kuzzo

How do you turn $1,000,000 → $0.43 in 7 days? One of the biggest collapses in crypto history occurred this week... Who's up for a story? 👇👇👇

My exact system for spotting which companies will make sales reps rich 12 to 18 months before everyone else figures it out. This has helped 200+ clients position themselves at companies like Snowflake, DoorDash, Samsara, and more recently Tractian before the herd showed up. Here's the blueprint:

I’ve never been more bullish on the future of @coinbase than I am now. This is a remarkable, generational compounder.

At some point you will get an urge to vibe code an app. It’s very important that you listen to that urge and just get started.

This is the type of stuff I love coming across on this site. What an interesting read

@ItzSuds @grok explain

The last time all the Thiel acolytes moved out of California, it was to prep for the largest liquidity event in history Market almost certainly tops out end of year, but not before we go supernova first & a16z returns $30b to LPs off Databricks You have 12 months to get rich gg

Coinbase Attempts To Replace Facebook And Visa Today, Coinbase revealed what may just be the most ambitious mobile app that has been released in years. An “everything app” that attempts to simultaneously disrupt Facebook, TikTok, X, Venmo, Visa, Mastercard, Google, and more. It’s what Elon Musk dreamed of building for X yet somehow Coinbase is further along in accomplishing. As I watched Jesse Pollack, Brian Armstrong, and the rest of the Base team present their project I wondered, how can one communicate the sheer ambition of what they’re creating? My one-linter attempt is to “disintermediate the economy with a single app.” It’s what crypto originally aimed to be since the introduction of Bitcoin. We shouldn’t need big businesses to be the gate keepers of economic value. However rather than speak in high level terms, let me break down specifically what was discussed today and why it matters. The Base App On the surface, the Base App is a simple one. It’s comprised of the following core four features: 1. A Wallet 2. A social network / feed 3. Private messaging 4. An App Store You are already familiar with these four things and likely use multiple products, each of which deliver their respective functionality incredibly well. Coinbase already happens to have products in market that provide these four core features. Coinbase Wallet provides wallet and App Store functionality. Zora, a company they previously acquired, provides a social feed and private messaging. Independently, none of these products are particularly revolutionary at a glance. And frankly, the odds of Coinbase successfully building the application which becomes the defacto “all-in-one app” are not in their favor. However the importance of their ambition cannot be understated. The Freedom To Transact Often times crypto people speak about “the freedom to transact”. What they ultimately mean is a system which bypasses the existing economic gatekeepers. For example, everybody has horror stories of sending money via a wire or ACH. The money doesn’t get there fast enough. The fees are egregious. And sometimes the money even gets lost. Then you have international payments which are an entirely separate can of worms. In short, large corporations (think Banks, Western Union, and other money transmission providers) create layers of friction for consumers and businesses who simply want to buy and sell products and services as well as send money to the ones they love. So what if you could build something which could bypass those big, stodgy institutions and give the power back to us, the consumers? That’s exactly what Coinbase wants to accomplish with this Base app. An Economic Engine In An App So what would you need in order to create an economy that is “totally free” from the institutions? Well, you’d need to provide those who have the means of creation (all of us as we have phones in our pocket) with: 1. A network to distribute their products and services 2. A way to promote themselves within that network, and 3. A medium through which to transact and exchange value free from intermediaries That’s exactly what the Base app attempts to accomplish. It’s also incredibly exciting that they have somehow managed to expand the “freedom of transacting” via tap-to-pay payments that would traditionally be reserved for the exact institutions we want to disrupt. An Open Internet On top of that, they want to do so via “an open internet”. “What the hell does that even mean?!?”, you may be thinking. The essence of the issues is that giant corporations currently control the distribution of digital information. We collectively, do not. Facebook “monetizes your personal data”. Google (and now OpenAI, Anthropic, etc), controls what information gets distributed. Apple determines what apps can show up on your iPhone. You, the consumer, don’t really get the freedom of choice nor the freedom of distribution. Hence the need for an open internet! Alas, all attempts at building one have failed repeatedly. Even the giants themselves have staged attacks to break open the “walled gardens” of one another yet it always seems to fail. This is why when one of the large companies, like Coinbase, attempts to bring down the Internet behemoths, they should be celebrated. They have the resources to do so, right?!? The Irony Of It All The list of hurdles that Coinbase is going up against is quite long. First, they’re a gigantic corporation with a market capitalization of $100 billion. They are the exact type of institution that the original “founders” of crypto wanted to disrupt. Second, they aren’t the most trusted institution. Thousands upon thousands of Coinbase users have had their money stolen from their accounts through increasingly sophisticated phishing attacks. If they weren’t hacked, many have had their accounts locked down. Coinbase claims that this app is “open” but why should anybody trust them now? Third, they don’t exactly have a MASSIVE user base for developers. During the presentation they quoted having “over 100,000 users” on Base. If you were to narrow that to daily users my guess is that number is depressingly small. Compare this to Facebook, who when they launched their “platform” back in 2007, already had millions of users, 50% of whom were using the product every day. Facebook built an addiction machine whereas Coinbase has never done so (unless you consider their product a gambling platform which would be a legitimate claim). Finally, while the app attempts to bring crypto to the masses, the transactions are often dependent on centralized authorities like Apple Pay’s platform and Shopify. These companies could make the decision to block users from transacting (and frankly are almost 100% likely to do so). Convenience at a cost Despite the hurdles, you almost have to root for Coinbase (emphasis on “almost”). They’re going after the big guys and simultaneously fighting on behalf of all consumers! Additionally, the Base App’s ambition truly appears rooted in the ethos defined by the crypto industry. I also believe that the team at Coinbase is building this application with the best of intentions. They don’t strike me as evil, manipulative individuals aiming to exploit the consumer. Ultimately though, what’s missing at the moment is a core desire from consumers to truly be free from the institutions. They’ve grown to become frenemies and in rare cases actual friends. The consumers want convenience and currently, the Base app can’t provide much of that. My friends, for example, want to transact on Venmo, Cash App, or Zelle. They want to chat with me on WhatsApp, iMessage, X, or Telegram. There’s not that core hook that, for me, makes this product a necessity. All that said, I’m rooting for them and believe that you should too. That’s because we need more people to “Rage Against the Machine.” Because that machine is clearly broken.

