DK (₿/acc)
@dksf
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#bitcoin/nostr freedom student, early googler, always curious, @foundersysk emcee
Joined April 2007
1/ I love to connect people when it's a mutually beneficial intro, but I always request that the asker send me a "Clean Email" so that I can clear the intro with the prospective connection. What is a Clean Email ™.🧵👇.
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i love how Steve Jobs has the candidate signature section of this offer letter say “I accept this insanely great offer !!!”.
*1989* offer letter for working w Jobs at NeXT looks better than some startup offers I've seen in 2022
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1/ I was thinking about some of the things I've changed my mind about in the past 10 years. Here's a list:.
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1/ As a founder you should spend all of your time on the unique things you can do which no other human on the planet can do. Corollary: You should spend almost no time doing stuff which is already well understood by someone else.
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@mikiebarb Also, I don't think we know enough about long-term outcomes outside of mortality yet. Severe or permanent damage to the lungs, for example?.
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1/ As a young engineer coming to silicon valley 18 years ago I misunderstood the leverage of organization building.
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1/ A lot of smart people get excited about ETH because of all the great developer talent around the project. "Follow the developers" is an oft-cited reason to be optimistic for the future of Ethereum.
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Why are IDEs mostly run on local machines?. Seems like there would be lots of advantages to being able to run a full professional dev environment as a remote desktop in a cloud environment. Big implications for collaboration, security, remote teams, etc. Who’s working on this?.
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We’re shutting down Highlighter, Inc. [I'm publicly sharing this note which I shared with our investors, friends, and supporters last week]. I’m writing to let you know that we’re shutting down Highlighter, Inc. I’ll cover:. 1. A brief history of our work on the company.2.
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What are the best examples of paid, online membership communities?. 1) @theinformation by @Jessicalessin .2) @farnamstreet by @ShaneAParrish .3) @stratechery by @benthompson . What else is good?.
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1/ I like looking back to the early writing of some now-famous bloggers. These aren't meant to poke fun at authors' dated thoughts, but, rather, to show that these now-big-voices have grown out of humble beginnings:.
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I've got a WhatsApp group where we're discussing remote/distributed team issues. If you're currently building with a remote/distributed team and want to share/learn DM me for a link to the group.
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If you're ever hosting a webinar and you want more people to attend, I suggest you don't call it a webinar.
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11/ I'm willing to change my mind about almost anything given the appropriate evidence.
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@unusual_whales we'll also be renaming the following. New Mexico -> New America. Mexican-American War -> American-American War (sounds so civil, no?). Cinco de Mayo -> Pluto is a Planet.
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1/ My guess at who will dominate the "last mile" to our homes in 10 years:. 1) Waymo. 2) Amazon/Whole Foods. 3) Uber. 4) A new restaurants-as-a-platform (RAAP) company (it's a tricky "idea-maze" to navigate properly, but I think this is the emerging one to watch./).
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6/ The interface by which people access a technology is still where all of the value accrues. What interfaces will we use?.
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Thoughts to a very early founder via email today:. If you don't have conviction don't do it. DON'T let someone talk you into it. If you do have conviction, maybe do it. DO let someone talk you out of it. With thanks to @eladgil for suggesting the email should be a tweet. 🙌.
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1/ A thread on “Fireside: my startup that will now not launch”. TLDR: We spent the past 6 months building a tool to help people create live call-in shows together (a.k.a. “talk-radio”). It was called Fireside. Based on the “go live together” Periscope launch this past week. .
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In silicon valley we love finding those under-developed, yet ambitious outsiders. So I open up my first connection from @LambdaSchool and the resume says the following: "PROFESSIONAL POKER PLAYER. over $3 million in live tournament earnings". 🤯. cc @Austen.
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6/ But I think the reality is that, while doing great work is hard, there is another very challenging and critical skill at play: attracting, filtering, and convincing great people to come together to work on a shared mission.
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5/ When I get connection requests like this I act on them immediately. <fin>.
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1/ A lot of smart people help us think about the market size of the non-sovereign monetary store of value use of #bitcoin. Often it is related to "digital gold" (@wences, @jlppfeffer) with est of $8T market cap or "the offshore banking system" (@AriDavidPaul) with est of $20-30T.
