Jesse Walden About

In 2006, Paul Graham wrote a great post wherein he concluded that Web 2.0 was a credible term because it meant “using the web the way it's meant to be used.” I think this is a good lens to interpret the term Web3, and why it is still a…Read More

Many entrepreneurs and investors think that crypto projects can’t capture value because they are based on open source code. The thinking goes that if you develop open source code, someone will come along and copy it, luring away your users and any potential for revenue. That doesn’t seem…Read More

Originally published as a Twitter thread, here is my high level reading/summary of @RobertJShiller’s book: "Narrative Economics"…Read More

Crypto founders have a unique challenge in front of them. In addition to building a product that people want, they also need to consider how that product can successfully run in a decentralized manner — that is, as a protocol owned and operated by a community of users. This is a…Read More

I spent the first half of the decade doing overlapping music things: 2010 - concert promoter 2012-  live streaming, SaaS tool 2013 - artist manager The second half doing tech things —specifically, "crypto" (née "blockchain") things 2015 - entrepreneur 2017 - investing / product / r&d 2018 - VC The…Read More

One way to think about various kinds of crypto projects is through the lens of contract theory. An axiom of this area of legal scholarship states: “all but the simplest contracts are incomplete”. That is, contractual arrangements cannot anticipate every possible outcome or set of actions, given complex and dynamic…Read More

Today, some of the most valuable corporations in the world today are “network operators”. Thanks to network effects, these platforms become more valuable to existing users as each new user joins. Network effects are innocuous at first, but can cause concern at scale if platforms enter an “extractive” phase in…Read More