Ryan Williams

Operator, angel investor, startup advisor. In previous lives: Jopwell (acq ‘23), Goldman Sachs, Wharton.

[Ryan Williams @ryanswilliams]

@BrilynHollyhand “Loathe” was on your word of the day calendar I assume?

[Lee (Greater) @shortmagsmle]

Accidentally re-inventing “thinking” from first principles

[Ryan Williams @ryanswilliams]

@elonmusk @CommunityNotes Your DMs are about to blow up…

[Pardon My Take @PardonMyTake]

“Your outie loves the Knicks”

[Deva Hazarika @devahaz]

Gotta say I’m starting to feel good about Sheel’s chances here

[Ryan Williams @ryanswilliams]

@beffjezos Robbed or supported this administration? 🤔

[Ryan Williams @ryanswilliams]

@bscholl @garrytan And it’s disappointing because otherwise this administration seems to make logical, sound decisions 🤔

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

There's a physicist at Stanford named Safi Bahcall who modeled this exact principle and the math is wild.

He calls it "phase transitions in human networks." When you're stationary, your probability of a lucky event is limited to your existing surface area: the people you already know, the places you already go, the ideas you've already been exposed to. Your opportunity window is fixed.

When you move, your collision rate with new nodes in a network increases nonlinearly. Double your movement (new conversations, new cities, new projects) and your probability of a serendipitous encounter doesn't double. It roughly quadruples. Because each new node connects you to their entire network, not just to them.

Richard Wiseman ran a 10-year study at the University of Hertfordshire tracking self-described "lucky" and "unlucky" people. The single biggest differentiator wasn't IQ, education, or family money. Lucky people scored significantly higher on one trait: openness to experience. They talked to strangers more, varied their routines more, and said yes to invitations at nearly twice the rate.

The "unlucky" group followed the same routes, ate at the same restaurants, and talked to the same 5 people. Their networks were closed loops. No new inputs, no new collisions.

Luck isn't random. Luck is surface area. And surface area is a function of movement.

The lobster emoji is doing more work than most people realize. Lobsters grow by shedding their shell when it gets too tight. The growth requires a period of total vulnerability. No protection, no armor, soft body exposed to the ocean.

That's the cost of movement nobody posts about. You have to be uncomfortable first. The new shell only hardens after you've already moved.

[MacFredesque 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 @FredTaming]

[reading a book in first person] i dont remember doing any of this

[Peter Girnus 🦅 @gothburz]

My net worth peaked at $1.2 million.

None of it was real.

I don't mean that philosophically. I mean it was located on servers that have since been turned off.

I own eleven properties in the metaverse. Three in Decentraland. Four in The Sandbox. Two in Voxels. One in Otherside. And a beachfront villa in Horizon Worlds that I bought for $214,000 because Mark Zuckerberg called it "the next frontier."

The frontier closed last week.

It's a mobile app now.

Last year I mass DM'd 340 people the phrase "you don't understand how early we are." I have since stopped doing that. Not because I was wrong. Because most of them blocked me.

I got into metaverse real estate in November 2021. Everyone was buying. Someone paid $450,000 to be Snoop Dogg's neighbor. In a video game. With no legs.

The avatars didn't have legs.

I thought that was bullish. "The legs are coming," I told my Discord. "Legs are a roadmap item." Three hundred people reacted with rocket emojis.

I called myself a "digital land baron."

I put it in my Twitter bio.

I put it in my LinkedIn headline.

I said it on a podcast that had eleven listeners. Three of them were bots. The rest were my alts.

My virtual property has more square footage than my actual apartment.

My actual apartment has furniture.

Location, location, location.

My most valuable asset was a plot next to a virtual Gucci store. Gucci left in 2023. The store is still there. Nobody's in it. It's like a mall in Ohio but with worse graphics and no food court.

I held.

Diamond hands.

That's what we said. "Diamond hands." It means refusing to sell while your investment loses 94% of its value. We turned financial paralysis into a personality trait.

A guy in my Discord paid $2.4 million for a 618-parcel estate in Decentraland. Prime district. High foot traffic. I asked him what "foot traffic" meant when the platform had 38 daily active users.

He said I didn't understand the technology.

I didn't.

I still bought more.

We had a DAO. A decentralized autonomous organization. That means we voted on decisions. There were nine of us. Three never showed up. Two voted on everything without reading it. The other four were me and my alts.

We voted to "acquire strategic parcels."

The vote passed unanimously.

I voted four times.

My portfolio peaked at $1.2 million. I told everyone. I made a spreadsheet. I projected 40x returns by 2025. I made a pitch deck. The pitch deck had a slide that said "WE ARE BUILDING THE DIGITAL ECONOMY."