They think rich people’s net worth is money "in the bank" and not invested in businesses where it is already doing exactly this

Kids need to go out there and read a book, stop scrolling

the nepo kid goes to college to meet smart kids the smart kid goes to college to meet nepo kids

The United States of America is bullposting like a 19yo CT addict from Korea and youre bearish?

Agenetic startups should aim to become the system of work against the incumbent systems of record

Great evening with @hwchase17 in NYC! Gosh, the world is not ready for agents 🫨

it's funny how many people wrote up huge predictions for MCP without even looking into how LLM performance degrades when you add even 10 tools to them

one of the biggest fucking problems with traditional resumes or linkedin is how aggressively ppl pigeonhole you. ppl glance at your job history, make lazy assumptions… “oh you did x, so you must be a y” & suddenly you’re boxed into some narrow, reductive archetype. it’s brutal for anyone who thinks across domains, who isn’t easily classifiable. the only real antidote is a public profile built on ideas. a bunch of x posts, essays, or prototypes… whatever proves you think clearly, & thoughtfully. that’s the modern resume. it’s the only way to escape the traditional outcomes & hierarchies.

meta is basically the yankees or the dodgers right now. they’re loading up the roster with elite ai researchers, dumping billions into infra, & signaling we’re going for it. when you do that, the world expects rings. you don’t get to say “we’re still experimenting” after you dropped $20b+ & poached half of openai. the pressure is now insane. every paper, every product, every demo will be scrutinized like a playoff performance. all eyes on the scoreboard.

this paper blew my mind when i read it four years ago. it blew my mind again when i reread it this morning basic finding is that transformers pretrained on TEXT are also useful for IMAGES (and proteins, and numerical operations).... 🤯 i think the term "Universal Computation Engines" is actually a really useful mental model my hypothesis is that transformers learn a lot of generally-useful internal mechanisms like how to load information from weights and aggregate information across positions. these tools are useful regardless of modality in the future, the mechinterp work (SAEs, Circuits) might be able to explain this sort of thing. but for now it's just a mystery. and in general it speaks to the eerie staying power of the Transformer. if somebody ever found a better arch, it would have to be even *more* Universal. good luck with that

Snowflake CEO Frank Slootman telling the hard truths.

If you get rich young enough you can speedrun an interesting life But if getting rich takes you too long you’ll wish you lived the interesting life along the way The challenge is you don’t know upfront how long it’ll take you to get rich

I kept trying to explain to my wife that the only problem with living in the sticks is that our kids will go to a small-town public school and that, while at least some of their peers will be smart and most of them will be normal, many of them won’t be either, and the modal kid there wont be very ambitious, to say the least. She was not concerned — until she went to a birthday party for one of the kids at our son’s daycare this weekend. Now she gets it.