Neil

Rushing to get a wire transfer initiated to arrive the same day is a terrible feeling - no control on the final outcome especially right before a holiday weekend. Beyond antiquated process but lucky for us, it's on the precipice of being disrupted

derek thompsons recent article inspired me to read more about alcohol im shocked by the est impact vs current narrative for instance, 7-14 drinks per wk reduces life expectancy by only 6 mos (!!) moreover, the negative effect is possibly offset by gains from deeper friendships

Narrative Capital has always been undefeated, many such cases

possibly dumb question: why is everyone so excited about agentic payments as a growth vector for crypto? giving your agent delegated access to your Visa card seems to work just fine? (i do believe that all debit/credit cards will eventually settle using stablecoins, but that's a stablecoin story, not an agentic payments story)

More AI bubble whispers + nearing peak disillusionment on crypto as an industry presents an interesting opportunity for those that have been straddling the two

Partners from two top US venture firms, Benchmark and Founders Fund, say they are uncomfortable with the current funding frenzy because it reminds them of 2021. “I’m very uncomfortable.....because it feels like we're getting back to a point where prices have become untethered from reality. It reminds me a lot of 2021,” says Trae Stephens of Founders Fund. Everett Randle of Benchmark adds: “The similarity I see with 2021 is that back then there was an almost unanimous sense of optimism because investors were making a tremendous amount of money.” “I think this duality is what defines a bubble.” According to Randle, the last three years will almost certainly become the most profitable period in venture capital history. That’s because SpaceX, OpenAI and Anthropic are generating historic returns for venture capitalists. But their success has also created a sense that everything else will work out. The parallels with 2021 are hard to ignore, according to him. The wave of IPOs from the 2019–2021 vintages generated enormous liquidity, while private companies were being marked up at a breathtaking pace. As investors made money seemingly everywhere, valuations became increasingly detached from underlying fundamentals. One example he gives is that investors began assuming that if a company had reached $100 million in ARR and was valued at $10 billion, it was only a matter of time before it grew to $1.4 billion in ARR and eventually listed at a $30 billion valuation. History suggests otherwise. “The immense difficulty of how many companies that are at $100 million of ARR ever make it to $1.4 billion of ARR..... is just 5% of all companies,” according to Randle. Stephens says that earlier in his career, if he met a company that had gone from zero to $15 million in ARR in three years, he would think, "That's fantastic." Today, he is much less certain.