I'm pretty confident that:

In 5-10 years, nobody will be aware of crypto 🪙

It will be long forgotten by everyone other than hardcore developers...
Not because crypto won't work.

It will.

But because, as it stands, it's CONFUSING.

The technology is pushed to the forefront when it shouldn't be.

Example: find me a crypto company that doesn't mention crypto.

In an effort to promote crypto, they obscure the utility.
As @benedictevans pointed out this morning, crypto projects are often impossible to navigate or underststand as a mere mortal.

They are built for fellow crypto nerds:

Every internet company today is built on technologies like HTML, TCP/IP, MySQL, etc.

Imagine if Facebook had launched as "The PHP Social Network".

Did it use a bunch of amazing enabled technology? Of course!

Is that relevant to the end user? Not in the slightest.
The user just wants to upload their photos and message their friends.

They don't care that it was enabled by TCP/IP, HTML, push notifications, and PHP.
In 1999, dot com startups pumped themselves up by talking about how they had "e-this" and "e-that" technology.

Most fixated on the fact that they were "online" vs. what they could actually do for consumers.
Just like how tech startups pivoted to focus on the user vs. the technology/category, I think crypto will go the same way.

It will get abstracted away by great design and technology improvements.

Just like a website in 1995, it's still too hard to explain to your parents.
That will change soon.

But your parents will never know that they are using Etherium, they will just transferred some money to a friend and it happened faster than usual.
Ack typo...when will Twitter allow editing!

“They will just transfer some money and it will happen faster than usual”
And *Ethereum” :-)

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More from @awilkinson

2 Apr
A funny heuristic:

What's your Batman project? 🦇

What's something, that if you don't do, nobody else will?

Imagine your life was a movie and this is the trailer:

"In a world where....______.....one woman/man...."

Read on, to see what I mean 👇

Most businesses or philanthropic projects don't need YOU to happen.

They are inevitable.

If you don't push it forward, someone else will soon or already is.

For example...
If someone didn't start Clubhouse, someone probably would have started a similar startup soon after.

Audio still would have taken off. It was inevitable.

Maybe it would have taken a little longer, but it probably would have happened.
Read 20 tweets
30 Mar
This is a story about how I lost $10,000,000 by doing something stupid.

Ten. Million. Dollars.

Literally up in smoke. Money bonfire.

That’s enough to retire with $250,000+ in annual income.

Here’s what happened…
In 2009, @metalab was a small but profitable agency.

The business was making a couple hundred thousand dollars a year in annual profit and I was trying to figure out how to invest the profits.

Agencies can be great businesses, but they are HARD.
You lose clients at random, your pipeline dries up on a dime. It’s feast or famine and unpredictable.

I kept reading about what @dhh and @jasonfried were doing with Basecamp, building software for themselves then selling monthly access to it.

wired.com/2008/02/mf-sig…
Read 57 tweets
29 Mar
I woke up at 5AM thinking about Bitclout.

On its face, Bitclout is really stupid:

1. Stupid name 😫

2. Stupid password system 🔒

3. Stupid crypto complexity 🤓

BUT, the idea is extremely interesting:

Creating a market based on betting on people and their content...
For the first time ever, Bitclout aligns the incentives of the audience and the influencer.

Here's a refresher:

1. I claim my profile, which is scraped from Twitter

2. You can buy my "coin" (aka stock) and the price goes up and down based on demand: bitclout.com/u/awilkinson
3. When people buy my coin, I get 10% of the transaction credited to me (someone buys $100 of Andrew Coin, I get $10).

The more popular Andrew Coin becomes, based on demand, the more our jointly owned coins goes up in value...
Read 14 tweets
23 Mar
One of the hardest things to balance as entrepreneur is WHEN to hire.

Hire TOO FAST and you end up with:

Toxic culture misfits 🤡

Middle management 👨‍💼👩‍💼

Parkinson’s Law: 🤼‍♀️

“Work expands so as to fill the resources available for its completion”

TLDR...
Your company gets does the same amount of work as before, way less efficiently.

Sometimes way SLOWER due to committees and too many cooks in the kitchen.

On the flip side...
Hire TOO SLOW and your life becomes a living hell 👹

You become Lucy in the chocolate factory, barely keeping up 😖

Your time gets consumed with unimportant tasks and decisions that are way below your pay grade 😩

And you don’t have time to be strategic or spot ice bergs 🗺
Read 6 tweets
22 Mar
This is kind of on the DL, but Tiny has made $10MM+ in venture investments over the better part of a decade.

Mostly just for fun. Our day job has been buying whole companies, so it’s a side hustle.

We think of it as a way to pay it forward and back friends we love.... 👇
In 2021, we’re taking our early stage investing more seriously.

As it turns out, when you have smart friends, investing in them goes well....
We’ve been lucky enough to invest in great companies like @Pitch, @Buffer, @Squarespace, @SpaceX, @Superhuman, Waking Up, and 30+ other awesome companies...

tinycapital.com/companies

(Click on Venture Investments)
Read 14 tweets
18 Mar
Most founders are scared of marketing.

They think it's douchey.

Instead, they do Field Of Dreams marketing:

"If you build it, they will come".

They won't. You need marketing.

The problem is, most marketers are aggressive.

They think in clicks and funnels, not brand...
For years, we hired marketing agencies who would embarrass us with cheesy and overly aggressive tactics.

So, we stopped doing it. We focused on organic growth, and in many instances it meant that we lost out on huge opportunities to well funded and better marketed competitors...
This was profoundly stupid.

Finally, we came to our senses and, infomercial style, said "there's got to be a better way".

Last year, we co-founded @doubleupgrowth with @aidanhornsby to create a growth marketing agency that focuses on marketing great product tastefully....
Read 5 tweets

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