Ideas I want to write about

It’s not that crypto has actually enabled the financialization of everything, but rather it’s removed friction in places where immense demand for financialization exists.

The longstanding struggles of digital media businesses drive home the fact that internet-native media requires a fundamentally different business approach. Monetizing content assumes that the value is held in the content itself. Under the physics of infinity – frictionless content creation and distribution – the marginal value of every additional a... See more

I did ask Ben what he thinks the experience will be like in a couple years as the network scales. Here’s what he described:

You open the Blackbird app. Based on what it knows about you, where you are, and any specific queries you make, it will suggest two or three places nearby. That will be the last experience you have with the tech. You’ll just w... See more

1. Privy makes it easy to embed wallets that users control but don’t need to think about, right in the app.


2. Base , Coinbase’s EVM-Compatible Layer-2 network, is a cheap, highly performant L2 with the trusted reputation and brand of Coinbase. (Since launching in August 2023, Base has already made upgrades that make the network cheaper and faster, whi

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That’s one of the things that’s newly possible because Blackbird uses crypto, but Blackbird works because it’s not a crypto app. It’s a restaurant platform and consumer app, built by restaurant people, that only uses crypto and whatever other tools it needs to use to make restaurants more profitable, help them understand their customers better, and... See more

There’s one big difference here, though. While Ben sold Eater and Resy to centralized companies, that’s not an option for Blackbird. Instead, ownership of the network of restaurants will primarily go to the restaurants themselves as the company progressively decentralizes. “Overall, the restaurant industry should own roughly half of the network,” B... See more

Toolmakers operate at the very bleeding edge, coming up with brand new science and technology, with a primary focus on the science and technology themselves.

Techno-Industrials start with the challenge they want to solve, and use every tool at their disposal, including some at the cutting edge and even some that they have to create themselves, to s... See more

Fred Wilson pointed out that being onchain opens up the opportunity to build an AmEx-like loyalty program where all the loyalty points are onchain.

“$FLY is like a stablecoin. It’s not something like Bitcoin where you buy it and hope it goes to $100k,” he said. “But the idea of taking loyalty points onchain is a big deal.”

Specifically, it will all... See more

Analogizing the current era in tech with the recent, software-dominated era is a mistake.

A much better analogy would be the Second Industrial Revolution in America, the Gilded Age when entrepreneurs built businesses using every new technological tool at their disposal to pull humanity to a new level of prosperity and became unbelievably rich in th... See more