The season of plenty, the art of restraint
2025 feels like Thriller on repeat: everyone’s dancing, no one’s sleeping, and somewhere in the background, venture capital just hit another high note. AI startups have soaked up over half of global VC flows since January. Valuations moonwalk upward; due diligence quietly exits the room. Founders talk about “planetary intelligence,” though many still struggle to make payroll.
We’ve seen this choreography before. It starts with rhythm and ends with rigor mortis.
At Sustaain, we prefer a slower groove — one with bass, breath, and balance. We still believe in planetary intelligence too, but of the tangible kind: the one that pays invoices and fixes supply chains. In an era where funding behaves like fog, we prefer liquidity to illusion.
Cash, after all, keeps the beat.
1. Discipline over drama
The AI bubble is our era’s pop anthem: catchy, loud, and destined to date. Every cycle needs its chorus of overconfidence. But in business, as in music, silence often says more.
When your only amplifier is your own cash flow, you learn the discipline of timing and the economy of silence. You build fewer features, but you play them right. You listen harder. You find rhythm in constraint.
That’s where product-market fit lives: not in vision decks but in contracts signed. Every paying client is a note of truth. The market doesn’t care for crescendos. It rewards persistence. The founders who learn to breathe between beats — to manage burn, to delay gratification — are the ones who still stand when the lights come back on. Michael Jackson knew it: mastery is repetition without fatigue.
Capital efficiency is the new growth. And the next great exits won’t come from hyper-funded rockets but from well-oiled engines that keep their rhythm.
2. Precision in motion
Liquidity is not constraint; it’s choreography. It’s how you move through uncertainty without losing tempo.
We watch cash flow like Richter watched color — in layers, transparencies, and contradictions. His paintings are never just abstraction; they’re control disguised as chaos. That’s how we treat liquidity — not as static reserve but as living pigment.
We run operations like a cockpit: fuel, altitude, visibility.
R&D happens only when two conditions are met:
- It solves a client’s real pain,
- It aligns with the megatrend.
Otherwise, it waits its turn. It’s not timidity; it’s choreography again. Knowing when to step, when to glide, and when to stand still.
Because beyond the daily noise – be it the tariffs, elections, and ESG whiplash – the megatrends remain unchanged: traceability, accountability, and credible AI for sustainability. These are not headlines; they’re tectonics.
By staying aligned with those, we can improvise freely without losing structure. The painter Gerhard Richter once said,
“ I blur things to make everything equally important and equally unimportant. I blur things so that they do not look artistic or craftsmanlike but technological, smooth and perfect. I blur things to make all the parts a closer fit. Perhaps I also blur out the excess of unimportant information.”
We build similarly: balancing focus and ambiguity, precision and patience, the present invoice and the future law.
3. The virtue of scarcity
Schopenhauer believed that the world is driven by Will: an endless striving, often irrational, but undeniably alive. Bootstrapping is a daily proof of that will. When resources tighten, instinct sharpens. You learn what truly matters: which problems to solve, which ambitions to delay, which truths to face. Scarcity rewards transparency because we simply don’t have time for fake news. It’s uncomfortable, but it’s also deeply clarifying. And ironically, it makes a company more bankable.
Because investors know what philosophers do: that endurance outlasts enthusiasm. When the hype subsides and valuations deflate, fundamentals inflate. The startups worth funding will be those that proved they could live without it. Seven years from now, when today’s megafunds look for exits, the survivors will be those who built with constraint and conviction — companies that turned liquidity into art.
We stand in that liminal space: where cash flow meets culture, where sustainability is not a slogan but a system. We’re not building a myth; we’re building an organism. One that learns, breathes, and lasts.
Conclusion — In liquidity we trust
Every age gets the anthem it deserves.
Ours just happens to come with a synth beat and an AI chorus.
But when the music fades, those who stayed grounded in rhythm — who practiced restraint, precision, and will — will still be dancing.
Grow deliberately.
Spend consciously.
Play the long game.
Cash is king. Impact is queen. The rest is choreography.
References
Sustaain Blog — For a Grounded Intelligence: AI God vs. Machine Learning (2024).
Gerhard Richter — Text: Writings, Interviews & Letters 1961-2007, Thames & Hudson, ISBN 978-0500093467.
Arthur Schopenhauer — Le Monde comme volonté et représentation, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade n° 682, Gallimard (2025 édition).