The slide had a rocket emoji.

That was my entire financial model.

In 2023 I bought a Bored Ape for $189,000.

It's worth $14,000 now.

I don't talk about the Ape.

I still use it as my profile picture. People ask me about it. I say "I'm long-term bullish." Long-term bullish means I can't sell it without crying in a Panera.

My mom asked me what a Bored Ape was.

I said "digital art on the blockchain."

She asked why it cost more than her car.

I said "you don't understand Web3."

She said "I understand you live in a studio apartment."

She's not in my Discord.

Justin Bieber bought one for $1.3 million.

It's worth about $90,000 now.

I felt better about mine after I heard that.

That's community.

WAGMI. We're All Gonna Make It. We said that every day. In the group chat. While the floor dropped. While the volume dried up. While 95% of all NFT collections went to zero.

We're all gonna make it.

None of us made it.

But we said it with conviction and a laser-eye profile picture. That counts for something.

It doesn't.

But we said it did. That's decentralized consensus.

Meta spent $84 billion on the metaverse.

I need to say that again.

$84 billion.

More than the GDP of Luxembourg. More than the GDP of Iceland, Luxembourg, and Malta combined. They spent it on a platform where the avatars had no legs, the graphics looked like a 2006 Wii game, and the peak user count was lower than the lunch rush at a Chipotle in Des Moines.

They just pulled Horizon Worlds from VR headsets.

It lives on as a mobile app.

My beachfront villa is now a mobile app.

Location, location, location.

Zuckerberg renamed the entire company for this. Facebook became Meta. A $900 billion company changed its legal name because the CEO watched Ready Player One and said "I want that."

Reality Labs lost $10 billion in 2021. $14 billion in 2022. $16 billion in 2023. $18 billion in 2024. $19 billion in 2025.

That's not a strategy. That's a speedrun.

They laid off 1,500 Reality Labs employees this year. Shut down three VR studios. Killed Supernatural. Put the entire VR social vision in a casket and said "we're pivoting to AI and wearables."

The pivot took four years and $84 billion.

I pivoted too.

I'm an AI real estate investor now.

I bought a virtual plot in an AI-generated world that doesn't exist yet. The founder said it was "the intersection of spatial computing and large language models."

I don't know what that means.

I gave him $40,000.

He has a whitepaper. It's 47 pages. I read the title and the tokenomics section. The tokenomics section is a pie chart. I love pie charts. They make everything look like a plan.

The project has a roadmap. Q1: "Build community." Q2: "Launch beta." Q3: "Scale ecosystem." Q4 is blank.

Q4 is always blank.

That's where the exit scam goes.

My accountant asked me to value my metaverse portfolio for tax purposes.

I said $1.2 million.

He said "current market value."

I said $6,400.

He stared at me for eleven seconds.

I know because I counted.

He asked if I had any other investments.

I showed him my NFTs.

He stared for longer.

I told him they were "cultural artifacts with long-term provenance."

He asked if I'd considered a 401k.

I told him a 401k was "legacy finance."

He told me to leave his office.

The metaverse is dead.

I don't accept that.

I am a digital land baron. I own eleven properties across four platforms. I have a beachfront villa in a mobile app, a plot next to an empty Gucci store, and a cartoon monkey that cost me more than my actual car.

Location, location, location.

The location is nowhere.

But I'm early.

I'm always early.

That's the same as being wrong except you get to say it with confidence.

[sigfig @sigfig]

people misunderstand the icarus story. the problem was not that he flew too high. it's that the wings were made of beeswax, which offered very little resistance to heating. with modern materials he would have had no problems. we can fly as close to the sun as we want now

[Ryan Williams @ryanswilliams]

@nickshirleyy than*

[Christian Keil @pronounced_kyle]

My preferred definition of "ARR" is your single-highest grossing minute of the year, times 525,600

[Ryan Williams @ryanswilliams]

@jgebbia We’re at war

[Ryan Williams @ryanswilliams]

@philippilk Sabotage? 😂 😭

[Ryan Williams @ryanswilliams]

@Acyn

[Ryan Williams @ryanswilliams]

@JohnKasich Bruh

[Ryan Williams @ryanswilliams]

@JDVance 😂

[Ryan Williams @ryanswilliams]

@NickAdamsinUSA 😂 yea, okay

[The Green Dragon Tavern @greendragonhq]

If trained officers can’t stay calm during a 7 on 1 arrest, how do you expect a citizen to stay calm when he is being punched, disarmed, maced, and shot?