Nate

Building systems for growth

[Nate @nate2xk]

A future state is coming faster than you can imagine.

[OpenAI @OpenAI]

This is GPT-6 Astra.

Anything you can do on a computer, Astra can do for you. Fast.

[Nate @nate2xk]

A treasure chest of strategies for anyone looking to land their first startup job or break into tech. True gems inside.

[Soumitra Sharma @soumitra_sharma]

I realized too late in my career that we all need to learn sales, irrespective of our profession or vocation.

In 2019, after more than a decade of what would be normally called a successful career track (pedigree, logos, scale, $$$), I went back to the drawing board and started self-training myself in sales (& marketing too) from scratch.

I can vouch that every point in this top @hackernews post on “How to do sales?” is true, and amazingly distilled to its simplest essence.

So much so that I have printed it out, kept it on my desk, to be reviewed each day.

Btw, it’s a real travesty that top universities and early-career jobs hardly provide any practical sales skills or training to young talent. I have seen this both in the US and India, and it’s a major gap in our learning systems.

[Sahil Bloom @SahilBloom]

Underrated career advice: Choose to work in a place with high talent density early in your career.

You tend to rise or fall to the level of the people around you. When you work with exceptional people, you absorb their standards, pace, frameworks, and instincts almost through osmosis.

High-talent environments compress learning cycles and force you to grow faster than you would on your own. They change your opportunity set and rewire your brain. The compounding effect of a few years in that environment can change the trajectory of your life.

Early in your career, there’s probably nothing more valuable than choosing the room with the highest talent per square foot.

[Nate @nate2xk]

Patience is key to unlocking long term growth.

[Startup Archive @StartupArchive_]

John Collison: We only had 50 users two years after founding Stripe

“We started working on Stripe in the Fall of 2009, and we launched Stripe in September 2011,” John Collison reflects. “I remember right at the beginning when we were starting it I said to Patrick [Collison], ‘Yeah let’s do it. How hard can it be?’ Which gives you a sense of our mindset. And the answer was: two years of difficulty. We had not predicted that.”

John remembers feeling dejected when Stripe only had 50 users two years later:

“When you spend two years getting 50 users, it doesn’t feel like a whole lot of progress. It feels like things are going pretty slow.”

But this is one of the challenges of startups, he argues:

“If you’re working on a startup that’s a bad idea, it’s going to feel like slow-going. But if you’re working on a startup that’s a good idea, it may feel like slow-going too.”

Yet slow growth has a silver lining:

“I think the thing that allowed us to take off in the subsequent years was the fact that since we were spending so much time on each one of those users; since we were hyper-focused on building a great product; and since we weren’t dealing with problems of scale yet, that allowed us to build the product that we wanted. Part of the culture that set in really early on was taking abnormally good care of those early users.”

The Stripe founders would get an email or phone call anytime a user ran into a bug. When they sent the customer an email moments later alerting them that the bug was now fixed, people’s minds were blown.

They set up a Campfire room that any customer could join and use to message John and Patrick at any hour of the day or night. And if a user was based in the Bay Area, the founders would invite them to come by the office and help integrate Stripe for them.

In the Stripe dashboard they would prompt their customers for feedback and feature requests. Then the Stripe founders would reply to that feedback within 10 minutes.

“What this meant was that even though the user growth was happening quite slowly in the early days,” John explains, “it actually had a pretty surprising viral effect where people had a good experience, they told their friends about it, and we were able to spread entirely through word-of-mouth even to this day.”

[Nate @nate2xk]

Most marketing teams don’t have a growth problem. They have a coordination problem that prevents scaling.

From the top it looks like “We need more contributors and more content."

So teams add:

More influencers
More ambassadors
More posts

But internally? Everything is fragmented:

1. Intake is everywhere - Applicants live in forms, spreadsheets, and notes

2. Execution is scattered - Tasks are assigned in Discord, Telegram, and X

3. Review breaks under speed - Quick approvals but mistakes slip through

4. Payments become operational risk - Wrong amounts, incorrect addresses, compromised addresses

If your system can’t clearly answer:

Who did what
Where was it approved
When was payment sent
What impact was generated

You don’t have scalable growth.
You have scalable chaos.

[Nate @nate2xk]

@camiinthisthang Building a creator tool that enables you to scale growth fast.

[Nate @nate2xk]

@WatcherGuru Safeguards? Or will this be like riding a roller coaster with no safety harness.

[Nate @nate2xk]

@jonahlau_ Running small squads with massive leverage is the way forward.

But the systems to coordinate that scale of work will matter even more.

[Nate @nate2xk]

@totofinance Definitely a lesson in there.

[Nate @nate2xk]

@sytaylor Interesting product but more importantly what is the target market for this BaaS?

[Nate @nate2xk]

@AlsieLC @DoorDash @tempo When payments move at this scale, the bottleneck shifts to coordination and accountability. That’s the real leverage point.

[Nate @nate2xk]

@xrpl_commons Rare level of depth here.

[Nate @nate2xk]

Most content is engineered for dopamine.

This is built for actual ecosystem exploration.

[XRPL Commons @xrpl_commons]

It’s HERE ✨
The DeFi edition of the XRPL Community Mag is now live. 🚀

What’s inside:
→ 🧭 Why 2026 is the turning point, not the beginning
→ ⚖️ How stablecoins, RWAs, and permissioned infrastructure are converging
→ 🪶 Institutions quietly choosing on-chain rails
→ 💡 Perspectives from builders and product owners
This isn’t a trends report. It’s a map — written by people with skin in the game.

👉Read it now: https://t.co/PJXfp9RANW

And if something in it changes how you think about DeFi, tell us in the comments. We read them.
Grateful to @krippenreiter , @evernorthxrp , @CryptoQueenAU and all the contributors who made this issue what it is.

Copy by @zsofi_b2 Zsofi Borsi
Design chilli drop.
Illustrations @Brosmind

[Nate @nate2xk]

@jojoliciosa Very on point. Curious to know what type of referral programs delivered the most value for you?

[Nate @nate2xk]

@aliciapeas @cryptocom 👏🪩

[Nate @nate2xk]

@parisrouz @GuiBibeau Docs works until coordination + payouts kick in. That’s the gap I’ve been building for.

[Nate @nate2xk]

@coreapp @BlackholeDEX @PharaohExchange @pangolindex @SierraIsMoney Strong playbook tying incentives to onchain app actions and ecosystem exploration.

[Nate @nate2xk]

@AvgJoesCrypto @coinbase Lifecycle messaging campaign automation gone wrong.

1. Segment to only users with related event actions.

2. Setup push limits and delays.

Easy fixes.

[Nate @nate2xk]

Everyone talks about growth. Few talk about managing it.