Matt McGuiness

LIVE NOW - Productive Money: The Most Bullish Case for Ethereum ($250K) @ethereum may be one of the most underappreciated assets. @mikemcg0 and @VivekVentures of @Etherealize_io lay out the case for ETH as “productive money”: A monetary asset with the store-of-value properties of gold and Bitcoin, but with the ability to compound through network activity. Enjoy! -------------- TIMESTAMPS 0:00 Intro 4:45 $250K ETH? 6:04 How to Price ETH 8:15 ETH’s Monetary Premium 10:25 What Differentiates ETH 13:54 The Path to $250K ETH 16:35 Menger’s Monetary Attributes 20:28 Scarcity 24:58 Fungibility 26:43 Divisibility 27:45 Portability 28:28 Durability 34:30 Verifiability 35:27 Censorship Resistance 37:00 ETH is Productive Money 41:39 How is ETH Productive? 46:40 Ethereum’s Tollbooth 51:28 Counterparty Risk 53:48 Productive Money vs Dead Capital 58:03 Pitching Productive Money to Wall Street 1:00:08 Why is ETH Underappreciated? 1:04:19 Wall Street ETH Investors 1:11:28 Other L1s 1:14:06 Why Not Just Buy the S&P? 1:15:00 Ethereum Technical Risks 1:17:20 How Does ETH Get to $250K? 1:23:18 Closing & Disclaimers

@Shaughnessy119 The sequel “The Strength of the Few” might be even better👀

Easily one of my new favorite sci-fi books of all time Thank you @mattmcguin!

Sam Altman on how Paul Graham’s essays inspired him to get into startups “I think like many other people, my introduction to the startup world and excitement about it came from reading PG’s essays. He’s an unbelievable writer . . . I think a whole generation of us copied PG in all of these ways. Although he was never like, ‘Let me teach you a class on how to write,' I and others clearly took a lot of inspiration because he just does it in a style that resonates so much. Like if you go read an average business book versus a PG essay, it’s like they’re both business writing, but other than that, they’re different species. He says interesting stuff. He says it clearly. He doesn’t waste your time. Nothing feels fake.” source: @david_perell

Marc Andreessen: "I'm reading every spare minute that I have" Expanding on his information diet, the a16z cofounder says AirPods have been the single biggest technological leap: "They're the unlock for me for audiobooks, podcasts, and interviews. I'm doing audio content probably 2-3 hours per day -- getting up in the morning, going to bed at night, all the drive time . . . If nothing else is going on, I'm always listening to something." Text-to-speech has also been an unlock with apps like Substack, NaturalReader, and Apple's audiobooks -- "It sounds spectacular," Marc says, "[AI voice technology] is really starting to work." Marc uses podcasts and YouTube interviews to go down rabbit holes on topics, but otherwise he's trying to get back to audiobooks: "I try to get back to audiobooks as much as possible, and the reason is audiobooks are my opportunity to really learn a new area that I probably don't know anything about. And so if I can scrape aside 10-20 hours of audio time for a period of history or something like that, I can really go deep on it." Marc generally tries to barbell his information intake: "It's either stuff that's super current or it's stuff that's timeless. I'm basically trying to not read anything that's from yesterday through like 10 years ago. I'm trying to be super current, and the form of being super current is talking to people who are currently experts or it's Twitter. Then for timeless, that's almost all books, but I kind of go back and forth between these modes." He continues: "I'm either listening to a book that's usually on history or a biography or something like that or some new domain that I'm trying to learn. Or I'm up to the minute on what's happening in AI today." source: @david_perell (2023)

We want to build the @perchdotapp marketing strategy around creating content that honors reading and great writers. Steve Jobs put it best when he said: "To me, marketing is about values . . . The best example of all and one of the greatest jobs of marketing that the universe has ever seen is Nike. Remember, Nike sells the commodity. They sell shoes. And yet when you think of Nike you feel something different than a shoe company. In their ads, as you know, they don’t ever talk about the product, they don’t ever tell you about their air soles and why they’re better than Reebok’s air soles. What is Nike doing in their advertising? They honor great athletes and they honor great athletics. That’s who they are, that’s what they are about.” Honoring reading is what Perch is about. If one habit unites the leaders, inventors, scientists, and artists who have forged our civilization, it is reading. Serious readers are disproportionately represented in almost every area of human achievement. You can follow the account here if you agree 👇

Shoutout to our @sevensevensix co @perchdotapp for making the “Top 15 Best Android Apps” list 🔥 It pulls all your blogs, newsletters & subs into one organized feed so you can keep up w/ what you care about. I use it to stay on top of the news (& the fun stuff too!)

@tomekzaw_ Thanks! Why put the perf improvements behind feature flags instead of enabling it automatically?

