was right. Great team, important mission, institutional adoption accelerating. The safest move would have been to stay.

But something's been haunting me for past year, and I couldn't ignore it anymore.

The Pattern I Can't Unsee

I keep watching the same movie play out everywhere:

Smart founders making bets based on 10% of the narrative.

Bitcoiners so deep in their bubble they miss the tsunami building in traditional finance.

Traditional finance so stuck in their frameworks they can't see the revolution happening on Bitcoin X.

Everyone's pretending they can see the whole picture from their one little window.

The reality is, we're living through the biggest information fracture in history.

Not just different opinions – completely different realities.

Bloomberg shows one movie. Reddit plays another. Policy makers are watching a third. And somehow we're supposed to make sense of it all by jumping between browser tabs and hoping we catch the right signals?

That's insane.

Why This, Why Now

I've lived through this before.

At Universal Music, I watched the entire industry miss what torrents meant because they were too busy fighting it to understand it.

They saw piracy. I saw proof that distribution was about to flip forever.

Got fired for saying file sharing would create more value than it destroyed. Then Spotify happened.

At Blockstream, I watched it again. Different industry, same blindness.

Banks seeing Bitcoin as a threat while missing that it's actually their evolutionary pressure. Media reporting on price while missing the infrastructure revolution.

Everyone watching their preferred movie and missing the meta-narrative.

The tools we use to understand the world are broken.

We're navigating information warfare with maps drawn in crayon.

Time to build better eyes.

What Happens Next

I'm going all-in on Perception.

Think of it as radar for how the narrative warfare the future of media will play out.

A way to see all the movies playing at once, spot the patterns that matter, and understand which narratives are about to flip before they show up in your timeline.

This isn't about aggregating news or sentiment analysis. It's about mapping how narratives form, fragment, and spread across our shattered media landscape. It's about seeing the second-order effects before they become first-order problems.

For the founders betting their companies on incomplete pictures. For the funds tired of being surprised by narrative shifts. For anyone who knows they're missing something but can't quite see what.

The Full Story

Like I mentioned at the start of this letter, I just sat down with Peter McCormack on his show and told this whole story for the first time.

We went deep on:

• Why living between Argentina's chaos and Norway's order taught me that reality has versions
• How banks will wrap Bitcoin like Spotify wrapped MP3s
• What happens when you realize the movie you're watching isn't the only one playing

The episode drops soon.

If you want to understand why I'm walking away from one of the most legendary companies in the Bitcoin industry to build in the chaos again, start there.

The Bottom Line

The monoculture is dead.

Consensus reality is fractured.

And the tools we're using to navigate this new world are relics from when everyone hung out on the same three platforms.

Perception is my bet that we can do better. That we can build tools worthy of the complexity we're facing. That intelligence beats ideology, and seeing clearly beats being right.

The building starts now.

- Fernando