Tuesday, June 28, 2022

28: Ukraine, NFT, Diversity

The Garden of Magic Eden How the newest NFT unicorn has mastered scale through transparency, creativity, and community ...... Today, Magic Eden attracts over 20 million monthly unique visitors. ........ The platform retains the vast majority of market share and is typically responsible for over 95% of daily Solana NFT volume. ....... This all despite the fact that Opensea, the market incumbent, launched support for Solana NFTs in April—an event widely predicted to be a “Magic Eden killer.” ......... . “They haven’t necessarily done everything right, but they are always adapting and reacting to what the community needs.” The company even has its own term for this building philosophy:

“Twitter-Driven Development.”

........... startups are mirrors of their founders, from the cultural values they codify to the expectations they set through example ........ In a landscape dotted with scams, Magic Eden is deliberate in putting in place measures to prevent bad actors and manipulation. ......... one gets the sense that keeping Magic Eden running is like tending to the boilers of a steamship, where constant effort is necessary to keep the business propelling forward. ....... being authentically web3 over web2 (prioritizing community input over centralized decision-making) ......... All four co-founders are immigrants to the US (Jack, Zhuoxun, and Sid are Asian-Australian; Zhuojie lived in China until coming to the US for graduate school). Zhuoxun’s early childhood was spent in Malaysia, until his mother moved the family to Australia when he was five. ......... Each of the founders has their own story of deviating from the path of least resistance to arrive at their current positions. For Zhuojie, that meant diving into a new programming language and learning blockchain development from scratch when he took on the role of Chief Engineer. “I was curious about Rust (the programming language of the Solana blockchain), web3, NFTs, crypto, and running a startup,” says Zhuojie, recalling his reactions after getting the call from Sidney to help start Magic Eden. .......... Jack takes the opposite stance, arguing that Magic Eden ought to feel similar to using a web2 app while remaining web3 at its core ........ One of the challenges Magic Eden faces is scaling as a fast-growing, remote-first startup while maintaining strong company cohesion. The team is globally distributed, and building culture while remote is something that the founders spend a lot of time thinking about. “We’ve had success hiring from our own networks, but we need to cast the net wider and search for talent in different places,” Sidney said. ....... Solana’s wedge of fast, low-fee transactions could be eroded by a similar experience on Ethereum that also offers better security. .......... Today, most NFT marketplaces focus on the transaction itself, while the initial stages of creating purchase intent or sparking inspiration happen on other platforms like Discord and Twitter. The user experience is clunky and disjointed: users have to check multiple platforms to discover, communicate, transact, and connect, leaving an opportunity to build a more cohesive commerce experience that reflects the social activity happening around NFT purchases and ownership.

Unbundling Work from Employment The internet and rise of micro-entrepreneurship ....... A 2017 McKinsey Global Institute study showed that 20-30% of the working age population in the US was engaged in independent work, and that the proportion of such work mediated by digital platforms like Uber and Etsy was growing rapidly. .......... YouTubers, podcasters, and gaming livestreamers who’ve monetized digitally-native hobbies ......... teachers, salespeople, farmers, chefs, and personal shoppers. ....... Freshbooks’ 2019 study on self-employment found that the primary motivations for those pursuing self-employment were non-financial: most individuals seek a combination of freedom, fulfillment, and career control. ........ humans are driven by autonomy (desire to be self-directed), mastery (urge to improve), and purpose (desire to do something meaningful)—all of which independent work can facilitate. ......... direct payment models have made it viable for workers to earn a livelihood from even a small number of loyal fans; and platform companies in the gig economy and passion economy have paved new paths to work. ......... Substack has enabled writers to more easily earn income from writing, and Blok.fit and Playbook have enabled fitness instructors to run a virtual business. ........ Given that the online creative economy is growing at nearly 20% per year, verticalization is becoming an increasingly viable strategy as each vertical grows larger. And, in particular, COVID is an accelerant to new vertical platforms as nearly half of the US is jobless and seeking new, turnkey ways to earn income through end-to-end digital platforms. ......... Podcasting has been around since the early 2000s, but Anchor, a podcast platform launched in 2017 that simplifies podcast creation, was reported to be powering 70% of all new podcasts as of Q1 2020 and believes that its monetization platform effectively doubled the number of podcasts running ads. ........... Shopify, which has stated that its mission is to “make entrepreneurship more accessible,” doesn’t just superficially enable the creation of an online storefront, but offers deeper functionality tailored to e-commerce merchants: a dedicated network of fulfillment centers, merchant cash advances, marketing & SEO, etc. This focus on the e-commerce vertical has enabled it to build a $114 billion business, blowing past horizontal website builders like Wix that also offer e-commerce functionality (market cap of $14 billion, as of 7/28/20). ............. In the local services vertical, Dumpling gives personal shoppers everything they need to run their own grocery delivery businesses, including a fully-funded credit card for purchasing orders, professional website, client-facing app, and business coaching. ......... For micro-entrepreneurs, the tradeoff of independence is a de-risked company environment for learning, pivoting, and risk-taking— ......... On Substack, individual newsletter writers are already self-organizing into subscription bundles, and some are hiring teams and further professionalizing their content, effectively re-bundling into a new media organization (albeit, with a significantly different cost structure). ......... Despite myriad attempts by startups to create better video consumption experiences aligned to a specific vertical, YouTube remains unbundled because it aligns to consumer usage patterns: there’s a large base of casual consumers who want to watch diverse content across categories, rather than visiting various destinations for different content verticals. As such, YouTube is an indispensable horizontal platform in the ‘entrepreneurship stack’ that supports independent creators across a variety of industries, from financial experts to unboxing video creators. ............... 22% of self-employed workers have multiple revenue streams, compared to 11% who work for an employer



