I’m honored to be mentoring 14 people across three global communities and also advising four stealth startups. Empowering the next generation of builders!

What the fuck does that even mean?

Did you hop on a Zoom call with someone once and tell them to “just believe in yourself”? Did you send a link to an outdated Medium post and call it career coaching? Or—my personal favorite—did you tell a junior engineer to “Google it” and then slap Mentorship Experience on your resume?

Everyone’s a mentor now. A coach. A keynote speaker. A guiding light. A North Star. A personal branding consultant. A Web3 philosopher.

Meanwhile, when actual work needs to get done, half these “mentors” are ghosting Slack, failing PR reviews, or posting motivational quotes about “grit” while someone else is cleaning up their Jenkins pipeline.

Let me break something to you gently:
You don’t have a brand. You have a job.

Somewhere along the way, the tech industry convinced itself that every human being is a startup. You’re not a person anymore—you’re a “personal brand,” a “founder of your own narrative,” a “content engine.” The obsession with branding yourself is turning people into walking LinkedIn carousels with zero self-awareness and even less actual value.

Here’s a fun fact: no one has ever asked me about my “brand.”
Not once.
No job interview. No client. No partner. No vendor.
Not one person has said, “Hey Peter, I was really moved by the synergy of your banner image and your title font. Tell me more.”

They ask what I’ve done. What I can fix. How I deal with hard problems. Not how I “position myself” as a “servant-leader technologist who thrives in ambiguity.”

How the fuck did we get here?

I miss when people just did things. Quietly. Without a 17-part LinkedIn post chronicling their “growth journey.” Without turning every pull request into a TED Talk. Without turning every coffee chat into a personal branding opportunity.