Category: Startups

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Internet Culture Startups

Day 1239 and @ Consensus 2024 Next Week

I’ll be in Austin Texas next week for Consensus 2024. I’ve really enjoyed my last couple of years attending. The entire crypto industry gathers for it giving it a summer camp feel. Or as Coindesk says “10 years of decentralizing the future” which undersells their role in reporting the industry.

The conference coincided with the annual Coincenter dinner which is an industry wide non profit effort to work towards policy goals for decentralized computing like Bitcoin & Ethereum and the wider cryptocurrency.

Our mission is to defend the rights of individuals to build and use free and open cryptocurrency networks: the right to write and publish code – to read and to run it. The right to assemble into peer-to-peer networks. And the right to do all this privately.

In that vein, I’ll be discussing the intersection of artificial intelligence as the #FreedomToCompute at Consensus as this is THE issue for everyone who uses compute as a tool to solve problems.

It’s an opportunity to discuss the big public goals around the future of machine money and machine intelligence.

I’d argue this includes the entire software industry and by default anyone who is reading this post. Our most important rights will be decided by how we handle policy on these issues. Math is leverage.

One of the town halls I’ll be participating in at Consensus (a format I love to dig deep into topics) is about how artificial intelligence can be a tool for our efforts to decentralize and not end up as a master of big government or big tech.

Crypto has the basic problems facing artificial intelligence. Both spaces rely on open, available and trustless compute. Both are under intense scrutiny and face significant regulatory capture risks.

It’s never been a better time to get involved in these topics. We need open protocols and interoperability standards far more than we need fretting about safetyism and hysterics about science fiction.

Doom solves no problems but software does. We need safe harbors and policy sandboxes so we can continue to nurture algorithmic innovation for us all.

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Emotional Work Startups

Day 1231 and Conviction

Patience may be a virtue but it sure sucks to practice. When things are slow and life’s problems are feel intractable, patience is no easy discipline.

The best I can do is find conviction in my positions and live slowly in the consequences unfolding. The agony of slow progress can make patience feels more like a fool’s errand.

But then there are days when the work of months and even years show themselves and the conviction that was once so hard seems suddenly effortless.

I have had many slow months (even years) where nothing seems to get accomplished. Startups are notorious for their uneven progress. You believe and yet must live with the slowness building that belief into reality.

Patience is no easy virtue. Conviction wouldn’t be impressive if it were.

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Startups

Day 1230 and Alignment is Consensus

Over the last decade I’ve gone deeper into a set of values that guide my relationship to what we should be building and for whom.

Consensus and alignment will be the twin sisters of our shared reality.

We achieve consensus through open networked & decentralized systems of governance and value. A trustless system reaches consensus we all agree upon through the mathematical verification of compute. Decentralized collaborative approaches are the path to alignment.

The further we get from truth as a set of shared experience we agree upon as humans, the more crucial a trustless future becomes.

AI and crypto offer us transparent solutions to agreement. Machine intelligence needs machine money and machine governance.

Humans beings are not truth seeking animals. We are social animals. We decide the boundaries of culture together. Rationality is an aspiration resting atop faulty sensors and emotional baggage.

But we can reach a consensus. Mathematics gives us the tools to differentiate between thing and not thing. We can encode quite a bit into binary.

We can seek to know things impartially. From there we share our experience with others. We measure and compare. Trial and error is collaborative. To be able to come to an agreement on a shared truth is the whole goal.

To be able to collaborate widely and through shared and mutually agreed upon standards remains the ambition of civilization. Coordination unlocks progress.

With artificial intelligence we can extend out the realm of what we know. Networking together all our emotionally faulty sensors, conflicting pieces of cultural & emotional knowledge together reveals bigger things.

If, from that networked reality, we are then able to scale the abstract business of solving specific and concrete problems all the better.

Building within reality requires us to agree on an acceptable consensus. We can verify positions and align incentives together. The alignment is all of us coming to a consensus on how we allocate our attention, willpower, and resources.

We reach for technological progress through alignment which is organized through the network consensus layers of governance and value.

The freedom to compute is essential to alignment. In a trustless world, we are able to reach consensus we can all verify.

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Emotional Work Startups

Day 1193 And Peak Performance

I was really struggling yesterday so I didn’t expect to jump right onto a flow state today. I went into town to eat a hamburger.

“You may not like it but eating a burger in the back of a casino in a strip mall in Montana while reading an economics lecture by Deidre McCloskey is actually female peak performance”

Maybe it was the positive effect of a bunch of fat and protein but I was in the zone afterwards. I was able to pull together a bunch of disparate connections on a specialty niche where I’ve had some very promising investments.

I, for a brief shining moment, realized I was almost certainly one of the most expert and well connected people on the planet for something.

