Vibe-trading digital oil is like vibe-hedging in treasuries during Hormuz risk-off. Both share one house of cards that works on paper.
Difference: oil at least has Dated Brent. Treasuries? Vibes all the way down.
EUCRBRDT Index GP <GO>
Good Products are Opinionated.
âEvery great founder Iâve seen up close, or even from afar, is highly opinionated and theyâre almost dictatorial in how they run things.
Also, early-stage teams are opinionated. And the products they build are opinionated. Opinionated means they have a strong vision for what it should and should not do.
If you donât have a strong vision of what it should and should not do, then you end up with a giant mess of competing features.
@Jack Dorsey has a great phrase: âLimit the number of details and make every detail perfect.�� And thatâs especially important in consumer products. You have to be extremely opinionated. All the best products in consumer-land get there through simplicity.
You could argue the recent success of ChatGPT and similar AI chatbots is because theyâre even simpler than Google.
Google looked like the simplest product you could possibly build. It was just a box. But even that box had limitations in what you could do.
You were trained not to talk to it conversationally. You would enter keywords and you had to be careful with those keywords. You couldnât just ask a question outright and get a sensible answer. It wouldnât do proper synonym matching, and then it would spit you back a whole bunch of results. That was complicated. Youâd have to sift through and figure out which ones were ads, which ones were real, were they sorted correctly, and then youâd have to click through and read it.
ChatGPT and the chatbot simplified that even further. You just talk to it like a humanâuse your voice or you type and it gives you back a straight answer.
It might not always be right, but itâs good enough, and it gives you back a straight answer in text or voice or images or whatever you prefer.
So it simplifies what we looked at as the simplest product on the Internet, which was formerly Google, and makes it even simpler. And you just cannot make a product thatâs simple enough.
To be simple, you have to be extremely opinionated. You have to remove everything that doesnât match your opinion of what the product should be doing. You have to meticulously remove every single click, every single extra button, every single setting.
In fact, things in the settings menu are an indication that youâve abdicated your responsibility to the user. Choices for the user are an abdication of your responsibility. Maybe for legal or important reasons, you can have a few of these, but you should struggle and resist against every single choice the user has to make.
In the age of TikTok and ChatGPT, thatâs more obvious than ever. People donât want to make choices. They donât want the cognitive load. They want you to figure out what the right defaults are and what they should be doing and looking at, and they want you to present it to them.â
Environmentalists spent 20 years begging cows to stop farting and closing coal plants. And AI just walked in and drank their milkshake. â¨â¨And now regular Americans are facing thousand-dollar electric bills.
Crypto isâŚ
Desperate gamblers chasing their first bag.
Investors funding the buildout of the global casino.
Bankers hypnotizing the masses to collect their vig.
âŚall meaningless and ephemeral without the cypherpunks, who defend the dream of encrypted and unstoppable cash.
I turned 40 this year. These are the things I wish I had known at 20.
Starting with...
1. Develop the ability to add and delete habits. Iâve observed that recovering addicts can have an edge on normal people--they have come to the stark realization that change is existential. Change is the price of survival for all of us. (For me, deleting is easier than adding. You might be different.)
Even though I lost a lot on luna, Iâm surprised there arenât more calls to pardon Do Kwon. He built one of the largest crypto protocols ever in public, all top exchanges had UST vaults, and nearly every major VC was active in Luna. The mechanisms were all publicly disclosed and widely discussed. He was def very arrogant at the top and shouldâve listened to criticism and feedback more effectively, but if industry decides to scapegoat him it actually makes it much less likely that it is able to attract higher ambition founders. There are similar lvl failures in every industry, but w crypto now as a founder debating pure ai, other earlytech, and crypto, you have to add on the cost that industry blames specifically you for the ideas that you help bring to market.
This would be the equivalent of jailing Vitalik after the dao hack.