Uncategorized (why is this even here?)

Startups are hard as hell.

It needs a founder so motivated, they have to walk through fire.

High intensity and high risk are combinations human beings aren’t made for.

In these environments, i’ve observed founders are generally motivated by:

• Money / Power / Status / Fame, all external factors
• Mission, which is internal motivation

i maybe biased, and do point out if i’m missing on an angle or any datapoints.

But for now, i like working with mission-driven founders.

That means your ‘why’ is so strong, it will carry you through the hardest times.

Dream. Desire. Death. Take any word. It is just a marker on a spectrum.

Similarly, with all variables, I think human society is on a spectrum with each of them.

Change happens as Pendulum Theory dictates.

Seeing everything on a spectrum is the only way to understand the universe.

Knowing which direction we’re headed on the spectrum is the way to improve one’s life.

This movie is different every time I watch it.

Today, I think it is a clear example of the fact that cogs in the wheel keep operating regardless of the direction.

This is because we have come to revere the naivete of a worker. In fact it has been encouraged and admired by every piece of literature in the last millennia. So much that the answer ‘I was just doing my job’ has become a sufficient excuse for not thinking of larger society.

Punishment, not just for bad actors but those who do not act to stop these adverse attacks on social consensus, should be stricter. Bad decisions and it is my job without thinking of the larger consequences should not fall in the purview of morality but under the umbrella of law.

Maybe there should be a clearer demarcation between the free and the cogs. This difference has been blurred by the free folks out of worry of revolt. But its time to accept that. Information asymmetry is reducing. And that means the only asymmetry that will exist in the future is that of effort, judgment, and risk-taking.

Measuring effort and judgment should give us a clear picture of who is free and who is a cog.

This will solve a lot of problems and I’m sure some people will be happy to be on either side, their roles clearly defined, and maybe oscillate between the two in phases too.

PS: Law may just be the worst layer of consensus we use, even parliament seems better. It is leaky, is narrow, and is an effective net to frustrate the masses.

Almost every hacker I’ve met, I can categorize into two types:

• One who complicates stuff
• One who simplifies stuff

I don’t know why someone would complicate stuff. But if I were to guess, it would be to mask some kind of insecurity.

Maybe this applies to every profession. Plumbers, doctors, chefs, etc.

#sidenote, I’ve got to write about this unique American disease of regurgitating technical specs for being seen as smart. Very wisely depicted in Chuck Lorre productions.

People like Paul Graham have my utmost respect because he simplified hacking for a lot of people. He doesn’t try to make it seem like an arduous task. The others are just standing in the way of innovation.

Paul Graham is rare because society rewards those who “sound technical” + people without insecurity are a rare breed in themselves.

I’ve learned not to want for things. The only thing that I’ve ever wanted was to move to a higher-stakes table. This enables me to see the world from a higher plane and learn more, faster.

So either I was to chill and read a book or play the game with the sole aim of moving to the higher stakes table. There is no mid-ground.

Unlike popular thought, a higher stakes table is not just measured in $ or BTC. It is measured by the access you have to other minds. Think Gandhi could write a letter and talk to every great mind of his time.

So I imagine, I should be in a position to be able to write to someone like Peter Thiel, Peter Diamandis, Bob Dylan, Chuck Lorre, Vince Gilligan, or Paul Graham, and jam on ideas. Just like sitting at the same poker table.

There was a time in my life when I thought the only way to achieve this was to make a lot of money or to get famous.

Yes, those are means to get to the tables where stakes are much higher. But I discovered something very simple that I am implementing currently.

Two things that people at the high-stakes tables have that most people don’t. The higher you go, the higher the need for truth and courage.

Sounds simplistic but my current thesis is that truth and courage will take me there. This means I do not lie, to myself or to others. And that I have the courage to stand for what I believe in, speak the truth, bear consequences for what I do, and admit when I’m wrong.

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There is just too much murk when it comes to lying. It occupies too much of our brains, it directs and distracts us from anything that is real. Higher the stakes, lower the tolerance for dishonesty of any kind.

And, the biggest problem in the world may not be poverty of things but the poverty of courage. Without courage, how do I know if the other person is even real or not? Are they yes (wo)men? I just don’t have the time to deal with this.

PS: I do not think high-stakes tables are poker games. They’re actually marshmallow challenges. And those at the top have these two unsaid rules before they admit one to their team.

I have seen a lot of my friends raise money in web2. Way back in 20120-15. 

I have seen a lot of amazing possibilities die for the fact that the founder was expected to live a frugal life, riding their bikes in Mumbai traffic, having to build their own websites, and broom their own offices.

This was expected.

Then I see the shittiest of ideas raise multi-million $ funding in the Valley.

It reflects the lack of risk-taking culture in our investors.

This should not happen. And that is why I work at BuidlersTribe (as opposed to sitting on a beach) to make sure these possibilities do not die a premature death just because founders could not live a good life or could not raise capital.

Raising capital has become synonymous to burning money to acquire customers. Like Uber, Swiggy or Tomato. But that is not the only thing.

Good founders are mostly raising money for paying their devs, for hiring good community folks, and that should never be a problem.

And although we’re no kingmakers yet, I work towards a world where one day, I can mobilize so much capital for good founders that they get to buidl at a level-playing field on a global scale.

