Me voy a buscar una luz pra iluminar.
Robot
Letters to a Young VC
Letters to a Young VC: Letter One
December 23rd, 2021

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...

Letters to a Young VC: Letter Two
December 28th, 2021

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...

Letters to a Young VC: Letter Three
January 5th, 2022

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 ...

Letters to a Young VC: Letter Four
January 12th, 2022

From scavengers to prospectors, is web2 rehab possible?

TLDR; probably not. You can go home now.

But, for those still here, let’s see what the prospects are.

Letters to a Young VC: Letter Five
January 20th, 2022

From seed, to crop, to harvest, to market, to plate.

High yield arbitrage is so much cooler and tastier than just swapping seeds for other seeds forever.

If you think seed 2 s...

Letters to a Young VC: Letter Six
January 27th, 2022

Exit strategy.

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...

Letters to a Young VC: Letter Seven
February 4th, 2022

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...

Letters to a Young VC: Letter Eight
February 8th, 2022

…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...

Letters to a Young VC: Letter Nine
February 18th, 2022

What happens to VC when founders and projects have alternative sources of capital that out-scale traditional debt & equity agreements?

With real web3 in full effect, founders no longer ...

Letters to a Young VC: Letter Ten
February 25th, 2022

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...

Letters to a Young VC: Letter Eleven
March 5th, 2022

From Vc to Ac.

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...

Letters to a Young VC: Letter Twelve
March 10th, 2022

The insecurity inherent in the way that we think about securities.

What are we talking about when we talk about security?

A family of four walks alone along what they are told is ...

Letters to a Young VC: Letter Thirteen
March 19th, 2022

Is a cow a security because it makes milk which can then be used to make derivative goods like cheese, yoghurt, and butter?

Is pizza a security because it is made from multiple component p...

Letters to a Young VC: Letter Fourteen
March 26th, 2022

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...

Letters to a Young VC: Letter Fifteen
April 3rd, 2022

This letter zeroes in on cryptography and economics.

It all began as a dream.

In the late 80s to early 90s a group of hacktivists, hobbyists, mathematicians, computer scientists and m...

Letters to a Young VC: Letter Sixteen
April 10th, 2022

For 3000 years, up until the 1970s, cryptography had been based on symmetric keys, meaning the same keys were used to both encrypt and decrypt messages.

In order to communicate securely the...

Letters to a Young VC: Letter Seventeen
April 17th, 2022

As any good money making adventurer setting off to discover new bags knows, risk is everything.

From how much appetite you have for uncovering unique opportunities that others don’t d...

Letters to a Young VC: Letter Eighteen
April 24th, 2022

Imagine an alternative to the data surveillance economy.

It’s actually quite hard to do, given our experiences over the past two decades, where we’ve become conditioned to assum...

Letters to a Young VC: Letter Nineteen
May 1st, 2022

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...

Letters to a Young VC: Letter Twenty
May 8th, 2022

Wow. Twenty letters in the bag.

Fresh off all the drama and clearly intentionally engineered gas wastage of the behemoth Otherside drop, continued inflation anxiety, Fed basis point jum...

Letters to a Young VC: Letter Twenty One
May 16th, 2022

A different medium for this message. Go to chromadin.xyz....

Letters to a Young VC: Letter Twenty Two
May 22nd, 2022

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...

Letters to a Young VC: Letter Three
January 5th, 2022

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 tech bros has become a sport.

It's not that all of the criticism is warranted, it is just that in some cases they make it so damn easy, even when you are coming from a staunchly pro-technology perspective. Because, ultimately, that is the trick isn't it.

What's really creepy and off putting about the behaviour of so many bros in tech, is the way that they posture smugly pretending to only be about the technical merits and consumer benefits of what they are doing, when really, it is all always about their personal ego, status, clout and capital.

They pretend to support open culture, open source and open markets. Just like they pretend to be pioneers for the growth and circulation of capital, but really, they use open technology usually built by someone else to capture and close down as much data and capital as possible, concentrating it in their own fratty pools and club houses whilst doing it all at your expense.

And worst of all they have the nerve to insecurely put on very public shows about how much better they are in their minds than everyone else. Or, how much better web2 is in their fantasies than the only technology layer that has ever actually offered self sovereignty and a way forward to everyone in the world — web3.

In the case of these iconic tone deaf web2 founders, besides the endless entertainment from their ridiculous back and forth –– as just one example –– it is interesting to notice how awful the consumer and customer support experience of Airbnb has become over the years, as more and more investor capital has been captured by the VC debt loop shitty code model.

It's no surprise that centralised systems that depend on increasing amounts of database and capital control, even if they have open source networks somewhere in their tech stack, lead to employees and users becoming enemies of the founders and investors. The incentives are totally misaligned.

Unlike in web3 where contributors, creators, consumers and protocol stewards and leaders, all have a substantive stake in the outcomes of every interaction, every service, every module of code, every step along the way, in web2 its entirely biased towards borrowed illusions of virtue.

Whatever classic tech bro founders and VCs can say and do to make themselves feel better practicing facial expressions in the mirror, it must somehow be what’s good for all of the rest of us, right?

Well, thanks, but next.

The world is already leaving you behind, you had your 15 minutes of fame, and then way to much some.

But is this all some way too easy counterattack, picking on bros shitposting on Twitter, in response to their comical attempts to bully new upstarts in technology and culture and protect themselves from competition for capital?

Not just that, no.

