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Since the beginning, Y Combinator s motto has been make something people want. For a growing group of companies we fund, it s now make something agents want. Last month, Cloudflare s CEO announced that bot and agent traffic on the internet exceeded human traffic for the first time in June (57% to 43%). The disparity is only [ ]
The early days of the World Wide Web were a heady time for newspapers.
Despite how different it is from finance, DeFi will need to grapple with three of the same factors that led to the 2007 financial crisis that birthed crypto: yield chasing, musical chairs, and hyper connectedness. In physics, it’s impossible to get away from gravity. In finance, it’s impossible to get away from the market.
If you want your product to be widely used—or to work on projects that won’t be shut down at the first sign of trouble—remember that the user is king.
A few blockchain networks will eventually find a smart user acquisition strategy or game-changing technology (worldwide scalability) or a killer value proposition and start growing.
In Gotham City, Commissioner Gordon uses the bat-signal to summon Batman. The ICO, for all its mainstream criticism, was the bat-signal that attracted so many to crypto. It catalyzed coordination that made cryptocurrency into a mass movement explored not just by cyperphunks, but by everyone.
I’ll make an only partially hyperbolic exhortation: software engineers should write less code.
The freedom of ignorance is a simple observation for entreprenurship: what we don’t know is sometimes as important as what we know.
Like a music fan naively asking “why can't we all just love all forms of rock and roll,” those in crypto asking "why can't we all just get along" miss the impossibility of that outcome. The vitriol is an inevitable result of different early adopter communities composed of clashing viewpoints. And the tribalism has some value in encouraging debate about what the crypto future will look like.
The most common mistake you’ll make is to see engineering media as a mirror of what’s going on in our industry. Instead, it’s more akin to a bazaar.