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2/. 1. Forwardable subject (i.e. not "Great to hang, DK!").2. Focused, customized blurb explaining the purpose of this potential intro -- no mention of other topics/ideas we may have discussed.3. No strange formatting.4. Has a single email signature from the asker.
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In my DMs today I learned (credible source) that @producthunt played a big role in Notion getting early traction (which came with their "2.0" launch). @rrhoover - do you have a list of the products which attribute a large part of their initial success to PH?.
As a "startup-historian", I'd love to hear more about the @NotionHQ early traction story. Was there a breakout use-case that really helped people figure out the magic? Was there a community of early adopters who were using it together for a shared purpose?.
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1/ Recently, @jamescham and I were talking about a very successful founder. James exclaimed to me "how is he so darn smart?". While the founder has raw mental horsepower, the magic of a super-success is in the compounding effects of access to everyone else's "best 10 minutes".
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1/ Decentralized Social Media just had its "Netscape Moment". 1990s - DNS, IP, TCP and HTTP -> Netscape.2020s - Nostr -> Damus.
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5/ I remember hearing Johnathan Rosenberg (VP at Google at the time) saying that "hiring great people is more important than your actual job". This always rubbed me the wrong way, because, in a sense it sounded like a multi-level-marketing scam.
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Silicon Valley: Remote work is the future! 🚀. Open Source: Welcome to our past 30 years! 🤷♂️.
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1/ One of the reasons Silicon Valley has a tough time with Bitcoin is that we are accustomed to seeing technology with multiple winners at every layer.
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1/ Contrarian blockchain hypothesis: the best projects of the future will look like the best seed companies of today in many ways.
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I think I'm understanding @jimmysong's work better now than I did before. This may be among the highest leverage activities for accelerating Bitcoin's success. Thank you, sir! 🙇♂️.
@F0nta1n3 @kanzure @TheBlueMatt @pierre_rochard @dksf @_jillruth @johnloeber @morcosa @suhasdaftuar @LukeDashjr @_jonasschnelli_ @MeshCollider @pwuille @jfnewbery @jamesob @murchandamus @skeees @eklitzke @orionwl @practicalswift @achow101 @jimmysong One option is self-study. @jimmysong course and (draft) book are open source.
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Congrats to @pdavison and @rohanseth for inventing something fresh and exciting!. They’ve experimented for years to bring something magical to the world. And best of all it couldn’t happen to nicer people!.
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nostr is going to be the primary way people onboard to the lightning network
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7/ I used to think silicon valley had a near-monopoly on the best technical talent. Now I think exceptional talent lives all over the world and can't always move here (for a variety of reasons). (👋 @toptal, @trygigster).
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Couple smart, young entrepreneurs I know building an at-home digital fitness product. 65% m/m revenue growth this year and shelter in place has been a huge boon. Wanting to connect with seed/angels to put together $1m. Who's interested in this kind of thing?.
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1/ Some of the riskiest places for #coronavirus transmission are the places which 100's of people touch each day. I put together a collection of visuals to help you proactively think about if/how you will interact with these surfaces.
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Today is my 20 year Californiaversary!. I came because I always wanted to work on startups.
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1/ Bitcoin development suffers from the "free-rider problem". A bunch of people got really upset with @naval for pointing this out recently. I think he's articulating a reasonable characterization of a problem we collectively face in accelerating future Bitcoin development.
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Why don't I hear more people exploring San Diego as an option when talking about leaving SF and the rise of remote work?. Seems to be all about LA, Seattle, Denver, and Austin.
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Also, Bitcoin is an excellent starting point for learning about Austrian economic theories! (cc @real_vijay).
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I would be absolutely delighted if we look stupid 3 months from now for having bought too many canned goods.
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If you're new to consumer investing here are some tips:. My Background:.1) I've founded/sold a zero-to-one consumer startup that reached 45 million users,.2) I've built multiple multi-million user consumer apps from zero,.3) I've invested in dozens of consumer companies from the.
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5/ I'm not claiming to predict exactly how Bitcoin fits into our lives 10 years from now, but "digital gold" and "offshore banking system" are merely starting points for the analogies of what Bitcoin can replace and that are understandable given where the technology is today.
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7/ If those people come together with a shared mission they will figure out great ways to contribute. In fact, if you filter properly, great people don't need a lot of "management" and "structure".
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3/ Part of what Google taught me was the leverage of systematized focus on "building a machine" that can attract, retain, and help coordinate the work of hundreds or thousands of people to build things together.
