/Insights & Stories.

The show ends, the lights fade, and the CFO asks the only question that matters: What did we actually buy?

The hype cycle used to be a natural phenomenon - innovation triggered expectations, reality cut them down, adoption stabilized. That ecosystem is dead. Today, hype is not a reflection of technology’s trajectory but a commodity in itself - manufactured, scaled, and algorithmically distributed.

Markets trade in narratives. For builders, the difference between survival and roadkill is whether you can tell the signal from the noise before the herd does. Narrative forensics — the art of scraping signals, tracing origins, and filtering hype — is the OSINT survival skill of 2025.

Innovative products rarely stroll into stable markets. They smash into chaos, where categories don’t exist, users don’t yet know they want the thing, and investors eye every claim like it’s a Ponzi. The older the playbook, the faster it fails.

Influence used to be a front-page headline. Now it’s engineered by botnets, synthetic influencers, and corrupted training sets, amplified until saturation feels like reality.