Censorship resistance feels more like an edge case today.
Another way of thinking about it is in terms of digital property rights.

e.g. in the 2000, the deal from social networks was amazing because you’d get free distribution to everybody, hosting, content creation tools…
Relative to the 1980 and 1990s when distribution was very scarce when being on TV was the biggest thing, now everyone is able to stream on YouTube, post on blogger, post on Facebook or what have you.

But as time went on, this has become the standard package and what has happened, is that rather than being neutral platforms, they have a huge thumb on the scale. Downgrading in search results, YouTube Adpocalypse… people don’t have a share in what they are creating and don’t have control over their digital presence, which become more and more important as it becomes a larger percentage of your life.

An interesting question to ask: What percentage of your waking hours a day do you spend in front of a computer. That is more than 50% for many people, specially information workers.

Most of your remaining life will be spent in the Matrix, and if you don’t have root over the Matrix (if you can just be locked in a box and all the doors are closed and money is taken away, and you’re silenced), that’s actually possible if somebody has root.

Against being totally powerless, the alternative is to have control and have economic rights. Control means private keys, and economics also means private keys. It's both the freedom and the prosperity. People focus on the freedom in the sense of censorship resistance, but is also the prosperity in the terms of digital property rights.

Crypto creators will be such much bigger than Internet influencers because they will get a much bigger cut on what they create. Millions of people are not getting a cut of what they create. When they do, they will share so much more of it, and it's going to be more useful because they’re going to do it in exchange for cryptocurrency and not simply likes, and It's and so on.

One should appreciate how hard it is to build centralized companies and also appreciate that it is very difficult to have something where you got a loop that has been optimized for being addictiveness for many people, and it’s dinging some much time and to having that compensated in some way. 

One bad part would be that things can become too transactional. On balance though there’s some good to that too. But even that can be positive, given that some much in social media currently is empty posturing and some much is hostility. This is because it would incentivize people to behave more positively when there are more mechanisms for economic alignment instead of a zero-sum status. But that is clearly a negative. Also, when everything has a price, you’ll see a lot of things that you didn’t thing about as being priceable, like sentiment (memes, hashtags) so you’ll be able to trade against that.

On balance, it’s good to add some degree of scarcity to the mix here because otherwise it is hidden, and it only exists as root in someone's servers, so instead put that back into people’s hands.

The single most important field is crypto identity (ENS, Solana names, Orbit …). We’ll need another term other than “Connect Wallet”, as it sounds like it will drain your money, but that portable identity is way more important that people think because when identity becomes portable, backends become liquid. When you can log in to a new service as easily as you load a new webpage, that means that the ice blocks (Twitter DB, Facebook DB), those become liquid and can flow between platforms, potentially as easily as just clicking. 

It's like the transaction with analog and digital cameras. Even though they were worse than its counterparts, they were more convenient, so they got used a lot and improved a lot.

One's Web3 identity hits that flipping, when it has millions of users, when series are build for that first (maybe around late 2030), then you can have for instance a crypto phone, and you have identity fundamentally with the private keys (all money, digital property), then digital exit becomes much more powerful because digital services need to fight for their bread because they don't have lock in.

The most scarce resources per decade:
- 2000 - Bandwidth
- 2010 - Attention
- 2020 - Blockspace
- 2030 - Loyalty

There needs to be Vampire attacks on web2 services like (Intagram, Twitter, Facebook). When tokens are integrated into social networks, they become more of a digital tribe.

In the west, people react with apathy and then panic.

The first web was the open web and Google could index that, it’s actually very difficult to do it, but it's possible with crawlers and so on (many technical difficulties in allocating the right bandwidth to each crawler and telling when should a side be recrawled - Cisco algorithms). Crawling is complicated because there are many formats, you’ve to do wrapper induction, it's a database populated page, how do you know you got all of it, how do you know you’re not breaking the web app when crawling it, etc.

The social web is even harder to index because it sits in Facebook's, Twitters… servers and they don’t want to let you index it. LinkedIn actually lost the “high five” case where scrappers can now in theory index LinkedIn, but they are still not making it easy. In theory, you can do a data export but really is not just data but also your identity and your connections - your social graph - as an individual (is your community, your subculture).