PS: Everyone who is thinking of Zoho, please read about survivorship bias before commenting.

— v0.9 [[web3]] [[money]] [[value]] [[draft]]

I have a friend who has friends everywhere in the world. He has been traveling with a laughable budget, Couchsurfing, and volunteering for over 6 years now. His bank balance is nothing. He mostly works on Couchsurfing reviews and just personal charisma. But if you check his bank balance, you’d say he’s poor.

My dad has been running a traditional trading business for over 30 years. Sits in a 10×10 feet office with 5 phones and manages a business running in large $ figures today. But he hardly brings much home. His bank balance should have been 10x with the work that he does. But if he calls, the biggest manufacturer in his business, they will give him any amount of credit without any collateral. Way beyond his and your net worth. Why? Because he has never cheated anybody in his entire career. Never taken a shortcut. In his business, everyone knows this.

Another friend of mine gets access to high-stakes poker because he just has a way to make rich people happy. He is an insider to a table to which most expensive watch owners couldn’t get access. He hears things that amaze me.

This is how the world was supposed to work. Before hyper-capitalism tried to boil all of this down to money.

Money became the store of value.

But what is value?

It is what a person brings to the table and what they achieve with it. It is the effort, skills, knowledge, trustworthiness, and respect combined into one sign: $. Of course, there were other decent attempts like certification for credibility, awards, credit ratings, etc. But there is hardly any correlation to real-life stature without over-simplification.

Value is now fluid. It cuts across thousands of tokens, NFTs, wallet-based identities, openly verifiable credit ratings, and land holdings in the metaverse.

This creates a perfectly competitive market for value.

I theorize that there will be a token denomination of trust, legacy respect, charisma, vibe (which translates to access), and many other vague terms.

Being rich will be a combination of these. Only having $ or Bitcoin in a wallet will not cut it.

— v1.2 draft [[proof-of-work]] [[value]] [[future]] [[big-problems]] [[grants]]

2021 saw the legendary $ENS airdrop. It was worth $12000 when I tried to claim mine. Then we saw OpenDAO airdrop $SOS token. Then $YEAR and now Anish Agnihotri has just given out the tools to do this without much effort.

This was common in the previous bull run too. I saw some random tokens airdropped to my Binance account.

My way of evaluating these projects is to see the amount of effort they put in.

The ENS team has been buidling for a long time. They drove adoption based on solving a problem for users, not by “incentivizing” using their token.

When we say proof-of-work, people usually see it as Bitcoin’s consensus mechanism. Proof-of-work is actually any reliable proof that someone has put in the effort.

Imagine if we measure the cumulative attention (or even time) spent by everyone working on ENS and compare it to the cumulative attention by $SOS team and publish it trustlessly.

I’m sure the gap is wide.

Real Proof-of-work

Satoshi took electricity as a unit of work. But in our world, the only real units of work are:

• Attention (!= Time)
• Reputation: Cumulative quality of their past work, as assessed by their peers/society

Attention x reputation is the real proof-of-work.

When we will be able to measure those trustlessly, we should be able to determine job pays / salaries more reliably.

Risk

The only thing missing here is the variable of risk.

Some people are taking more risks than others and should be compensated accordingly.

Truly speaking everyone’s value in this world’s large ledger should be:

Attention x reputation x risk.

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The world owes a lot to someone like Nikola Tesla but we weren’t equipped to measure these things before.

This may be one of the most important problems of our times.

To align:

The value created by an individual for society = the value that society gives them back (another gamut to be figured out. Maybe includes status, perks, wealth, who knows!)

Friction between these two currently includes a ton of people and the opacity of markets. Performance reviews are yuck. Employee time cards != attention. Degrees != reputation (too much variability/noise).

We have the technology for solving one side of this equation. Who is buidling this? What do you think is missing here? Please let me know.

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Unbaked thought: I think a combination of these three is the triangle of leverage. This is how someone like Hemingway or Nikola Tesla created immense value for society.

I’ve followed Matt Mullenweg since I discovered WordPress in 2006. It is almost like I know him. Most people don’t but he was the first one to create a ‘lean startup’, have remote work normalized, stuck to open source even when everyone from 0-1 SV gurus to Steve Jobs preached complete control and dominance.

There was a time, I will admit, that I felt WordPress was losing its edge. I saw my friends move to Joomla, I re-aligned my company to Drupal because that’s where big money was, enterprise applications were.

Then came along Wix and Webflow and all the cool tools.

But whenever I had to build something, my gut moved towards WordPress. I still cannot pin down why.

I installed the first version of the WazirX blog, this one is on WordPress and so is the BuidlersTribe website.

It just works.

Some things I’ve seen about Matt’s thinking (from his writings and product decisions only):

• Never took VC money :p
• Always open-source, no fear of copycats or forks
• Never feared competition. Only moat is his focus. Rest will happen
• Made a generation of people their living + got non-coders like me to buidl. Without WordPress, I wouldn’t be in tech. I can safely say that
• Wanted to work on one mission for decades and is still doing it
• Had grand plans at 21. Wasn’t taken seriously. Still underrated
• Powered the internet silently

The guy is just wise. Wisdom is scarce in tech.

Most people don’t know this. Many in tech have foretold the death of WordPress a few times now.