I know it's not fashionable to blame founders, but I genuinely don't understand this. What has he done to deserve "lots of respect" in the context of this conversation? TBC got to a difficult place because of their choices. Rugpulling users by creating a product nobody asked for, squandering investor money, cashing out by selling to a company antithetical to all the marketing copy TBC had produced to that point.

If you live by the rule that you only judge leaders by their actions and not by their words, TBC was a failure as soon as they abandoned Arc, and arguably when they couldn't provide a business case for Arc in the first place.