What people don’t get about blockchains is that up until this point they have been basically hosting financial data. It didn't look like web1 or web2 data, meaning HTML pages or social pages. But now it's starting to as blockspace increases (DeSo, Mirror, Capsule Social, orbit, …). Essentially you have decentralized storage of posts and identity and other kinds of things. This radically simplifies indexing. One simple proof is that everybody    can set up something like btc.com or blockchain.com or blockchair.com (block explorer), and already billion dollar companies have been built as block explorers (ehterscan.com). Indexing is easier and therefore searching is also easier because instead of pinging the sites, and all the crawling complications, you get it all pushed directly to you with new blocks.

Now with people singing the content they create with the ens or other identities, you have digital signatures as a first class feature. That is huge, and they are open. 

A big chunk of Google nowadays are actually queries for many recent events. They don't show all the historical stuff - hard to find it. That means that their index is highly biased towards open state platforms (because they’re less than 1 yo). A large fraction of Google will move to new clients. They are much more vulnerable than what people think because the whole scope of what they index and the difficulty of indexing it may just get transformed. This is a redefinition of the problem because search has just become easier, it has got more signals, Google doesn't have the core competency around it.

New kinds of social networks will be built, and many of them will invoke finance as a first class feature (because you can assume that every user has a balance). The backend change to a web3 social network is so challenging, that people might just do is to have almost exactly the same front end that we’re already accustomed to (client), and then put all the energy into innovating in the backend and making that actually work first.

Crypto creators will be such much bigger than Internet influencers because they will get a much bigger cut on what they create. Millions of people are not getting a cut of what they create. When they do, they will share so much more of it, and it's going to be more.

Balajis on distributed social networks.

The bits that matter:

1. **Vision and mission**
2. **Speed**
3. **Product Customer Fit**
4. **Product Market Fit**


## Mission and vision

**Mission**: Why do you exist, other than making money? Higher-order purpose. Clear on what would be better afterward.

**Vision**: What does the future look like because of you?

Why do you need those things:

1. **Decision-making** if everyone knows the end goal there's less existential debate.
2. **Your brand customers** will know what ideas they're signing up to, what do you stand for?
3. **Your employees** you want a team inspired by the shared purpose, not just the revenue growth or monthly metrics.

## Speed

A startup is a business designed to grow fast. You should be moving at neck-breaking speed. You should be very uncomfortable with things moving at a normal and fast pace.

Companies that ship fast always outperform.

What are the ingredients of speed:

- Culture
- Tooling: Bring value to customers and increase our ability to do that fast.
- Focus
- Process

>Fast gets good before good gets fast


## Product customer fit

Your product must be **loved** before you can tolerate being **liked**

Forget all the hacks, optimizers, and multipliers. **Product Customer Fit** means that "for a given customer, do they use our product every time the problem occurs and does it solve the problem **<u>every</u>** time.

**Jobs to be done:** The more you understand the problem, the more the solution becomes self-evident. How to understand your job:

- **Interview your users**: Break the interviewees into different specific groups of people.
![Screenshot 2022-02-22 at 11.15.30.png](https://jamalavedra-blog.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/Screenshot_2022_02_22_at_11_15_30_5fb76b8b78.png)

- **Scope your product:** Make a storyboard on why someone would start using your product. i.e., What happened so that you needed to start using our product, What did it feel like to start using our product, how did you know that our product what the right one for you, what was your definition of success, do you ever think you'll stop using our product. Use this to set up metrics that matter.

![Screenshot 2022-02-22 at 11.15.40.png](https://jamalavedra-blog.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/Screenshot_2022_02_22_at_11_15_40_2041369a46.png)

- Pick metrics that matter. The real question you want to know is, **do they use my product every time it matters**, meaning **what is the expected problem frequency or the trigger that causes me to use it.**

When X happens, I use Y, every X I use Y. How many unique users have fully adopted your product. Are you fully solving the problem? You have product customer fit when some amount of unforgiving customers use our product every time they need it can help them, and it solves their problem completely.

## Product Market Fit

You have a repeatable, reliable, and efficient way to reach the people who have the problem your product solves.

