Crypto wallets are hard to use because of seed phrases. Users forget to back them up or can’t access them on new devices. Small mistakes can leak the phrase and lead to a loss of funds. Passkeys have been proposed as an alternative because they are automatically backed up and harder to leak. But they are built on WebAuthn, which was designed for website authentication, not for presenting and…
Advice for small teams searching for product market fit Avoid side quests If you aren’t writing code or talking to users, it’s a side quest. People will rope you into a lot of these so learn to decline them politely. Remove bureaucracy Your team should have a maker’s schedule 1 and one short standup daily. Don’t cargo-cult into big company things like sprint planning and writing product specs.…
Imagine that you wanted to build a sufficiently decentralized Twitter — a social network in which no single person or company is in control. How would you build something like that? A social network is decentralized if it has many servers run by different people. The data would be spread across servers, so you’d need a simple way to answer questions like “What are the latest posts?”. This is where…
If you’re joining a startup and want a good financial outcome, there are two critical things to get right. Ensure that there is some probability of an IPO and that your stock won’t expire before it happens. Unfortunately, most equity advice is bad and distracts people from these two important points. The most insidious advice is “don’t join a startup for the money.” It discourages people from…
Every year, centralized social networks place more restrictions on what users and developers can do. They seem to believe that limiting choices is the path to a healthy network, while the opposite is probably true. A decentralized social network can challenge this hypothesis by making two powerful promises that centralized networks cannot. They can guarantee that users own a direct relationship…
Crypto protocols are changing the defensibility of financial businesses. Network effects are becoming weaker, while brand effects are getting stronger. New moats like stakeholder ownership are coming into play. If you’re building in crypto, you should know what these moats are, how to create them, and how to compete against businesses that have them. Network Effects Traditional exchanges could…
Once upon a time making money by being evil online meant going after big companies. Today, you can make more by going after individual people. We all have bank accounts and social security numbers online that can be stolen and resold. Attackers make hundreds of dollars on this information and sometimes even millions . You don’t have to be a celebrity to be a profitable target. We’re all becoming…
When I was at Coinbase in 2017 we found ourselves going through hypergrowth with a codebase that had racked up quite a bit of tech debt. The results weren’t pretty: frequent outages, unhappy customers, and sleepless nights. We learned the hard way that a small part of our debt caused most of the problems. The trick lay in figuring out which part that was. Let’s start with a definition: technical…