Kevin Kwok Profile picture
Jun 15, 2020 8 tweets 2 min read Read on X
Great post by Casey

There's huge difference in the strategies to get to a minimum viable loop, and those to strengthen an existing loop.

And conflating these is source of so much confusion in advice given and taken in tech
Casey is probably person I've spent the most time in a room discussing these things with. And wish we could still do it weekly.

Much of the time in tech people complain about advice given and how it's useless or even worse contradictory. But they come ot wrong conclusion
advice isn't intrinsically bad, it's that we often lack the important axes that make the situation and relevant advice needed very different

One of the most important of these is what companies do before they hit their core loop and after they hit it
Kindle strategies are pre-loop strategies. And that changes everything about them. They are not about stability--they are about hitting minimum viable scope of the core loop

Like paddling on your surfboard until you can catch the wave and stand up.
This means that expenditure on a per capita basis on pre-loop strategies can be high. It means that they tend to be very focused on hitting a specific metric. It means that they can be very centralized. it means that they tend to be generalized and easily used across companies
Randomly, people good at identifying pre-loop strategies tend to be very identifiable. Watching them meet each other is like watching a shibboleth test. There are certain ways they poke and trade strategies to identify each other.

But there's still a lot we haven't agreed on
about pre-loop strategies. We don't yet have strong views for example on how much you must understand about the core loop's unit economics in order to justify your pre-loop strategies. After all implicit in the over investment in pre-loop strategies is that assumption that payoff
curve is very high on long time scale due to leverage of the core loop. Intuitively we get this is distinction between pre-loop strategies and just bad use of resources

In this sense venture itself is a *pre-loop* strategy. And more generally it ties back into sense of PE ratios

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More from @kevinakwok

Mar 29, 2022
Suddenly see sumo oranges everywhere. so went down the rabbit hole on them.

New variant started in 2011. But with 4 years to get to production

Unsurprisingly they are indeed the orange industry's honey crisp. Who says innovation is dead haha Image
Only one company in US makes them. In asia at least very similar variants are way more common i think

look at this launch calendar haha Image
or in donut chart form Image
Read 4 tweets
Mar 29, 2022
My conspiracy theory is that oil isn’t dinosaurs. It’s the carbon capture technology of the dinosaurs

This is the only thing I want to believe. And makes all carbon capture tech innovation infinitely more funny to me.
Dinosaur time traveler: how do you like our gift to your generatio…sorry you thought that was *made* from my dead body. And you shoved it into your car?!?!
Lowercarbon LP letter: every day we strive to walk a little closer to the glory of the Mesozoic era
Read 5 tweets
Mar 12, 2022
Sword of Damocles:
The real sword of Damocles is this poll. And if you answer wrong gonna block you
Starting to think humanity was a mistake
Read 4 tweets
Jan 22, 2022
Here's chart I made for myself that I think about. Basically the only time period of US history where we've gone this long without a president winning with 75%+ of electoral college was post-civil war period

Lots of ways to interpret this.
One would be to think about what are plausible paths of someone getting those numbers in today's age. If we expect reversion to mean, than it's very interesting to understand what paths someone will cut through it.

Another interpretation of course would be to be bearish. A third
is to think party system has gotten more "efficient" at being roughly evenly split.

You might be wondering what is that datapoint of someone winning with less than 50%. Is that even possible?!?!
Read 4 tweets
Jan 3, 2022
We're at odd ground right now where there's not really any medium for mid/long form discussion on blog posts anymore

Blog post replies not really a thing. Twitter used to be but less a place for discussion. Private email and group chat sort of the place, but issues with both
Email or spinning up something like a discourse seems like the temporary solution I'm increasingly tempted by

Latter is tempting after seeing some successes in it on protocol forums for long form. But has whole list of other reasons high activation energy
but it is very odd that there are essays I read where literally do not know where one discusses them

Most I read wouldn't be hacker news fodder anyways. But fwiw I think hacker news is not this either.
Read 4 tweets
Sep 28, 2021
As always remarkably impressed by vitalik's writing. Do think he's writing at a level that few are matching in discourse with him, which is shame.

Personally, I think two additions that it's not clear market has consensus on are
1. is financialization a core attribute or a tempo
rary distribution method for crypto

2. is the reliance on exit as the safeguard a temporary or long term solution. Which implies views on the long term stability of individual crypto projects vs constant churn due to the incentives towards defection we've seen market give today
subpoint buried within the 2nd point is that I think there's probably a better understanding of some kind of meta-project players where you should see exit into new tokens not as churn but as capture of a more informed / capitalized elite in crypto. And I suspect the data would
Read 10 tweets

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