Exploration, Web3 Skepticism, and other things

Notes on Exploration

I keep trying to learn about web3 and crypto, some days I wonder why, and then I am reminded “…be careful about being too quick to filter out topics because you quickly judge them as boring. Don’t have a fixed mindset about it. There’s interesting stuff everywhere…”

First explore, then exploit. I am definitely in exploration mode these days.

A good reminder to not limit exploration to current media, much of which will be forgotten, but to dive deep into writing from the past and material off the beaten path.

I am not sure what the Internet of Bio-Inspired Things or the Internet of Biological Things are, but I am intrigued.

Write more often, and write more succinctly. Good advice, writing is an integral part of exploring and learning.

I still haven’t found the best tool to document my explorations for myself and for sharing. I am using a rube goldberg arrangement of markdown editors, cloud storage, and github pages for publishing. Some more good ideas here about capturing hunches.

Web3 Skepticism

Delian Asparouh, a VC at Founder Fund, says it well: “a tragic misallocation of talent”. That is my general feel at the moment, web3 is to tech as the CDO spree of the 2000s was to finance.

Anil Dash makes the point that much of the existing web started out with a very open sharing model, but commercial entities drove it in a different direction for commercial reasons, and a bunch of new protocols and technologies won’t change the commercial motivations and behaviors. Web3, if it succeeds, will end up with a bunch of new dominant players (who may just be the old dominant players).

Seth Godin is pushing a DAO for voting in the broadest sense. There does seem to be something in the web3 idea of open and programmatic governance, tho the web3 adherents need to dramatically simplify the stack of concepts.

Random

So Microsoft is a metaverse company. I recall in the mid-90s when Microsoft started talking about the IAYF vision. In about 42 nanoseconds the word was coopted by everyone, the Microsoft corporate library announced an IAYF app internally which was just a vb frontend on some db. The grand vision became meaningless. If you are going to invest a lot of corporate energy into a word, you should probably make sure the word is distinctive and can be owned by your corporation.

Let the Market Worry for You — espouses the view that there are a ton of people thinking about risks, and that this is therefore all priced into equities, and therefore you shouldn’t let risk concerns keep you from participating in the market. An interesting view, tho largely formed during an era of sustained market growth.

I did not know that the Wizard of Oz may have been a comment on monetary policy.

Quitters get raises. Long known in the tech industry, interesting to see the broader data.

McDonald’s Theory. Great brainstorming hack.