I recently read the memoir by Richard Russell, founder of XL Recordings, home of The Prodigy, Radiohead, Adele, The White Stripes, The XX, and countless other divergent cross-overs who changed mainstream music. The book concludes with a reflection, that for much of his career, Richard was driven by ego,…Read More
Agentic services are increasingly open source, composable, decentralized, and enabling new markets that are autonomous and user-empowering. These are excellent raw ingredients to attract the talent that leads to explosive creativity and startup creation in software. Many of these same themes were prevalent at the outset of the internet…Read More
There has been a lot of debate about whether crypto is for finance, or more than that. My view is that, yes, crypto is for finance. But also, finance is becoming much more expansive than is commonly understood. There are three fundamental drivers. First, mass accessibility and participation in markets…Read More
In 2014, Vitalik defined DAO [https://t.co/63UgPgXrMq] as follows: "an entity that lives on the internet and exists autonomously, but also heavily relies on hiring individuals to perform certain tasks that the automaton itself cannot do…""Automation at the center, humans at the edges"…Read More
Variant had its annual investor meeting on Tuesday. I shared the below ideas in my keynote update on the market: Crypto is exiting what I would describe as a consolidation phase of the industry that has lasted the better part of the last 2 years. During this consolidation, there’s…Read More
The first ten years of smart contract blockchains were born of bitcoin’s original cypherpunk values: censorship resistance, open source, permissionlessness, and a new glimmer of building a democratic/equitable internet on top of a shared world computer. Today, those ideological values are meeting with market pressure, because the mainstream…Read More
“Only with crypto” has been facing headwinds (apart from SOV) while "better with crypto” has been gaining steam. Will this change? If so, how?…Read More
My crypto journey started with a startup in 2014 (Mediachain)—we wanted to put all the world's media onchain. What we believed then, I still believe now: onchain media allows media to simultaneously be abundant, distributed everywhere—and also valuable, with attribution for creators, provenance for collectors, and…Read More
When a new go to market strategy becomes clear, a wave of innovation and opportunity often follows. In 2024, you can go to where the wallets are.…Read More
Crypto can be viewed as the “democratization of investing.” Robinhood did it for stocks. Crypto does it for many other forms of internet-native value: money, digital art, memes, and early-stage technology projects.…Read More