Toys, Secrets, and Cycles: Lessons from the 2000s 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.

........... The National Academy of Sciences ranked the internet 13th in its list of great inventions over the last 100 years, beneath radio and telephones ........ At the same time, there was a small but growing movement of developers and founders who were excited about the idea that the internet could be more than a read-only medium – that it could allow anyone to create and publish, to not only read but also write, as we said back then. This movement became known as web 2. The runner up name was read-write web. ......... there's a strong correlation between rich product design spaces and what smart people find interesting ........... Another striking thing about that period was how small and passionate the web 2 community was. I remember in 2004 going to what I think might have been the first New York Tech meetup. ......... Sometimes I get asked how I first met old friends like Fred Wilson and Alexis Ohanian. The simple answer is there just weren't that many people, especially on the east coast, who were interested in these topics. We all knew each other. ........ But people were very focused and excited. The feeling was that a revolution was brewing. We knew a secret and the rest of the world hadn't figured it out yet. ......... Yahoo was considered a savvy company, and said they were making web 2 a core part of their strategy.......... The basis of competition switched from creative idea generation to disciplined execution. You had to decide whether you wanted to be the idealistic band at the indy bar or be pragmatic — potentially making compromises — and play in stadiums. .......... By 2007, things were looking up for web 2. Among other things, Facebook passed 10M users, Twitter was growing and had just gotten VC funded, and Google acquired YouTube. .......... from a startup perspective, the 2008-11 era turned out to be a golden age. Apple released the iPhone app store in 2008 and by 2009 talented founders were pouring in. The mobile app revolution was in full swing. .......... Almost all of today’s top mobile apps were created by companies founded between 2009 and 2011, including Uber, Venmo, Snap, and Instagram. .......... even if social, cloud, and mobile each improved linearly, the combination could improve exponentially. ........ My belief is that the best place to look is crypto and web 3. ......... Things that look interesting to smart people usually do so because they are rich with product possibilities. These possibilities eventually become reality. Toys become must-have tools. Weekend hobbies become mainstream activities. Cynics sound smart but optimists build the future.



Diversity & Friction friction is one inevitable result when any organization – a company, a non-profit, a government agency, or a military unit – accepts more diverse members into its ranks. ......... When individuals in the group no longer have the same shared backgrounds, perspectives, and life experiences, those emerging differences can generate friction, discomfort (not unlike the discomfort that can come with sudden silence), and even conflict. ......... Denying friction in a diverse organization is akin to Victorians denying sex. It doesn’t go away; it just comes out in other, unexpected, and possibly counterproductive ways. ........

diversity plays an essential role in counteracting groupthink. But volumes of literature also reveal how resisting groupthink creates conflict.

.............. Diverse perspectives fuel creativity. ........ tension and friction – ideas and people rubbing against each other. It comes from conflicting visions of how the world works coming into contact. These collisions generate heat but also light .......... Organizations stagnate without friction. They become sterile, boring, conformist, and risk-averse. Or the friction erupts, but without warning, in the form of conflicts that can sap morale, cause talent to leave, or even create legal threats, public relations disasters, or customer relations nightmares. ............ continuous learning alongside fellow workers and constant negotiation with those colleagues. .......... The best teachers don’t deliver or download knowledge. Instead, they provide scaffolding so that students construct their knowledge. ......... Diversity & inclusion lectures often devolve into a class where neither pupils nor students want to be. .......... Charged topics like diversity and conflict can often best be approached indirectly. It lowers the stakes for everyone involved. It also helps the learning feel less like a chore. ........ Play is so essential to humans and animals. It is how our young brains develop the patterns and tools we will need for the rest of our lives. It is also how we learn about conflict. Play is thus deadly serious. ........... Play is also – obviously – joyful.

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