Reid Roman

Building the crypto on-ramp for organizations @RuckusFi – follow along

[Reid Roman @realReidRoman]

We may have to swap to more equity/outcome-based comp to get people productive with token budgets. Are tokenmaxxed salespeople seeing uncapped upside?

[Reid Roman @realReidRoman]

Hot take: AI if it doesn't replace jobs will still break the labor/comp model. Employees mostly don't get paid to be smart, they get paid to do a job. Infinite tokens means slightly more productivity and lots more personal time...

[Dwarkesh Patel @dwarkesh_sp]

In medieval times, within the arms race of ever more demonic torture devices, some sadistic genius came up with the idea of the Little Ease.

This was a prison cell built so small in every dimension that a grown man could not stand upright in it nor lie down at full length nor properly sit.

The pain is relentless and without relief and inflicted by one's own body. Prisoners were known to go insane within a few days. A stay at the Little Ease was considered even more cruel than the rack, the thumbscrew, and the other ghoulish machinery of the Tower of London.

A breeding pig will spend her whole life in a version of that box.

These are social, roaming creatures (more intelligent than dogs) who will never leave this corset of steel.

They have been selectively bred to be bigger than their frames can support. Yet we put them in cells so confined that they cannot comfortably sit, and their attempts to do so (for example, by sneaking their limbs into adjacent stalls) reliably lead to fractures and sprains.

They cannot sweat, yet have nothing to roll around in to cool themselves off. Except their own manure, which (contrary to the common misconception) they are so averse to (thanks to their strong sense of smell) that new sows will often suffer from constipation to avoid soiling the space from which they eat and sleep.

Here is how the writer Matthew Scully described what saw at one of Smithfield’s “gestation barn”:

> “Sores, tumors, ulcers, pus pockets, lesions, cysts, bruises, torn ears, swollen legs everywhere. Roaring, groaning, tail biting, fighting, and other “Vices,” as they’re called in the industry. Frenzied chewing on bars and chains, stereotypical “vacuum” chewing on nothing at all, stereotypical rooting and nest building with imaginary straw. And “social defeat,” lots of it, in every third or fourth stall some completely broken being you know is alive only because she blinks and stares up at you … creatures beyond the power of pity to help or indifference to make more miserable, dead to the world except as heaps of flesh into which the [insemination] rod may be stuck once more and more flesh reproduced.”

—

The Save Our Bacon Act is trying to unroll the few state protections we have against this barbaric cruelty - for example California’s Prop 12 - which banned the sale of pork from pigs kept in gestation crates.

It’s incredibly important we don’t end up with this sort of federal preemption.

SOB will not only kill the most important animal welfare related laws in the US of the past decade, but more importantly, it will also restrict ALL future legislative progress (aka how the animal welfare movement has gotten its biggest wins).

The Senate is currently deciding whether to add the SOB Act to the Farm Bill.

With relatively little money now, we can discourage the most pivotal senators in the Ag committee from backing this amendment.

Defeating this bill is even more important given the amount of philanthropic funding I expect to come online in the next year or two.

It will plausibly be over 10x more expensive to repeal SOB than to prevent it from passing in the first place.

All that money that could be spent transforming our society's relationship to mass animal suffering will instead have to be spent just getting us back to where we are right now.

That's why money spent now fighting this bill (and I mean right NOW) is so effective.

If you’re in a position to donate six figures, please DM me.

[Scott Stevenson @scottastevenson]

Another reason I’ve been unphased by VC pitch weirdness is: high performance looks weird

And it looks weird in founders too—you want investors on your side who understand that

The world of mediocre performance is designed to create a sense of order, surface level politeness, predictability, warmth

When you push to the extremes of performance, and operate from first principles, the outcomes look alien to many people

It takes weird people to operate at this level

The last person you want on your board is a conformist bureaucrat who doesn’t understand the extreme chaos of running a high growth startup—because the reality will scare them and then you’ll have to put on a performance to manage them—distracting you from getting any real deliberation done

This dynamic is not super obvious because very smart, very weird people have a lifetime of practicing seeming normal on podcasts, in public, etc.

But in the environments where these people get together—it’s a totally different wavelength of communication, chaos tolerance, contrarianism, intensity

As a founder you also need to be able to identify weird and spikey people in hiring

It’s super important to understand how to work with these people and to understand why they think the way they do

It usually does not come from a bad place—it comes from consequentialist ethics and extreme optimization

[Peter H. Diamandis, MD @PeterDiamandis]

If self-driving cars are 8x safer than human drivers and we refuse to deploy them because of one bad case, we are choosing to let hundreds of thousands of people die per year to protect our feelings about control.

[Reid Roman @realReidRoman]

2023 predictions, published in all humility: https://t.co/BNUZrXcVoZ

[Reid Roman @realReidRoman]

Harder to imagine paying $500k for someone else's monkey pixels when you can make your own at home

[Reid Roman @realReidRoman]

Do you think NFTs would have hit as hard if AI art had hit first?

[Reid Roman @realReidRoman]

The best way to predict the future is to tweet about it

[Reid Roman @realReidRoman]

I'll claim all great brands are great for having delivered on one of these three.

[Reid Roman @realReidRoman]

I got a hypothesis on branding: the best brands create the environment for customer self-actualization, they're the world in which we find meaning. There's a pretty mapping between the three components of human motivation and three instrumental brand-building techniques

[Reid Roman @realReidRoman]

Autonomy: Platformization - giving people tools, space, suggestions to play, create, customize, personalize, and compose.

[Reid Roman @realReidRoman]

@NotionHQ can I request a feature for centralizing all my contextual to-dos, or at least searching for them by block type. Like this: https://t.co/DrISem3Nco

[Reid Roman @realReidRoman]

Dreaming about aliens #stablediffusion

[Reid Roman @realReidRoman]

Final thought: if you build in public you can get some free publicity (https://t.co/ltfXSxqOLO among others).

[Reid Roman @realReidRoman]

Should I build in public? Threading personal considerations:

[Reid Roman @realReidRoman]

Cap table publication might be a carveout. A lot of web3 project participation is conditioned on anonymity. And both investors and founders don't like deal numbers leaking.