On the marketing funnel, you should start at the bottom with the happy paying customer and work your way up the funnel

![Screenshot 2022-02-22 at 11.19.06.png](https://jamalavedra-blog.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/Screenshot_2022_02_22_at_11_19_06_040dc6a4b3.png)

How people buy your product:

1. Problem-based They search by the description of their problem.
2. Category-based: They search by the solution category.
3. Competition-based: They want a better version of what they currently have.
4. Brand-based: They want you!

**Disclaimer**: _These are a set of notes I took from listening to Des Traynor. They don't fully represent his thoughts as some of these might be rephrased to something I understand more clearly._


## Notes

1.  [Why startups succeed](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oh4sA47XpR0)

Notes on what Des Traynor (co-founder of Intercom) thinks it takes for a start-up to succeed.

Des Traynor on why startups succeed

Just some random thoughts I got today after hearing the latest episode of King of Kings from Hardcore history. From its definition of an ambitious The earnest desire for some kind of desire or distinction, such as power, honor, fame or wealth, and the willingness to strive for its attainment.

I have the intuition that remarkable individuals are born, sure. But they are also blessed by a set of circumstances that allowed them to develop their ambition to their full potential.

Before the information age, coined from the “Sovereign Individual”, it feels like the places where this person could appear were always constraints to what civilization happened to be in the eye of the hurricane. There are countless examples of this: Alexander the Great, Xerxes, Julius Cesar to name a few.

This is because even extremely ambitious individuals are constrained by the local maxima they believe plausible, therefore crippling their expectations.

Now in the information age, these hyper-ambitious individuals aren’t only constrained to where they live but rather have the possibility of learning what everyone else at the top of civilization knows, which in theory should make the likelihood of an extraordinary individual appearing from wherever. I’m not sure this is the case though.

I have the intuition that remarkable individuals are born, sure. But they are also blessed by a set of circumstances that allowed them to develop their ambition to their full potential.

About hyper-ambitious individuals

Zoom fatigue is a real thing. A lot of meetings are now lasting much less, like a turbo meeting of around 7 minutes. A lot of meetings are getting replaced by written culture (asynchronous communication). People just post and say what they are going to do that day, no need to meet every morning for a daily stand-up. People are finally realizing that reading is 2x as fast as listening, and if your culture really wants to speed up you move to a written culture, an asynchronous culture where business moves at speed of thought

We're realizing that we can just send a Google Doc that aligns our thinking and if we take the time to write it well, there's no point in talking. And that's time saved, even though it takes longer to write the doc, if it deletes the meeting, that's a win. There's still a bit of fallback to Looms where we narrate the piece, which is also working. People are trying to avoid meetings, it pisses people off.

Having meetings mainly for socialization. Avoiding and clarifying meeting slides through other async tools as Slack allows for higher-level discussions in the actual meetings. It's fascinating because people miss co-workers, and want to see them hang out. But, the fact that people are happier around their families on their own schedule makes a lot of companies double down on the work from home paradigm.

This clearly doesn't work for everybody. The effect that this has on mentorship for people that are young in their career will be something to be determined. At this point, changing companies is like changing between tabs in the same browser, because none of these policies are unique. The idea of company identity is lost and people are starting to regret this kind of stuff. All these evangelists that claim they know how to make hybrid work, still haven't figured it out themselves.

Moving to deliberate social gatherings is very valuable. Especially because they're an opportunity to replicate the camaraderie moments. The cost of leaving a job where you haven't met anybody and you have no fabric or real-state in the company other than the transactional nature of compensation is as low as ever. In a way, there's something lost there, as you didn't get a chance to bond with a group of people.

The written culture also forces a lot more for people to be self-managed (and have more ownership over what they produce), which means that the middle management roles aren't as necessary.

For people that will want to go back to the office, they'll let them go back. For remote and hybrid workers, I believe we need to make a distinction on performers. There are mainly three levels of performers in organizations:

Hight performer

Middle performer

Low performer

Every company gets a percentage of each. For low performers between 10% and 20%. For anybody that is a real contributor, no one will care whether they're at home or office. For anyone in the middle that has the potential to become serial contributors, low average or below average, there's the possibility where a two-class system will come into play where for an average performance that has high potential and the company wants to invest in them, it might be hard to do that remote and wouldn't have the option. A-list players would get to pick, anywhere in the middle have to go to the office or the company chooses.