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1/ I'm building a tool to make reading long-form books more collaborative. I'd love to hear more about your current habits.
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1/ A lot of people hypothesize about ways to "build a better YC" (accelerators, incubators, etc.).
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When I say "the blockchain" I mean a specific one: "the Bitcoin blockchain". i.e. the one with the most hashpower/security, longest history of immutability, most decentralization, etc. Some mistake this language to mean "enterprise software" or a token thing. 🤦♂️.
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Loved this episode of Venture Stories. I'm not sure if it was the articulate thinking from @rabois or the fact that @eriktorenberg has really perfected his "FM radio voice". 😅. Either way, give it a listen:.
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1/ We're proud to do a small part to encourage people to stay inside and self-quarantine. Self-Quarantine Book Club is a community on Slack where book lovers around the world come together to discuss what they’re reading. As of today we're opening it up for more people to join.
1/ In an effort to create more human connection in these challenging times we built the Self-Quarantine Book Club:.
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1/ Censorship Resistant Non-Sovereign Monetary Store Of Value is a simple Bitcoin utility which doesn't require that I find the other participants to transact with to get utility (though I must believe they exist). It's functionally similar to a single-player mode for Bitcoin.
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The best job opportunities are often not posted online -- you have to know someone involved to even know about the existence of such opportunities. Has anyone built a private networking tool for helping companies/candidates meet like this?. cc @julianweisser.
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@anuatluru I've been thinking I should make a spreadsheet listing my top 20 or so friends and just randomly call them from time-to-time. haven't done this yet, but might be part of a new-year-new-me kinda thing.
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People who are good at building “audience” often think they’re good at building “community”, but these are very different practices.
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6/ I used to think that remote teams were used by entrepreneurs who were unskilled at recruiting local teams (or too cheap!). Now I have more direct experience working with remote teams and have found it game-changing in the "hypothesis testing stage" of building.
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It's crazy that more founders don't subscribe to the @rabois philosophy here.
Lean Startup is a dumb & bankrupt philosophy for mediocre people w mediocre vision & ambition. job of a founder is to paint a picture of a better world & then deliver that. It’s not to study the world, ask people what they want in a better world & then create that - @rabois 🙃
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5/ Cryptocurrency money is likely to be the first ever actual "winner take all" market we see in technology. A single winner at this layer. Lots of value built around it. Lots of opportunity at other layers. But at the money protocol layer, just one.
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We all have our vices:. For some it's alcohol. For others it's biting their nails. For me it's buying too many web domains.
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5/ Instead Linux enabled Google/Facebook to exist. People who are users of Google/Facebook never consider themselves Linux users. But if Google/Facebook had to run Microsoft IIS they would have never been able to build services which scale to serve billions of users.
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We're building "Highlighter - Book Clubs" for people who want to join an open book club for literally any book. Sign-up here to participate in the beta:
I can see some of my twitter time getting substituted by @dksf’s new app Highlighter. The units of organization are both people & books. There’s a decent amount of dunking too. Get in early to become a bookfluencer. V 10.0 would hopefully have deep links to actual book chapters!
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The best way to search for Tweets is to use Google, not Twitter to execute the search. Here's how:. Google with this syntax: "site:[query]".
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1/ I agree with @Alex_Danco that angel investing can be motivated by both 1) financial returns as well as 2) social status. I have been active for a decade and been the fortunate recipient of some of each of these. However, I think he misses the most important one for me. .
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MSTR's "Speculative Attack" was proposed by @BitcoinPierre over 10 years ago. with @moneyball and @maxawebster
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I'm finding @golden to be a better source than @crunchbase for learning about startup companies' financing history. They don't paywall the free information which is generally available, but doesn't happen to be organized well. 👏 @judegomila.
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Voices in #crypto that provide very high signal relative to their audience size on Twitter. You should follow them now:. @ljxie .@moneyball .@dwr .@eiaine .@_jillruth .@wheatpond.@katie_haun .@AriannaSimpson .@Melt_Dem .@lsukernik .@avichal.
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Has anyone built a personal finance tool like for crypto to help people track yields, ownership, etc. across services?. Seems like a lot of people would use it.
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"The best way to learn secrets is to never share them.". I would credit the author, but I suspect anonymity is desired. 😉.
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