So much of not getting eaten by change is simply accepting that you feel absolutely bonkers an enormous amount of time. Learning to live with it isn’t as easy as it looks

If you are lucky and smart and open minded a straight line can appear through what was other completely disparate things. It’s funny that we call putting a line through things regression right? Simplifying things is funny like that.

Learning to act when you see a through line is almost all of the battle. “Noticing things” is only useful insofar as it something you take action on.

I felt as if I had no clear path at all yesterday on anything and then today I did. I didn’t see some kind of perfect Delphic vision of the future. I just realized that work I’d set in motion three or four years ago has yielded results and if I was able to keep going with other people who saw it too then I had done what I could.

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Emotional Work Homesteading Startups

Day 1191 and 90 Day Horizon

I feel like I’ve got a decent grip on the directions that have captivated markets and where the next decade of opportunities will emerge. My long term confidence on managing through chaos remains the same. Focus on resilience and adaptability.

I feel as if repeat myself constantly in the ways that I live this through my revealed preferences.

In more local “place” resilience we live on land we own land in Montana with our own well, water rights, and powering our energy needs off a large solar grid.

In broader macroeconomics terms, I invest in decentralized ecosystems like Bitcoin, open source software projects and compute exchanges. Hell, I was even the first check into a nuclear energy company last year. Energy and networks matter.

Yet I have no idea what I intend to do with my next couple of months or where I should even spend my time except “keep doing what you are already doing!”

I’ve come to some crossroads on my attention and the decisions I need to make in the short term feel challenging. I’ve never had more opportunities in front of me and it’s exhilarating. But I also don’t feel like it’s clear how to best allocate my attention in the very near short term.

But I also don’t have high confidence on what I should be cutting out or bringing to the forefront in the next 90 days or so. There is simply so much happening (and those effects are potentially existential) that it’s a struggle for me to say “fuck it we ball” to what’s in front of me. What ball? What am I saying fuck it to? Is it a fuck no or a fuck yes?

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Startups

Day 1163 and Women in Tech

A lot of emotional energy has been directed at the “problem” of “women in technology” in the last decade or two. Stupid campaigns get run with degrees of condescension in which it’s insinuated the only way women could see the value in crypto is if we make a perfume. It’s the rankest form of sexism and extremely effective. And I’ve proudly worked in cosmetics. Chemistry is cool.

So today on International Women’s Day I’d like to remind myself that I’ve l been “in tech” since the moment I fell in love with a personal computer as a young teen. I’m on that edge of elder millennial that did things in the real world as children but had access to the virtual early.

Plenty of men mistakenly assume that because I worked in fashion, beauty and ecommerce. I was early before the ease of hosted Shopify accounts or even Heroku instances for an app. It was a lot more roll your own.

And yet some think my experience doesn’t count. Despite it being a clearly sign of capital markets having underpricing occasionally. Ifs a good thing. You go where market rewards you and you learn to learn skills along the way.

I think so much less about my gender now. Almost resent ever having been talked into it. You do it right then you, like an anyone else in the market, can benefit when someone misallocates.

If you are lucky enough to steward your own capital, then get to be part of the investor bases to build the next generation. I do that now. I am still a woman.

I’m proud to use the resources I have to invest in what I believe in based on my experiences and the thesis I invest under. Not as some smoothed over marketing narrative with a gender hook. No I price like an actor you can do business with. I am willing to show my revealed preference.

I learned in previous eras so I may serve the generation that is coming up. And I’m happy to invest in the ares I believe in most. I am happy as a woman to invest in men as I am in women.

The focus I see in founders I have invested in across energy, artificial intelligence and crypto are ones I believe in. I believe in them as people. I believe in them as founders. I believe in them as men.

I am lucky to be seen as an individual with capital and insights that can help them carry a better future forward. I hope all founders are seen as individuals.

Technology innovation has been the driver of improved human life. Material prosperity is good for women. It’s good for men. So I’ll celebrate doing stuff for the boys on international women’s day.

Alex Miller visiting with me at one of our favorite portfolio company Valar Atomics. I believe in Isiah and his team.
Categories
Finance Startups

Day 1147 and Balkan Crypto

I’m in the Balkans for a few weeks doing some scouting and visiting with friends and colleagues. The western Balkans including Albania, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Serbia and Montenegro are known for their occasionally colorful participation in cryptocurrencies.

The region has experienced currency volatility, struggles with central banking and even in Albania a civil war stemming from a financial crisis over government Ponzi schemes.

These negative experience with currency instability, government corruption and sociopolitical unrest has led to a desire to experiment with transparency and decentralization amongst the region’s youth.

