Winning
Spain just showed the world how to do it. I'm still figuring out if it's worth it.
Issue #09 · July 25th 2026
I write about the things that don’t change in a world that won’t stop changing.
I believe adding real value is what gives us purpose, keeps us happy and improves our lives.
Spain won the World Cup. And by the way, I am very happy about it. It has again made millions of my fellow Spaniards happy everywhere in the world and showed everybody that if you chase it hard enough, you can get it.
They won playing football. Not tactics designed to waste time, not simulation, not backroom arrangements or engineered draws. A generation of players taught to play the right way, who won because of it, not in spite of it.
That doesn’t always happen. Which is exactly why it matters when it does.
I’ve been sitting with that result and thinking about what it means outside of football. About venture building, about professional ethics, about the gap between how you are supposed to play and how most people actually play. I don’t have a clean answer.
That is the essay.
The temptation is real
In venture building, the pressure to oversell is constant and ambient. It is not the exclusive territory of bad founders. It is the water everyone swims in.
The deck that stretches the numbers just enough to clear the threshold. The pilot that gets described as a contract in the next investor call. The TAM slide that conveniently includes markets you will never realistically reach. The update that buries the bad news in the appendix, below the fold, after three slides of momentum metrics. None of this is lying in the way that gets you prosecuted. It is the daily management of the gap between what you have and what you need people to believe you have.
And it works. That is the uncomfortable part. It often works. The founders who tell the cleaner story raise more, hire faster, and close sooner than the ones who name every risk in the room. The market does not reliably punish optimistic framing. Sometimes it rewards it handsomely.
“The market does not reliably punish optimistic framing. Sometimes it rewards it handsomely.”
The spectrum
There is a spectrum here and pretending otherwise is its own kind of dishonesty.
On one end, there are founders who lie structurally and at scale. Who raise on fiction, build nothing, and leave employees, investors, and customers holding the damage. Theranos is the famous version. There are a thousand less famous versions that never make the news because the amounts are smaller and the victims have less access to journalists.
On the other end, there are founders so rigidly transparent that they cannot sell anything to anyone. Who name every risk before the investor has decided they like the opportunity. Who correct their own pitch deck in real time when a number feels slightly aggressive. That is its own kind of failure, and it is not virtue. It is an inability to hold the tension that selling requires.
Most people live somewhere in the middle, making small daily choices about how much to round up, how much to omit, how much to frame. The question is not whether you are on the spectrum. You are. The question is where, and whether you are honest with yourself about it.
What it actually costs
I tend toward honesty in ways that I know have affected my professional outcomes. Not perfectly. Not always. But as a default that I return to even when it costs me something.
I have been in rooms where naming a real risk killed a conversation that might have gone somewhere. I have watched competitors describe the same stage of product development in language so confident it made our honest framing sound like weakness. I have lost deals to people who were further along on the story than on the substance. That is not a complaint. It is an observation about how the game is actually played, as distinct from how it is described.
How comfortable you are with the gap between what you say and what is true is not purely a moral question. It is also a psychological one. Some people carry large inconsistencies without measurable cost to their sleep, their relationships, or their self-image. Others carry small ones badly. Knowing which one you are is more practically useful than any ethical framework. The framework tells you what you should do. Your psychology tells you what you will actually do, and at what price.
I know which one I am. I can take very little to bed. That shapes my choices in ways that are not always optimal by the metrics the market uses to keep score.
"The framework tells you what you should do. Your psychology tells you what you will actually do, and at what price."
The invariant
Spain won. And they won clean. That is not always how the tournament goes. Football has its share of results that were manufactured by other means. The World Cup is not the market, and the market is not football. The analogy has limits.
But there is something in that result worth sitting with. That playing the right way and winning are not always mutually exclusive. That sometimes the discipline you maintained when it would have been easier to cut a corner is the same discipline that made you good enough to win when it counted. That the thing you refused to compromise became the thing that compounded.
I don’t know if that is a rule. I have seen enough of the opposite to know it isn’t always true. I suspect it is more of a bet than a guarantee. A bet that playing straight compounds in ways that are real but slow, that the relationships built on honest ground last longer than the ones built on a good story, and that the version of yourself you don’t have to maintain is easier to sustain over a long career than the one you do.
I keep making that bet. Not because I am certain it pays off. Because the alternative costs me something I am not willing to spend.
Fernando Martín is Managing Director of NEXMO Movement Data Hub (UC3M), Venture Builder at MOVEN, and founder of Eccocar. He writes here about venture building, AI agent operations, and the European technology landscape.
The Invariance — by Fernando Martín In a constantly evolving world, only value is the invariance that holds everything together.
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