I've been thinking a lot about what is actually happening in these markets since getting to NY.
Some new things have clicked and become really undeniable with being here, it has just been fas...
How do you spot a fake in culture, in tech, and in markets of all kinds?
A great place to start is corporate simpdom and the symptoms of central control.
Before the hea...
Tech Bros suck.
There is just no other way around it. Sorry to be so blunt.
But seriously, it seems that for the past 10-20 years, give or take, complaining about ...
TLDR; probably not. You can go home now.
But, for those still here, let’s see what the prospects are.
High yield arbitrage is so much cooler and tastier than just swapping seeds for other seeds forever.
If you think seed 2 s...
Who benefits most from timing the right moment, right from the start, to race for the exits?
The hint is in the title of this Letters to a Young VC series. Of course, i...
I just watched Rounders for the first time, catching up to the insider linguistic tricks feels long overdue. Like how loan shark copycat financiers saving so much fictional wealth for the s...
…You seem to have confused the value of liquidity in an artificially scarce market with the work founders, creators, engineers and others who take on the majority of the risk do to actua...
With real web3 in full effect, founders no longer ...
Why do VCs do VC?
Get bags, have fun, be savvy.
So, why does being a gardener of CC0 ecosystems give VCs a better path out of VC?
Better bags, mo...
Amplifying the delta between load and effort for more savvy cash.
At some point on every journey towards the hope of more savvy bags, one has to put aside the theatrics...
What are we talking about when we talk about security?
A family of four walks alone along what they are told is ...
Money is a self perpetuating social convention.
It's no more than a token that we trust will hold value in future exchanges. If buyers and sellers, ports and authorities accept textil...
This letter zeroes in on cryptography and economics.
In the late 80s to early 90s a group of hacktivists, hobbyists, mathematicians, computer scientists and m...
In order to communicate securely the...
From how much appetite you have for uncovering unique opportunities that others don’t d...
It’s actually quite hard to do, given our experiences over the past two decades, where we’ve become conditioned to assum...
We’re now on letter nineteen, and it’s about time that we talked about what actually differentiates assets built for and in web3.
The thing is, we have to be honest with ourse...
Fresh off all the drama and clearly intentionally engineered gas wastage of the behemoth Otherside drop, continued inflation anxiety, Fed basis point jum...
A different medium for this message. Go to chromadin.xyz....
Dear YC Founders,
This letter is a special edition, just for you.
You may not all be VCs yet, but you are certainly in training— conditioned to look for the exits at all times...
With real web3 in full effect, founders no longer need to go down the winding roads of chasing venture funding, living on the whims of those who finance borrowed time and paper.
Frankly, web3 worthy of its own name is rooted in mechanisms that generate capital at its source, in ways that are independent from external capture and other corruptive factors. It’s a black swan sanctuary with variance swaps embedded directly into the foundational infrastructure of the ecosystem, project, protocol or whatever else you want to call it.
The SOP becomes no longer about powerpoint presentations, elevator pitches, spending time in cafes convincing disinterested parties about new ideas and groundbreaking opportunities using the theatrics of hype and long over-leveraged FOMO to expand exit liquidity, but rather, can the project actually meet the demand of the market and continue to maximise their own in-house and networked productive capacity?
The web2 Silicon Valley keynote speaking circuit spin so many fallacies they should take up shop in an old LES tailor’s empty storefront. From lean to agile to sprints better served on unseasonal Olympian CCTV… 🙃 The over regimented hot new business methodologies of the next 15 minutes are all incompatible with nimble, semi-pseudonymous, factorial and wagmi capital within web3.
It would help so many on the buy, sell, trade, and even the VC side to remember a simple truth: buyers aren’t objects. You don’t “have them”. Demand is an action and an appetite. How well do you serve it? And what channels does the creation of capital at its sources route through to get to you or meet demand where it moves in the market?
A project’s success is not determined by a fake market cap or valuation, but rather, by their ability to go head to head in a freely competitive market, directly against other founders, primary producers, entrepreneurs, creators and more.
Unbridled creativity, ingenuity and relentlessly authentic stories will beat your tired, old, boring brand copy anyday.
So now, 2 questions remain.
It’s really obvious, but broadly overlooked and often rejected with prejudice by conventional markets today—a full and enthusiastic embrace of cc0.
It’s actually the only way a project is able to hyper scale and meet global demand.
The default lock down of content by gatekeepers doesn’t merely leave gratuitous amounts of value on the table, it does far worse––it makes it all but impossible for culture and capital to generate factorially to its full potential— the only perpetual motion machine that is really worth the name. With cc0––and even better, cc0 with incentives that inherently advance web3 and creative freedom––producers can meet demand and scale a surplus of it.
No longer a sole producer running limited machines to straining at full throttle, the new creators and merchants of culture leverage and gain directly from self-perpetuating open access network effects of value. Countless teams, individuals, and projects build, derive, remix and repurpose their primary source materials, products and content to in turn add dramatic increases in source, secondary and networked value.
Rather than wasting endless resources and spreading contagions of destructive unintended consequences that result directly from trying to police, shut down, control and perpetuate violence, or the threat of it, producers can liberate themselves through their work, empower others around them, and use incentives through NFTs, crypto and other token economic standards to increase upside for all.
With this new producing, trading and operating procedure, venture capital and venture capitalists as they stand are not needed any longer. That busted old model is broken and there’s nowhere right or left for it to fit.
So, now we arrive at question two.
Individuals, syndicates and communities coordinating through DAOs that strategically deploy capital to the market to patron and support the building out of aligned and interesting parts of a cc0 generated ecosystem, virtual world or other slice of the metaverse.
They water, seed and incentivise parts of the cc0 garden through native web3 mechanisms.
Whether that is via native token launches and fair distribution, massive multiplayer decentralized quests, DAO bounties, decentralised on-chain market making activities, governance and voting activity, exercising the right to strike and stake as the new civic responsibility, and all of what has yet to be discovered or developed in this ever evolving new terrain.
I moved around a lot, I’m used to rame...
Prospecting drilling between the liquidity and lack of substance for some life giving thing— liquid gold, fresh water, magic...
There’s no kind of right way to do what I do. Feeling out of place, like a live in outer ...
Intellectual curiosity for this midtown magic.
The liminal watercolor of magic that happens between those two. They are showing t...
I can’t be sure.
Freestyle is an art form. Beyond coming prepared and spitting pre-written verses.
No ...
A written appropriation of videos, visual insights and anchors for how to make it in web3, not lose your shoes, your shirt, your soul.
...
Synthetic Futures
Time to help others with the outbreak. Not out of danger yet.
Emancipa
And there’s no point raising problems with people who don't learn how to understand them, in a system that wasn’t built for you, and still isn’t..
Dhäwu
A fragment of languages that shouldn’t have survived— but did.
Cuntism
Strayan Social Disease: Whinging, Advanced Wankerism, Cuntishness and some good old Terminal Tall Poppy.