We're often asked about the performance regressions of Reanimated on the New Architecture 😫 Most of the perf improvements are already shipped in Reanimated 4.2.0 behind feature flags ✅ Read this guide and learn how to enable them in your app today 🔥 #performance-regressions-on-the-new-architecturee" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">docs.swmansion.com/react-native-r…

Shoutout to @perchdotapp for landing on @howtomen’s “Top 15 Best Android Apps” this month 🔥🤩 A big moment for a hard-working team! 👏

Paul Graham's "Bus Ticket Theory of Genius"

Huge new release just went live on @perchdotapp today - User profiles with reading activity heatmap - Streaks - Reading data analytics - For You feed Let me know what you think if you get a chance to check it out!

New essay: Viral Loops From the inception of PayPal, Peter Thiel focused on viral distribution for both practical and philosophical reasons. Practically, he knew his small startup could never acquire millions of users through conventional marketing channels. Philosophically, he drew on René Girard’s theory of mimetic desire and believed that people mostly borrow their desires from others. Girard developed the theory to explain how imitation can escalate into rivalry, contagion, and even collective violence. Thiel saw in it a framework for technology adoption: if you could get a small group to want something and spread it, others would follow in a predictable cascade. PayPal’s breakthrough came when the team realized money could be sent to anyone with an email address. That made the product inherently viral: every transaction pulled new people into the network because recipients had to create an account to get their money. Then they amplified it with a referral bonus that paid $10 to both inviter and invitee. At first $20 per user might seem like a lot, but in the middle of the dot-com boom when companies were spending hundreds of dollars to acquire a single customer, it was relatively efficient. In November 1999, PayPal’s 24 employees seeded the network by emailing their friends with the subject line “PayPal User Beamed You Money.” Growth took off immediately. In five months, they went from a thousand users to a million, compounding at 7-10% a day. As the loop strengthened and network effects kicked in, they reduced the bonus to $5, then phased it out entirely. Two years later, PayPal went public and was acquired by eBay for $1.5 billion. Ex-PayPal employees would go on to build their next companies around virality. The YouTube founders used an embedding strategy to spread their videos to millions of people on MySpace. Reid Hoffman devoted roughly 80% of LinkedIn’s early resources to viral growth. And it wasn’t just PayPal alumni. Facebook, Dropbox, Twitter, and almost all of the fastest-growing Web 2.0 companies relied on similar dynamics. In fact, the user bases for these products grew so large, so fast, that no traditional marketing channel could have created them. Marc Andreessen eventually gave this distribution strategy a name: the viral expansion loop. Any strategy to grow virally begins and ends with a loop: someone tries your product, tells others, and some of those people become users too. Then the cycle repeats. The exponential growth these loops produce make it possible for founders in the internet era to build billion-dollar companies simply by designing their products the right way. No sales team or marketing budget needed. In practice, viral loops take several forms: - Word of mouth. The purest kind. The product is so remarkable that people tell others about it. Facebook’s earliest growth on college campuses was mostly word of mouth before they started building more explicit viral hooks (e.g. email invites, adding your friends via address books, etc.). Word of mouth drives the growth of many movies, books, diets, and TV shows. - Inherent virality. The product only works if others use it. WhatsApp, Slack, and Zoom fall into this category. Facebook even manufactured it by refusing to launch on a campus until half the student body joined a waitlist. - Collaboration. The product is useful alone, but better with others. Google Docs and Dropbox folder-sharing are good examples. This loop can take longer to spread if your customers don’t immediately need to collaborate, but once they do, strong network effects kick in and it’s extremely sticky. - Communications. Every use advertises the product. Hotmail’s ”Get a free email account with Hotmail” default signature is the most famous example. Every email a customer sent spread the word about the product. - Content. The product spreads through the media it helps people create. TikTok and Instagram grew because people saw watermarked videos and photos with cool filters on their Facebook and Twitter Feeds. - Referrals. Direct incentives to spread the word like PayPal’s $10, Dropbox’s free storage, and Amazon’s Affiliate program. At one point, half of Uber’s new users came from referrals. - Embeddings. Features designed to spread your product across the web. PayPal built software that let eBay sellers to automatically add a “Pay with PayPal” button to all of their listings. YouTube built a code snippet that let users embed a video on any website. Airbnb built a tool that let hosts cross-post their listings to the much-larger Craigslist. The strongest products stack multiple loops on top of one another. Take PayPal for example. The payment product was inherently viral because sending money forced recipients to sign up, but the team amplified this with referral bonuses and embedded payment buttons. To know if a loop is working, you have to measure two things: the viral coefficient and the cycle time. The coefficient (K) is how many new users each user brings in. If every customer invites ten friends and 20% convert, K = 2. Any value above 1 produces exponential growth. Cycle time is how long it takes the loop to spin. The shorter the cycle time, the more frequently the loop compounds. YouTube’s was minutes, which is why it grew so explosively: watch a video, share it, friend joins. Small improvements in either lever bend the curve disproportionately. A modest increase in conversion or a slightly faster cycle time compounds into enormous outcomes when repeated thousands of times. That’s why great teams obsess over friction. Every second shaved from the path to value increases conversion and accelerates the loop. However, it’s important to keep in mind that virality and retention are inextricably linked. Bringing new users in through the front door doesn’t help you grow if they immediately turn around and leave. Instead, you should think of retention as prerequisite for viral growth and a multiplier. A product people use every day has thirty opportunities a month to generate new invitations; a product they use once has only one. The math of the viral coefficient still applies, but you have to think of it across many sessions. This is why the highest retention products are almost always the most viral. Viral loops aren’t magic. They are mechanisms, and like all mechanisms they either work or they don’t. Properly designed, they are the most powerful form of distribution available to startups. But they only endure when anchored in real product value and strong retention. Without those foundations, even the most spectacular loop collapses into nothing more than a temporary spike.