Ultimately, it's a recognition of how they are destroying themselves with each solipsist post they make against the decentralization of capital, culture, and tech.

The premise of Venture Capital is supposed to be about maximising gains through the placement of many small bets, which ideally, but rarely in reality, cultivate a wide diversity of essential new tools, services, interpretations of technology etc. helping upstart entrepreneurs and creative pioneers by pass the cold start and scale up problems.

But, we all know, that VC in practice, at least in the macro economy that we have had for the past arguably 20 to 40+ years, is a hyper scale casino, where the idea and digital representation of money, divorced from tangible wealth, is put to work chasing more numbers go up on screens. Frankly, Wall Street is anti capitalist— it’s just a saturated HFT algo market where bots go brrrr.

And this distortion has spread throughout core and peripheral capital manipulation industries of all kinds. VC is one of the worst of them. It didn’t have to be this way.

It all comes down to the mechanism design. VC leaves money and value on the table, and actively destroys wealth in pursuit of ego and a race to the exits.

What better way than to get a quick large exit, than to burn the house down behind you.

Who cares whose in it, you’re already out.

You can sit around on Twitter pretending to have glorious wisdom to share from your survival story.

When really, the vast majority of founders and VCs in web2 are structurally bound by the requirement to extract ever greater amounts of personal information and feed them into 3rd party data base beasts, to be arsonists.

What puts us all in this situation where we debate whether to ignore them as past their prime and utterly forgettable or actively call out their histories of bad behaviour is the nerve that they have to claim as light those that are new to web3 or are considering getting deeper down the rabbit hole into some nonsense about how up is down, good is bad, and self sovereignty for all will actually lead to the new slavery.

Even if these semantic and semiotic debates are worth having to make sure that we don’t repeat the often intentional mistakes of web2, these tech bros are some of the last people that should be doing anything other than retiring quietly after all the damage that they have done.

Because it’s just entirely obvious how foolish and self defeating the statements that they are making are. The honeymoon period when hopes and efforts to make web2 truly about large scale growth of open networks, open culture and open code, for the flourishing of all, has long been over and replaced by proof through self evident and easily verifiable behaviours, tending towards control at all points.

Now, with the dawn of web3 tools, protocols and mechanisms, we don’t need to debate who it is good for. The devices and methods themselves advance individual prosperity, empowerment and radically independent well being.

By leveraging the long promised and finally now delivered benefits of open market networks everyone can build real wealth in this fast growing economy, and as the web3 metaverse matures, the scale up will dwarf the entire pile of coins collected by the few in the web2 era.

You want to be a creator, artist, designer, buyer or investor in this new world that is great and YOU CAN to a far greater extent than ever before.

Now you can’t fake it taking cover behind old ways. The proof of whether you are genuinely contributing to the advancement of the networked commons and capital creation is stored immutably on transparently verifiable blockchains.

Sub Thread Weekly
Sub-Thread Weekly: #1
December 29th, 2021

There’s three days left until the end of the year, 30 blocks left in this walk, and I’m still getting these damn messages.

I moved around a lot, I’m used to rame...

Sub-Thread Weekly: #4
January 18th, 2022

Pressure.

Pushing down on me. Pressing down on me.

Prospecting drilling between the liquidity and lack of substance for some life giving thing— liquid gold, fresh water, magic...

Sub-Thread Weekly: #5
January 26th, 2022

And I can’t tell you what I’ll write. They’re words without the paper.

There’s no kind of right way to do what I do. Feeling out of place, like a live in outer ...

Sub-Thread Weekly: #6
February 3rd, 2022

He comes to town every Tuesday. Are you free Tuesday?

Intellectual curiosity for this midtown magic.

The liminal watercolor of magic that happens between those two. They are showing t...

Sub-Thread Weekly: #7
February 10th, 2022

How's this for an intro? Have you done this before?

I can’t be sure.

Sitting down, sitting up.

Sub-Thread Weekly: #19
May 9th, 2022

AI generated text is supercharging fake news. Yet, this was my results. A pretty decent text generator in some contexts, in others, a whole bunch of hogwash.

Thank you?

Input: Goin...

Sub-Thread Weekly: #20
May 17th, 2022

Mastering the discipline to the point where it literally flows through you.

Freestyle is an art form. Beyond coming prepared and spitting pre-written verses.

No ...

Sub-Thread Weekly: #21
May 24th, 2022

A written appropriation of videos, visual insights and anchors for how to make it in web3, not lose your shoes, your shirt, your soul.

How to survive an IRL dungeon crawler game.

...

Web3 Fashion
  • DIGITALAX: Emancipatory Lifestyle Tech.
  • F3Manifesto: Transcendent nostalgia. Machine & human made. In with gen. AI, web3 fashion & cc0 before it was cool.
  • Highlaŋu: The Highland-Yolŋu alliance. Maximum resistance experience. Maximum knowledge preservation. Wearing and building erasure-resistant transmission systems.
  • Coin Op: We know it's a lot to keep up with. How can you know if this is the blend of instant convenience and purchasing power you've been waiting for?
On-Chain Video
  • Chromadin: There are whispers of new apps that can't be taken away from you. Stirrings of resistance decentralized in code. Where users own the network, direct messages are reliably private, and the channels we see the world through can be counted on to stay fully independent. Engagement and influence flow back to you. Like it was always meant to be.
  • Kinora: On-Chain Video Social Quests.
Coins
  • MONA: ERC20 protocol token. Unclaimed Value in Agency.
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від Емми-Джейн МакКіннон-Лі