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Toys, Secrets, and Cycles: Lessons from the 2000s
June 27th, 2022
I started my internet career in the early 2000s during the dot-com bust. It's hard to picture this now, but the internet was a thing that people used only intermittently, to check email or plan travel or do some research. The average internet user spent about 30 minutes a day online, compared to about 7 hours today. To use the internet, you had to sit down in front of a desktop PC and "log on" (most people still had dial-up), nothing like the always-on, high-speed mobile internet we use today. In 2001, Amazon's stock price hit an all-time low, with a market cap of $2.2B, about 1/500th of what it is today. A prominent research firm published a study asking Americans if they'd adopt broadband and the majority said no. Email was the most popular internet use case and they didn’t see the need to make it faster. The National Academy of Sciences ranked the internet 13th in its list of great inventions over the last 100 years, beneath radio and telephones. The mainstream consensus was that the internet was a cool invention, but had limited use cases, and probably wasn't a good place to build a business.
Collected web3 twitter threads
March 19th, 2022
Some reasons to build your startup in web3
March 19th, 2022
Web3 offers advantages across product, marketing, economics, ecosystem, and ethos.
Embrace and extend
March 19th, 2022
Bill Gates had a very clever tactic for responding to open alternatives to Microsoft proprietary tech.
Web3 critics misunderstand decentralization
March 19th, 2022
The key question in web3 is whether the network effects accrue as private goods (as they did in web2) or public goods (as they did in web1).
How web3 reduces the power of centralized services
March 19th, 2022
The economic power and overall control of centralized services built in web3 will be limited by the lower switching costs due to data portability.
NFTs and ownership
March 19th, 2022
NFTs work with the internet instead of against it, increasing the abundance of creative works while allowing creators to get properly paid for their work.
Blockchains and performance
March 19th, 2022
The performance delta between computers that can make commitments (blockchains) and computers that can’t (Google/AWS servers) will shrink over time.
Seven types of NFTs
March 19th, 2022
NFTs are new digital primitives, similar in flexibility and generality to past digital primitives like the website, and they take many forms.