Mark Zuckerberg: “Developing superintelligence is now in sight.”

Iverson worked with Rocket to overhaul their design system, website, and apps before the Super Bowl launch. We made a video documenting some of this work. Very proud of the team, and excited for what’s to come.

I wrote an essay explaining why I want this to exist. I think it's absurd that so many Op-Eds sit behind paywalls in legacy media publications. Just a few examples: - Peter Thiel in the New York Times - Marc Andreessen in the Wall Street Journal - Patrick Collison in The Atlantic - Sam Altman in the Washington Post - Palmer Luckey in the Washington Post

Announcing The Founders' Tribune For more about the long-term vision, please read the full post here: founderstribune.org/p/announcing-t…

Facebook VP of Growth on how to prioritize power users vs marginal users As Alex Schultz puts it in the clip below: “The thing that everyone in the Valley gets wrong is that we think about ourselves when we optimize for growth.” His favorite example is notifications: “Every single company when they talk about notifications goes: ‘I’m getting too many notifications. I think that’s what we need to optimize for on notifications.’” But power users aren’t leaving your site because they’re getting too many notifications. “What you need to focus on is the marginal user: the one person who doesn’t get a notification in a given day, month, or year.” Building an incredible product is all about thinking about the power user and optimizing for the people who use your product the most. But people who are already using your product all the time are not who you should be focused on if your goal is driving growth. He cites the growth accounting framework Facebook used to think about growth: “We looked at new users, resurrected users (people who weren’t on Facebook for 30 days and came back), and churned users. The resurrected and churned numbers for pretty much every product I’ve ever seen dominate the new user count once you reach a sensible point of growth a couple years in.” He continues: “And all those users who were churning and resurrecting had low friend counts and didn’t find their friends so they weren’t connected to the great stuff that was going on at Facebook. So the number one thing we needed to focus on was getting them to 10 friends.” This is what Alex means when he says focus on the marginal user—not yourself or your power users—if your focus is on driving growth.

Q: When should a startup founder give up on their idea? Stewart Butterfield is the founder of Slack, which he famously pivoted to from a failed gaming platform called Glitch. In the clip below, he describes how he felt stuck trying to figure out whether or not it was time to give up on Glitch: “On the one hand you have the narrative of: good entrepreneurs are resilient; when everyone else thinks it’s a bad idea, it’s probably a really good idea; you have to dig in and prove people wrong; keep going even when times are dark. On the other hand, there was a morning when I woke up and was like ‘I can’t do this anymore. I’m the CEO and Chairman of the Board, and I’m sure this is not going to work’” What convinced him that the idea wasn’t going to work? Basically the Glitch team had exhausted all of the ideas they had to fix the problems with the product. And Sam Altman—who is conducting the interview—agrees: “That’s always when I tell people to give up on an idea: when you run out of ideas for how to make it work.” Stewart goes on to explain the process in more detail: “At first you fill up whiteboards with ideas and argue about which ones are the highest value. And then you eliminate them one-by-one. Months go by. A year goes by. Another six months goes by. And then you’re like: ‘we’ve already gone through most of the worst ones and we only have three left. This is probably not going to work.’” The good news is that coming to terms with the failure of Glitch allowed the team to move on to a more promising idea: Slack--which ended up being acquired by Salesforce for $27.7 billion.

Starting in a small market isn't limiting; it's liberating. Focusing on a niche allows you to quickly identify advocate customers and receive invaluable feedback

“We sold the company for $700M, which seems really great until you remember that there was a down round which basically wiped everybody out.”