The ecosystem is host to serious projects has a talented base of engineers. Ripple is experimenting with a national stable coin in Montenegro. Zuzalu, the two-month invite-only gathering that Ethereum blockchain co-founder Vitalik Buterin led in Montenegro has been a regional hub. And it has inspired a new grants program Zu- villages that strikes me as a cross between network state and a DAO with Gitcoin.

In an editorial in Bitcoin Magazine the founder of the Belgrade Bitcoin Hub summed up the “why”

As a result of years of unfulfilled promises from regional politicians, people of the Balkans are hard to convince about the long-term benefits that can be realized by adopting Bitcoin in one’s life. A low time preference way of life to most people in this region is associated with disappointment and the lowered standards of living that have happened many times before.

Plumski founder of the Belgrade Bitcoin Hub.

Categories
Community Startups

Day 1145 and Vitality

The most gratifying part of early stage startup investing is the vitality. When you are in the mindset of optimism, all things are possible.

I first met Isaiah Taylor about a year ago. We found each other on Twitter. I cold DM’s him with “you seem interesting.” We’d hop on the phone and go through what he was working on in long strategy talks.

I think in our first conversation we spent half an hour just discussing origin stories. We’d both had strongly American west families and we were neighbors in the upper Rocky Mountains. We shared a Christian faith. I liked his style.

Those early rambling sessions when a founder is discovering their market and their unique talents is a precious time. I knew I wanted to invest in him long before Valar Atomics had come into focus.

Ambition and vision are honed over time as you broaden your horizons. It’s the most fascinating tension. The bigger you dream the more you must see your path clearly and pursue it relentlessly. Vitality begins with knowing where to apply your will.

I feel the optimism that Isiah has brought. And I admire how he has taken it to a bigger community. Watching the El Segundo community self-mythologize in real time during this weekend hackathon has been an exercise in collective application of will. Like its cousin in techno-optimism e/acc , the American dynamism “new vitalism” egregore values building for the future.

@ADoricko and @isaiah_p_taylor opening up the Gundo Defense Tech Hackathon via Rasmus

Categories
Startups

Day 1125 and Planting Seeds

I like to get to know founders over time. It’s a canonical piece of advice passed down over venture lore that one should invest in lines not dots. Consider the messenger of course.

I’m sure to founders it can feel a bit self serving of investors to want to see a lot of traction before a commitment. That’s not what I’m talking about. I think as an investor, we have an obligation get to know a founder’s character and their approach to problem solving. Especially if you believe their opportunity to be enormous.

At the earliest stage our responsibility is to assess your capacity to overcome obstacles and to improve your skill sets to match. We need to know you will grow and flourish.

Nurturing a seed is the entire metaphor behind early stage investing. A seed round is such an optimistic name. If we must extend the metaphor that we are planting seeds then the work starts before anything goes in the ground. Good soil, good weather conditions, and the right timing matter a lot.

The anxiety inducing part of this is that my approach years I take time to cultivate potential founders for years. I never quite know when someone will go up for a fundraise. I have to wait and see.

But when it does happen. It’s such a miracle. No finer feeling in the world than having cultivated the right conditions for something to grow.

Categories
Media Startups

Day 1110 and Somatic

I’m upset. I feel it in my body. Soma apparently means “body” in Latin, somatic is “of the body” so to have a response in your body is a somatic response. I’m having a somatic response.

I’ve been surprised at the emotional campaigns that have been waged against technology in the general, and artificial intelligence in the specific, as of late. But I am starting to feel the emotional weight of the collective fear and emotion in my own body. Futureshock is here and the fear mongers are here to tell you and I that we should be afraid.

This weekend there was op-ed was published in IEEE entitled “Open Source Artificial Intelligence is Uniquely Dangerous.”

The o-ed was written by David Evan Harris who is a chancellor’s public scholar at UC Berkeley. He used to work a Meta on ethical AI. Now this not the opinion of IEEE which is calls itself “the world’s largest technical professional organization dedicated to advancing technology for the benefit of humanity.”

You’d think that sort of mission would be a little more on board with new technologies. But maybe David is just an extreme voice. Op-Ed’s are meant to represent a variety of opinions after all.

But how should I feel about the benefits of technology when it’s presented to me like this? They used a skull to really get across the visceral fear. No friendly face to make a concession to our silly human anthropomorphic desires. Let’s scare the stupid hairless apes.

Don’t worry the government and regulations will save us from this psychedelic skull

I have an inherent skepticism when someone wants to sell me on the dangers of regular people having access to something new and potentially transformative. Why must we always default to the precautionary principle? Why is fear always our default?

I don’t want to let this sort of thing get to me. But I can see the narrative campaign being waged against artificial intelligence and the sheer volume and tenor of coverage leads me to believe that everyone is aware of its potential.

Claiming artificial intelligence is only for the knowledgeable few chosen by committee of expert sounds so sensible. But I think my body knows better. I should be upset by this.