In the upcoming months, everyone is going to go back to the realization that workspaces have good air conditioning, nice food, and are purposely designed for work with nice meeting rooms. People are going to love it initially. The appetite is there, as the employees realize that designers optimize offices for work and there's something useful about that. So there'll be an initial storm back and that's fine. Still, fully remote workers will continue to be fully remote.

Companies will have to make a decision on what's the threshold for doing that, as you don't want a junior person that is super inexperienced and needs a lot of mentorships and wants to learn from the more senior engineers, it's going to be harder to do that from a bedroom somewhere.

The next stage is when everything nourishes back, these 3 days a week thing is going to be complicated. That's because we're going to realize that we want a team behaving the same schedule. if there's like 6 people in a room and a person on the dial-in, that's messy as they have different bandwidth conversations.

They'll need to agree on a schedule like, Mondays and Tuesdays they go to the office, and after that work is dished and everyone knows what they're doing and there's no need to contact regularly (you move to async). Teams will need to set an operational cadence themselves.

I suspect is going to be three months after everyone is back to normal that people are going to realize what we need to do. That moment is going to be a bundling between fully in-office, fully remote, or the hybrids (where they'll need to agree on the days).

You can't just dabble with remote, once the more senior people aren't in the office all the time, the shift to written culture becomes mandatory. It's either that or losing time in meetings.



We're realizing that we can just send a Google Doc that aligns our thinking and if we take the time to write it well, there's no point in talking. 

My thoughts on the future of work

Every software company that ever was, has always said, _“our product is intuitive and easy to use”._ The reality is that every one of them lies. Here’s what happens for a human to use software: from the thing that you want to do, you need to translate that intent into a set of actions (drag and drops and swipes) to make the software do what we intend to do. E.g. You’re in photoshop and say that you want to remove the background, you should just be able to say “remove the background” from this image. If you’re in HubSpot you should be able to ask “how many people have signed up for our product in the last 90 days.

You should be able to just type that question in because that is your intent. You should be able to express the thing that you want, and the technology should be able to figure it out. We have the technology now on the language side to be able to understand languages, and all we really need is a translation layer.

This is a megatrend to be, which is bigger than mobile. Mobile added the translation from what you used to do on your desktop, now you can do it from anywhere. And this enabled a bunch of new use cases.

This thing is; that thing that you have been trying to learn, that software layer in which you never got good at because you never had the time. Now a billion people can use that piece of software that wasn’t even possible before because they don’t have to learn to clicks and drags to make it work. They can express the thing they want, and the software can do it.

If you were an enterprising VC is choosing the categories where this will have the biggest impact (business intelligence, reporting, B2B software is a natural fit). The beginnings of the consumer side would be with things like Alexa, but the B2B world is open to making the thing actually intuitive and make it do what I want.

That magic trick → You just do this and that and get the result that easily. Like waving a wand and getting a surprisingly good result. Once you see it, you can’t unsee it. So that when you see it, you can’t watch at the products that don’t have it in the same way.

Google is kind of this magic genie where if you give it a set of questions, it tries to come up with the answers. If this can actually be done, this is the next level to Google in that you can ask it any question, and it doesn’t just give a set of pages where the answers might be, but it actually tells you the answer.

Check out this demo of using Codex as a search engine: [https://mullikine.github.io/posts/search-the-web-with-codex/](https://mullikine.github.io/posts/search-the-web-with-codex/)

It turns out that many tools out there (Google Calendar, Microsoft Word) all have internal APIs to build plug-ins around them. So there is a sophisticated way to control these tools with these internal APIs. Today, if you want to make new more complicated behaviors from these products, you need to add a new button from every new behavior. It is possible to use Codex and tell, for instance, your calendar to schedule a meeting next week after 2 pm. It would then write the corresponding piece of code, which is the thing that you ultimately want. No need to hard code each interaction, but rather Codex can take each API on the fly.

Every software company that ever was, has always said, “our product is intuitive and easy to use”. The reality is that every one of them lies. Here’s what happens for a human to use software: from the thing that you want to do, you need to translate that intent into a set of actions.

future_of_human_computer_interactions.png

Hey, I'm Jaume 👋

Balajis on distributed social networks.