Facebook and Google Block Russian State Media, Crypto Exchanges and Sanctions – Stratechery by Ben Thompson
Facebook and Google bans probably don’t make much of a difference in the short-term, but will be a challenge in the long-term. Then, the structure of crypto drives a different response.
Amazon Launches Luna, Apple and Russia – Stratechery by Ben Thompson
Amazon launches its streaming gaming service with a Prime tie-in; then Apple stops selling hardware in Russia, but didn’t take down the App Store. Both make sense.
Things You Should Never Do, Part I – Joel on Software
Netscape 6.0 is finally going into its first public beta. There never was a version 5.0. The last major release, version 4.0, was released almost three years ago. Three years is an awfully long tim…
Investing in Startups With the Series 65 · Accredited Investor · Natecation · Natecation
From studying for the exam to registering with the SEC — my foray into investing in startups and venture capital by passing the Series 65 and becoming a licensed investment adviser representative.
You’re lucky that I ain’t the president Cause I’ll push the f*#king button and get it over with F&$k all that waiting and procrastinating And all that goddamn negotiating — Bushwick Bill, Fuck a War Tom Hagen: Mike, why am …
There are only two ways to make money in business: One is to bundle; the other is to unbundle. So the idea behind unbundling of Airbnb is simple: Pick a niche use case with passionate but unsatisfied guests and then build a business around it.
The original version of the Web based on high-quality organic hypertext links is long gone. It has been largely replaced with captive silos of information targeted at keeping users within walled gardens to the maximum extent with links to external content being marginalized in order to keep the user engagement the highest. Social networks are […]
You probably need to do fewer things right now. Prioritization, the other definition There’s two loose definitions of prioritization. Prioritization(1): Ordering a todo list. You make a giant list of things you could do, things you should do, things you’d like to do… and then you put a unique number...
How Chris Dixon’s Dive Down The Crypto Rabbit Hole Made Him The World’s Top Venture Capitalist
The a16z crypto partner is the Midas List’s new no. 1 for 2022, and the venture industry’s most visible, and often controversial, face in the wild west of tokens and NFTs.
Clayton Christensen claims that Uber is not disruptive, and he’s exactly right. In fact, disruption theory often doesn’t make sense when it comes to understanding how companies succeed …
Power Laws & Normal Distributions in Crypto's Future
Power laws rule everything around us. This is a core principal of what we have largely come to learn in a world dominated by this narrative, which has also helped proliferate the concept of Asymmetric Upside. Within traditional tech/Web2, due to the compounding nature of moats (most notably network effects) and duopolistic markets, it is […]
“Developers, as you know, do not like to pay for things”
Cockroach Labs has many things going for it. The company’s approach to distributed database technology is novel, and it has the potential to gain significant market share internationally.
There is an art to engineering and sometimes engineering can transform art. For Spencer Kimball and Peter Mattis, the two worlds collided when they created the open-source graphics program, GIMP.
How engineers fought the CAP theorem in the global war on latency
The founders of Cockroach Labs wanted to ensure data written in one location would be viewable immediately anywhere on the planet. The use case was simple, but the work needed was herculean.
Scaling CockroachDB in the red ocean of relational databases
CockroachDB’s success is not guaranteed. It has to overcome significant hurdles to secure a profitable place among well-established database technologies owned by companies with very deep pockets.
The pathway to more widespread web3 adoption starts with familiar web2 onboarding user journeys before branching out further with with non-custodial wallets.
AI is coming for source code generation. But for the boring stuff. I'm not talking about machine readable or intermediate code generated by compilers (although AI is coming for that as well), but human-readable source code generation. These models will provide the glue between layers to seal up leaky abstractions. And the leakiest abstractions are first. Take for example generic REST or gRPC API client/servers. It would be a pain to plumb through each request/response pair for each language w
> If you are to do important work then you must work on the right problem at the right time and in the right way. Without any one of the three, you may do good work but you will almost certainly miss real greatness. Richard Hamming No magic answer will guarantee that all three conditions are satisfied. But, by making a series of 95% confidence bets and gathering more data along the way, you can quickly find seemingly impossible futures. A first principle cannot be deduced from any other axiom