Circle Three 59 / Don’t Dream It’s Over
I was in kindergarten on 9/11. It’s one of my earliest memories. In memory of the first responders and survivors, I highly recommend seeing Come From Away. The play closes soon on Broadway after a five-year run.
Contents:
brain bites: Culture
Design Your Environment
brain bites: Business & Investing
Notion Case Study
brain bites: Cryptoassets
Do You Understand Web3?
Ethereum Merge
Gary Gensler: Crypto Regulation
Lyric: Don’t Dream It’s Over
brain bites: culture
If You Want to Design Your Life, Start by Designing Your Environment. From the author of An Audience of One, article here. The key to that new writing habit or that new exercise routine isn’t a shiny new pen or lulu shorts. With each passing week of operating a business, I see the importance of environment, of using our relationship with the things around us to change our behaviors. This article is part of what inspired me to learn about the power of systems rather than goals. Here are three key quotes to use for inspiration:
“Designing your life begins with the designing your days, and designing your days starts with designing your environment. By designing the right environment, all of our desired behaviors become automatic.”
“By reducing the activation energy for any desired habit or action, you increase the likelihood of following through on that habit or action.”
“For the most part, everything in our lives is set on default. Designing environments means making deliberate choices about everything including the clothes you wear, the food you eat, people your surround yourself with, and the information you consume. What you consume will determine what you create. So make it a deliberate a choice.”
brain bites: business & investing
Notion: On the Brink of Failure. Inflation is rampant and businesses might be struggling. One business case study I like is Notion, a project management software that avoided complete failure. We use Notion at FirstWatch and I use it personally for my digital portfolio.
Founder Ivan Zhou spoke about being nimble and pushing boundaries beyond people’s expectations:
“Sometimes I joke, ‘Moby Dick was written by one person.’ Three of [Herman Melville] probably wouldn’t be much faster. Software is a lot like that. Without understanding what you’re trying to do, adding more people will actually slow you down.”
“Go to the edge of what is still acceptable to your peers and go to the far, far edge of that. And how do you go to the far edge of that? You distill from something not in the circular place you are living but look in a plane outside of where you are working. Imagine Andy Warhol, right? He said, ‘art is whatever you can get away with.’”
brain bites: cryptoassets
Web3 is Still Happening. Two web3 investors share 10 reflections on web3. The crypto bear market is here and there are plenty of lessons. Here are my favorites from the list:
“There has to be value.” We see this clearly now. Perverse incentive design only goes so far to bootstrap adoption. The projects still seeing success are generating revenue and have a strong user base.
“The future belongs to digital natives.” I’m a tech-savvy millennial who can’t hold a candle to the tech usage of kids nowadays. “They don’t give a second thought to using digital coins, tokens, and goods.” The future will be built on this generation so engrained in tech.
“Incentive design matters.” Tokens are designed around incentives, and many of these schemes proved to be unsustainable in the market drawdown — Axie and Stepn to name a few. Token design is with incentive design.
Speaking of web3, I recently completed SoftBank Operator School’s Foundations of Web 3 and its Applications Season. Highly recommend for the web3-curious. Here.
Merge Countdown. You should care. Even Google has a countdown timer. Ethereum’s Merge is perhaps the most-anticipated crypto event of the decade. The asset will become (1) deflationary (2) yield-generating and (3) ESG-friendly. Markets have been anticipating the event for years, and the market reaction will show us how institutions and retail investors expect the asset to perform.
Gary Gensler Wants to Regulate Crypto. Matt Levine’s Money Stuff column points out the discrepancies and mis-incentives from Mr. Gensler and the SEC as they regulate crypto. Is regulation needed? Absolutely. Matt comments on the strengths and weaknesses of the SEC’s approach.
“If you are an ambitious financial regulator who wants to regulate crypto, you have to regulate crypto! You have to put in the work! You have to sit down to try to understand how the crypto market operates, what investors need to know, and what is required to encourage useful capital formation.
You have to write rules that anyone can read and that create some plausible path for how crypto developers can register their tokens and how exchanges can trade them. And then you have to focus your enforcement efforts on actual consumer protection, going after the crooks instead of just the people who are naive enough to walk into your office.”
Lyric: Don’t Dream It’s Over by Crowded House
I love the optimism in this song as a reminder that sometimes, you’ve gotta dream on. Just one open door can prove to be the opening you need. One of — if not the — best song to ever come out of New Zealand, too. Watch the live version here.
Hey now, hey now, don't dream it's over
Hey now, hey now, when the world comes in
They come, they come to build a wall between us
You know they won't win
Stay Curious,
Dan