1/ I love to connect people when it's a mutually beneficial intro, but I always request that the asker send me a "Clean Email" so that I can clear the intro with the prospective connection.

What is a Clean Email ™
🧵👇 2/

1. Forwardable subject (i.e. not "Great to hang, DK!")
2. Focused, customized blurb explaining the purpose of this potential intro -- no mention of other topics/ideas we may have discussed
3. No strange formatting
4. Has a single email signature from the asker

1/ A thread on “Fireside: my startup that will now not launch”.

TLDR: We spent the past 6 months building a tool to help people create live call-in shows together (a.k.a. “talk-radio”). It was called Fireside. Based on the “go live together” Periscope launch this past week... 2/ ...we’ve decided to not pursue it further since they’re doing a good job at executing the core idea.

Story and thinking below 👇

1/ As a founder you should spend all of your time on the unique things you can do which no other human on the planet can do.

Corollary: You should spend almost no time doing stuff which is already well understood by someone else. 2/ If there is another human who can do the thing and the transaction costs of finding/delegating/executing that are lower than your own time/opportunity cost (which is almost always the case for a founder) then you should find the other person and delegate it.

1/ Recently, @jamescham and I were talking about a very successful founder. James exclaimed to me "how is he so darn smart?".

While the founder has raw mental horsepower, the magic of a super-success is in the compounding effects of access to everyone else's "best 10 minutes". 2/ It's an insanely virtuous cycle. I rarely hear people talk about it. I've always said that Larry Page, for example, is a smart individual. But there are probably many in the valley who have roughly the same "wet biological smarts" as he does.

1/ I like looking back to the early writing of some now-famous bloggers. These aren't meant to poke fun at authors' dated thoughts, but, rather, to show that these now-big-voices have grown out of humble beginnings: 2/ An old one of @ev's from 1998 lives on thanks to archive.org:
web.archive.org/web/1999091306…

"The real retailer of the future—the type that will eventually knock the silly grin off Jeff Bezos’ sadly ignorant face – is the one that gets even more specialized."

😂🤷‍♂️

1/ I was thinking about some of the things I've changed my mind about in the past 10 years.

Here's a list: 2/ I used to think of angel investing versus professional venture capital investing as "little league" versus "major league". Now I see them as two very different crafts, but with related skillsets and sometimes cross-over practitioners.

1/ A lot of people hypothesize about ways to "build a better YC" (accelerators, incubators, etc.). 2/ I think there are all kinds of opportunities to serve early stage entrepreneurs in new ways. But the best way to find an opportunity like this is to look at what's underserved by the existing systems. Hint: access to capital is not your differentiator.

1/ As a young engineer coming to silicon valley 18 years ago I misunderstood the leverage of organization building. 2/ It was obvious to me that engineering provided a tremendous amount of leverage. You could write code once and it could get used millions/billions of times to help people. How could anything else achieve such leverage?

1/ A lot of smart people get excited about ETH because of all the great developer talent around the project. "Follow the developers" is an oft-cited reason to be optimistic for the future of Ethereum. 2/ I'm excited to see the ideas/ecosystem around a decentralized smart-contract system (a.k.a. "world computer") move forward, but I think this ecosystem has more in common with Linux than it does with Bitcoin.