The Wisdom Wall

“these networks have a set of shifting incentives where when they start off, They're solicitous to software developers, creators. They have to be their startup. But over time, as they gain power and the network effects kick in, they start to extract.”

“So there's this really reverse thing I think happening now where people are afraid to build useful products, but it's perfectly legal to build useless products.”

“The goal of web three is to get the best of both worlds, to get the democratized open protocols of web one and the advanced functionality that we've come to love, mobile apps, fast user experience, everything else from web two and combine those.”

“I call blockchains computers that can make commitments. And so what that means is you write some software on the Ethereum computer and you can write some software that says, I'm going to build a social network. And on this social network, I'm going to commit to you that if you make a post, I'm not going to take down…”

“I believe that in my business, at least liquidity is a bug and not a feature. And what I mean by that is the ability to sell something is a very, very dangerous thing and can mess with you. And I bet you that if most venture capitalists could sell their stock along the way would have far lower returns because The…”

“That's an old internet strategy that I call come for the tool, stay for the network.”

“The way I think about these NFT projects is the goal is to evolve them more like cities in a bottom up way. So you create these assets in these communities, and then people build applications around them, and it comes bottom up.”

“If you just run around like kid soccer, average thesis will lead to average outcomes.”

“I think any area where you're kind of an emerging technology area, you need to run things at that kind of four-year horizon, ideally, pretty minimum, because you're just dependent on the moods and sentiment of the broader world and exogenous factors that you can't control.”

“In blockchain web three, there's been very, very few cases of people spending significant money on customer acquisition. One of the exciting things of web three is that the users, because they have tokens, because they have ownership, they become evangelists for these systems.”

“If you look at just generally at the history of technology, people mistakenly think of these things as laws of physics, like Moore's law. People talk about as if magically There's this inevitable march towards being able to pack more transistors on chips. I think in reality, a lot of these performance improvements are…”

“I'd say a very important lesson, and I think one I kind of learned the hard way on my second startup is don't try to create the trends as a startup, try to ride the trends.”

“What I've come to believe in retrospect is that early stage angel investing is, you'll often hear that it's 80% about the people or something and 20% about the idea or something like that. I think it's like 98% I've now learned about the people and like two percent about the idea.”

“in people's careers, I think you get caught on kind of a local optimum. Imagine the career landscape is a hilly landscape, and there's the highest hills where you kind of want to get to. It's very easy to sort of be walking up a hill and feel like you're succeeding. This is like you're at a job, you're at McKinsey, and…”

“Because composability, this Lego brick feature of open source software is, to me, the compounding interest of software.”

“My mental model is there's prices and then there's innovation. They're really two different charts that are somewhat unrelated. And the innovation chart in my mind is mainly driven by platform shifts and major new technologies.”

“In some ways, you can think of a blockchain as a political solution. It's a way to recruit great engineers, because they want to work on it, and there's a financial model to incentivize them, and it's neutral. So all these different 10 institutions that maybe don't trust each other, don't need to trust each other. So…”

“Power in tech is network effects, almost always. Occasionally you have scale effects, brand effects, but generally it's network effects.”

“In our world, a lot of people may not have formal educations. They may not have the same pedigree, brand name resumes. We've hired a lot of people who have not gone to college. What we want to see is they've demonstrated excellence. That excellence can be through open source code. It can be through other kinds of…”

“One of our core frameworks is invest in strengths, not lack of weaknesses. So what that means is look for people with some kind of superpower, but that doesn't mean they have to be well-rounded. The truth is a lot of great people and a lot of great companies have a lot of flaws. And if you go and look for things that…”

“We don't expect them to win or be successful, but we expect them to try really hard. A pet peeve would be entrepreneurs who just don't keep that covenant. Hey, I'm going to quit my startup and go take this cushy job. When we invest, that's kind of the only thing we expect. Certainly don't expect success. We just expect…”

“To me, a community is not when you look up to a leader like Steve Jobs. It's when you bump into somebody at a bar, and they're interested in that topic, and you actually feel an affinity. And that's how the PC felt back then, and that's how crypto feels today.”

“Generally people who might be listening to this, who are interested in technology, if you have tech skills and you're in this world, they dramatically overestimate the risk of starting a company.”

“And I've now seen enough startups to tell you that in certainly the majority of cases, there's a founder issue. It's a very, very stressful experience starting a company and almost inevitably at some point there's tension between the founders and it can arise from a number of different things.”

“one of the best predictors of startup success. It'd be great if you knew it ahead of time. It's very hard to know ahead of time, but one of the highest correlates or something is persistence.”

“if you look at the last, I guess, 70 years of computing, going back to, you know, World War II and the advent of modern computers, there's been these waves every 10 to 15 years of new computers. So mainframes, mini computers, PCs, the internet, mobile phones, right?”

“I have this idea unpublished blog posts. I call media keto. The idea is think of media consumption, kind of like you do with food. And I think of social networks, like reading Twitter and things as like sugar. Reading the news, I consider sugar. I don't read the news much. Reading a book is protein. Writing is protein.…”

“I think a lot of very important things come from those side interests and hobbies. And a lot of what we kind of consider productive work is important, but oftentimes can fall prey to short-termism, I guess. And kind of group think and other things.”

“imputing logic onto things that are probably noisy and random. My impression of a lot of investing is everything from, if you could watch CNBC and they say the market moved today because of X, Y, and Z, and in fact, it was probably moved because whatever some algorithmic trader bought did X, Y, and Z, and who knows…”

“I like to say composability is the software as compounding interest is the finance. It has that same amazing thing. When you do compounded interest, you're like, whoa, that really matters a lot. This is obviously well known to your listeners, but in software, that's kind of the thing that gives you that same effect.”

“You get through that trough, you have to have two characteristics. You have to really just be all in. You have to have grit and you have to be willing to put up with that and be kind of miserable and all your friends say, what are you doing and why are you wasting your time? And then the other thing you have to do is…”

“computers specifically have this feedback loop. When they hit this golden period of product market fit, they have this flywheel where the applications Get rapidly better. And that in turn creates economics incentives for the platform to get better, which in turn creates economic centers for the application.”