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...
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 and think that it makes you clever.
No wonder you’re trained by letters like the latest from YC to grab as much capital as you can, to make the most of the everything bubble in collapsing old centralised economies, and squawk all about how smart you are for stocking up the survivalist bunker until everyone else shakes out of the market.
Raise a billion or 10 if you can.
Or maybe instead build something people actually want to better equip them for the radical economic shift so obviously underway.
Maybe you don’t have it all figured out and what we are really seeing is not a staggering collapse in demand, but rather a race for supply to keep up with it.
Your paper investments likely won’t do too well in the transformation.
For all readers, it’s always a smart move to always ask “Cui Bono?”
And, in this case, it’s clear that YC and similar VC/web2 founder frat members are poorly positioned for current market opportunities so would rather everyone believe that the sky is falling for all.
If they can’t benefit directly, at least with emails like those above, they can maintain their position and keep shilling the tired old 101 Startup playbook of leveraging debt to cover 12-24 months instead of building a business that can thrive in all conditions.
Rather than playing games with debt. Build things that people can use to build things.
At lower costs, less overhead, faster time to market, greater efficiency and more prosumer empowerment.
And, most importantly, in times like these, unleash greater ability to create across the full range of the market activity — from IRL to ever more immersive digital, from manufacutring to culture and commerce.
No bias here, but it should be obvious that fabrication is one of the most direct paths— new hardware production utilising local equipment combined with web3 tooling capitalises on vast opportunities for globally distributed reshoring of manufacturing capacity and everything that comes with it.
Emerging methods like DTG (Direct-to-Garment) represent a profound transformation for how gains in efficiency, reductions in transport time and every other complementary enhancement translates into a radical increase in range of available actions and self sovereignty for consumers, producers and founders and funders like yourselves.
If you’re in a position where you raised too much, just enough, or best yet, not at all, there’s no better time than now to raise ahead of anyone foolish enough to listen to YC’s advice.
Get busy building for this radical shift while the YC frat is busy hibernating.
After all, PG said it best way back when, “Make stuff people want”.
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.