Exclusive access to hot deals, discovering founders, picking winners, and indexing the category — If you want to make a good return (20%/yr+) by angel investing in early-stage startups, these are the four strategies that I see working today: Exclusive access to hot deals Discovering founders Picking winners Indexing the category I’m an investor in over a dozen startup funds including Shrug, Haystack, Susa…

I’m repeatedly struggling to understand how Balaji thinks blockchain technology adds value to internet-enabled use cases — I’ve recently been debating with @balajis on Twitter about his various ideas for blockchain use cases. I’m posting a lightly-edited transcript here because I think it’s an interesting record of two opposing viewpoints circa 2021. Balaji is an amazing Twitter account to follow, a regular source of smart and fresh…

Role-playing as a visionary when you don’t have a coherent vision — I’m not inspired by Web3’s vision because the end state that it’s supposedly aiming for — regardless of whether the technology to get there makes sense, and whether the various execution challenges are feasible — is super vague. In my previous posts, I focused on analyzing Web3’s value prop to…

Cryptocurrencies are useful because millions of people want to make transactions that their governments want to prevent — Welcome to the latest installment of my quest to try to put my finger on a web3 value prop. Today we’ll be exploring whether cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin might plausibly have any good value props. If you’re just joining, you may want to catch up on my previous posts: Chris Dixon’s…

Today I came across yet another article criticizing a company for being “exploitative”, whose criticism amounted to not liking the fact that its pricing was calibrated to the market. In times like this, I just want to make sure we’re all on the same page about the concept of consumer…

The ability for applications to read and write their data to the blockchain will be inconsequential — When you ask people what Web3’s biggest value props are, a common answer is sharing interoperable data across applications. Here’s what a typical explanation looks like: Chris claims that shared data like “usernames, social graphs and posts” are an important reason why Web3 apps will differentiate from…

Yesterday’s web3-themed episode of Tim Ferriss’s Podcast didn’t provide the one thing I was hoping for — I just listened to the October 28, 2021 episode of the Tim Ferriss Show podcast, titled Chris Dixon and Naval Ravikant — The Wonders of Web3, How to Pick the Right Hill to Climb, Finding the Right Amount of Crypto Regulation, Friends with Benefits, and the Untapped Potential of NFTs…

The approach that successful founders use to break through the traction barrier — I’ve been giving hundreds of early-stage founders the same advice over and over: You need to manhandle your users now. You know what I mean by manhandling, right? And they’re understandably confused. So here’s my reference post about manhandling. Manhandling means guaranteeing that you achieve a good outcome by directly…