"I am a sick man... I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. I believe my liver is diseased." -- Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground the trenches For the past 2 months, I’ve been underground, in the trenches. I’ve been wholly focused on understanding the current onchain meta by being a full-time speculator. I’ve been spending most

A few weeks ago, we made the challenging decision to pivot our energy away from Personae, the company I've been working on for the past couple of years. We pioneered new ground, we failed to build retentive products, and ultimately we decided to return investor money and re-enter the startup idea maze from scratch. Looking back, it's been a classic

I’ve been thinking about the future of online identity for a little while now. ~1.5 years ago, I co-founded Personae Inc. to investigate what felt like a looming sea change. This is how we phrased it back then. Today, I’d say that all of those predictions have only become more obvious: as lower-cost gas regimes (L2s, L3s) are becoming the norm, m

The biggest indicator of where the action is going to be in crypto is where new founder leverage exists. Uniswap was interesting in 2020 because it allowed a team of <10 to build an exchange that reached volumes comparable to the big exchanges that employed 1000+. In 2020, Ethereum was clearly a new source of leverage for creative, ambitious fou

Product-market fit is the most important target for every early project/company/protocol. In crypto, we forget this periodically. Whatever you’re trying to make happen, if you want your thing to affect the world, you must have something that humans rabidly flock to (even if those humans are an infra-customer like ‘developers’). And if you want tha

https://twitter.com/lakshmansankar/status/1727079319804269050 Note: I choose not to name any specific projects/communities here to combat my own crypto-religious biases. use your imagination in filling in the blanks, but try to question your own beliefs in the process. In the 6ish years I’ve been building in crypto, one thing seems to have been pre

What makes something trendy among crypto builders? How do opinions form around what's 'likely to work' and why does it not seem correlated with what we know to actually work? I found myself revisiting these questions while reading Polynya’s (excellent) recent rants. nft://10/0xc01BC64513A9F0c7C231d81b00B16ffF23F1F728/?showBuying=true&showMeta=t