Dan Sangyoon

In 2026, I plan to be fully back to decentralized social. If we want a better society, we need better mass communication tools. We need mass communication tools that surface the best information and arguments and help people find points of agreement. We need mass communication tools that serve the user's long-term interest, not maximize short-term engagement. There is no simple trick that solves these problems. But there is one important place to start: more competition. Decentralization is the way to enable that: a shared data layer, with anyone being able to build their own client on top. In fact, since the start of the year I've been back to decentralized social already. Every post I've made this year, or read this year, I made or read with firefly.social, a multi-client that covers reading and posting to X, Lens, Farcaster and Bluesky (though bluesky has a 300 char limit, so they don't get to see my beautiful long rants). But crypto social projects has often gone the wrong way. Too often, we in crypto think that if you insert a speculative coin into something, that counts as "innovating", and moves the world forward. Mixing money and social is not inherently wrong: Substack shows that it's possible to create an economy that supports very high-quality content. But Substack is about _subscribing to creators_, not _creating price bubbles around them_. Over the past decade, we have seen many many attempts at incentivizing creators by creating price bubbles around them, and all fail by (i) rewarding not content quality, but pre-existing social capital, and (ii) the tokens all going to zero after one or two years anyway. Too many people make galaxy-brained arguments that creating new markets and new assets is automatically good because it "elicits information", when the rest of their product development actions clearly betray that they're not actually interested in maximizing people's ability to benefit from that information. That is not Hayekian info-utopia, that is corposlop. Hence, decentralized social should be run by people who deeply believe in the "social" part, and are motivated first and foremost by solving the problems of social. The Aave team has done a great job stewarding Lens up to this point. I'm excited about what will happen to Lens over the next year, because I think the new team coming in are people who actually are interested in the "social": even back when the decentralized social space barely existed, they were trying to figure out how to do encrypted tweets. I plan to post more there this year. I encourage everyone to spend more time in Lens, Farcaster and the broader decentralized social world this year. We need to move beyond everyone constantly tweeting inside a single global info warzone, and into a reopened frontier, where new and better forms of interaction become possible.

I've read 8,000 Y Combinator applications. You would think the reviewers are thinking through a standard set of questions. Is it a good idea? Is it a large market? Is it an experienced team? Do they have traction? During my time as a reviewer, we went back and tested which questions actually predicted success. The process was look at the best performing companies and then ask whether the application question would disqualify any of the biggest outcomes. If so, eliminate that question. Is it a good idea? Well, Airbnb was a bad idea. Air bed and breakfast. Nobody thought it would work. Is it a large market? Airbnb, Coinbase, Microsoft, Apple, Nvidia all started in tiny markets. Experienced team? John and Patrick Collison had no experience in fintech when they built Stripe. Brian Chesky had never built a company. Brian Armstrong was just a product manager. Do they have traction? We learned to invest in slope, not Y intercept. The initial traction doesn't tell you anything about the angle of ascent. Sooooooooooooo...none of these standard questions worked. The best question that predicted success was determination. Who is the most determined? Even if they're not the smartest. Even if the market hasn't developed yet. Even if their initial product is wrong. It outpeformed by a mile. And didn't disqualify the winners. AND was evaluatable. It was so predictive that YC took that one question and found five different ways to ask it.

Are we in a AI bubble? open.substack.com/pub/dksangyoon…

160x in a month. How I got my first two jobs and met a personal hero. Link in bio for the story.

Acquiring knowledge is easy, the hard part is knowing what to apply and when. That’s why all true learning is “on the job.” Life is lived in the arena.

Charlie Munger liked cigar butts more than people give him credit for. He made 45% in a year in his personal account on Hays Lemmerz – a messy bankruptcy "deep value" situation. Link in bio for the story.

I’ve given this lesson many times after learning the hard way The same mental model can be applied to sovereign debt, even thinking about markets like the stress tests in 2009. Great post

What Important Truth do Very Few People Agree With You On? "I recently re-read Zero to One. One key question from the book is 'What important truth do very few people agree with you on?' I think Silicon Valley has it wrong with universities..." dksangyoon.substack.com/p/what-importa…

2025 Investments - Bitcoin, Coinbase, Match, Value in China "Having started business school, it has been hard to find time to write. I split my public equities portfolio in two categories - tech and value..." substack.com/home/post/p-16…

Congrats to @SpaceX on a great launch today. Reading Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson now, and the stories of the failed three launches with Falcon 1 make me believe it’s only a matter of time before Starship succeeds.

Interesting metric to track

Obama sounds exactly like @DOGE!!

Everything in crypto is a scam Except A $1.7T digital and global storehold of wealth, permissionless borrowing and lending, permissionless exchange of assets, stablecoins, the world’s largest prediction market, proven rails for fundraising, proven monetization for artists without extractive middlemen, the largest decentralized wireless network experiment, the largest GPS refinement network period, the largest internet scraping network for AI training, assets for increasingly mature games …

There is a shortage of top notch air traffic controllers. If you have retired, but are open to returning to work, please consider doing so.

@chamath It’s not just DCA: nytimes.com/interactive/20…

Shared with permission. This is from one of my commercial pilot friends: “Honestly DCA is the sketchiest airport we fly into, I feel like the controllers there play fast and loose hence the periodic runway incursions. I’ve said to every first officer in my threat briefings that we both need to be on red alert at all times there. DCA calls out helo traffic and vice versa all the time but it’s borderline impossible to see them when your bombing along at 150mph”

@swaaanson Fake news, thiel refused to support trump this time around and trump was disappointed. The incident is profiled somewhere

Peter Thiel is a kingmaker in the shadows He backed Trump in 2016 and now 7 of his ex-colleagues(JD Vance, David Sacks, Elon, Vivek) are running the US government Once you understand how Thiel spots winners before anyone else, you'll build influential networks like no other🧵

Glad to have met Kyle in college at our investment club and thankful to be a small investor in their fund

The American electorate decisively reelects Donald Trump. Ergo: The German government falls, the French government falls, the South Korean president declares martial law, Bashar al-Assad flees Syria. There’s an economic chain reaction, too. Bitcoin rallies, the dollar rallies, U.S. stocks rally, Tesla rallies. Meanwhile, the Russian currency weakens, China slides deeper into deflation, and Iran’s economy reels.

Not a single top 50 alt from 2021/2022 has hit a new ATH against BTC.