It seems unintuitive that a small 25 basis point interest rate hike in Japan would spike all risk assets, including tonight's -20% $ETH candle.

But you need to understand the way the carry trade works:

It's a leveraged unwinding. The quick explanation of the carry trade is borrow at 0 rate and invest in something with higher than 0 expected returns:

1. borrow Yen for nothing
2. buy an asset outside Japan that yields more than nothing
3. ???
4. profit

Making an announcement soon? Don't hire a PR agency.

Definitely not through Series A, and maybe not ever.

You can execute PR internally with a junior resource without having to pay a $50K / month retainer.

Here are the basics in <5 minutes (bookmark this): First, I take it when we're talking about public relations, we mean just the part that means "relationships with journalists" and not marketing or social media or "comms."

So to understand PR, you have to understand journalism and what makes something newsworthy.

Switching into crypto is one of the most asymmetric things you can do for your career.

Why? There's a low-status moat around it.

Cross the moat and you'll experience less competition, more career acceleration, and highly asymmetric opportunities: I'll start with a story about low-status moats:

When I was in business school I attended an annual real estate conference.

Investors and developers would come and give advice on breaking into real estate development or real estate private equity.

Hearing from a few teams who are scrambling to get a marketing strategy in place before we go parabolic.

You're fine. If you're struggling with narrative and positioning here's what to do in the next 30 days.

Plus 1 thing you absolutely should NOT do: 1) Founders: start tweeting every single weekday.

Four single posts, one long post.

No excuses. Drop whatever it is you're doing, stare at the screen, get it done. Marketing leaders: literally sit next to your CEO and encourage them.

Pat them on the head. Give them treats.

I've talked to 50+ crypto projects in the last 10 days looking to hire a CMO or Head of Marketing.

They're not going to have an easy time.

Here's why hiring an all-star marketing leader won't fix your problems: Before we even get to what a CMO does, let's talk about how hard they are to find.

The head of talent for a leading crypto VC estimates the total # of "true" CMO candidates in crypto at 10-15.

Already, your odds are not good:

Hundreds of projects looking to hire 10-15 people.

I saw a headline that went unnoticed yesterday:

"White House confirms US has intelligence on Russian anti-satellite capability"

Here's what would happen if an adversary took out America's global positioning system:

(+ why you should have 30 days of supplies) People are sleeping on the threat of anti-satellite weapons.

Even the White House downplayed the threat.

Spokesman John Kirby said it was "troubling," but claimed no immediate threat and that anti-satellite weapons couldn't cause physical destruction on Earth's surface.

The recent discourse on airdrops upsets me deeply, and probably not for the reason you think.

I personally understand the difficulty of managing users who demand compensation for their participation.

I've been through it and it isn't easy.

But--guess what?

That's the deal. To be even more explicit about what the deal is:

"You put your hard-earned money into our protocol, and we will pay you."

That's what we all signed up for.

2024 is going to be an insane year.

It's not too late to get ahead of it and make a plan.

You can do this exercise in an afternoon to win your year:

(Bookmark this!) I just finished my third year doing yearly planning with @maggielove_.

We've simplified our system to just three components:

- reflection
- planning
- accountability

Here's how it works:

↓

If you pay someone to do something, they're more likely to do it.

"Show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome"...right?

Wrong.

Money is a special type of good, and paying someone money to do something might make them want to do it LESS: This outcome was explored by the extraordinary study and paper "A Fine is a Price" by Prof Uri Gneezy.

In it, the designers predict something called the deterrence hypothesis:

Assessing fines will lead to less of the fined behavior.

I was spending way too much time on my phone.

Until I discovered grayscale.

Grayscaling is a simple way to break the addiction.

But did you know iOS lets you automatically turn grayscale on and off depending on the apps you're in?

Here's how to reduce your screentime by 50%+: First, if you don't know how to do the most basic trick of turning grayscaling on and off, navigate to:

Settings > Accessibility > Display & Text Size > Color Filters

And set your Color Filter to "Grayscale."

Everyone's talking about crypto points.

Points are a new incentive primitive that significantly increase the scalability and utility of ERC-20's and will be the key innovation of this bull market.

You can think of points as off-chain derivatives: Points essentially contain the right but not the obligation to redeem for underlying ERC-20s at a future date.

Points rely on highly performant off-chain database systems called Servers to store and verify individual point balances.

The Harvard, MIT, and Penn Congressional testimony debacle clearly shows why DEI is a self-defeating organizational methodology.

DEI is unstable because it isn't a principles-based form of leadership.

It's a feelings-based one: Look up DEI and you will inevitably find that its core goal is feeling-based:

"feeling included"
"feeling welcome"
"feeling comfortable"

The premise is that in order to drive performance, organizations must achieve a collective ~feeling~ of inclusion, welcome, and comfort.

Aztec is a privacy-first Layer 2 on Ethereum.

Sounds nice, but "privacy" implies more than just obfuscation:

Aztec's design actually turns Ethereum completely on its head.

So here's what private execution actually means and implies in <5 minutes: Public execution is what we're used to on Ethereum:

Transactions are executed by a chosen block proposer and then subsequently re-executed (validated) by other nodes in the network.

Reddit--the 6th largest site in the US--is on the verge of irrevocably fumbling its community.

Its volunteer moderators now have the power to dismantle one of the world's biggest centralized social platforms.

Here's a timeline to get you up to speed on Reddit's collapse: On April 18, Reddit announces new API pricing.

Apollo and other 3rd party Reddit apps suspect the pricing is adversarial.

reddit.com/r/reddit/comme…

In 2017, I interviewed with Elizabeth Holmes to be Head of Finance at Theranos.

I'm convinced I learned more in those 45 minutes than I did in 10 years of school and work.

Today, she reports to federal prison to serve out an 11 year sentence for fraud.

Time for a story 🧵: It was May, 2017. I'd just finished classes at Harvard Business School and I'm in Florida for some pre-graduation beach time.

I get a call in the car from my finance professor.

"What are you doing after you graduate?" he asks.

Not sure, I say.

The United States has never defaulted on its obligations.

But America faces the first serious possibility of reneging on its debts since 2011.

So why in the world would anyone design a system like this?

Here's a brief history of the debt ceiling, the Dumbest System on Earth: First off, you need to get to know some of the players in this game.

We can analogize it to a corporation:

There's:

- a CEO (the President)
- a governing board (Congress)
- and a finance department (the Treasury)

(the Fed isn't involved in this specific spat)

Most people think they know how banks work.

The way banks actual function is much more nuanced than the toy version you learned in Econ 101.

Here are 3 myths & misconceptions about our monetary system:

🧵 Myth #1: Banks accept deposits that they subsequently lend out.

Example:

Anna puts $1,000 in her savings account yielding 1% interest.

Then the bank lends the $1,000 to Billy, who borrows it at 5% to fund his crypto pet rocks startup.

The bank keeps 4%.

Right? Wrong.

Crypto fashions itself as a better alternative to the modern financial system.

But how is it going to solve anything when people can see all of your transactions and exactly how much money you have?

The original sin of crypto is the lack of privacy.

That all changes today.

👇 If crypto is to succeed, it needs a system that supports transparent, auditable code alongside watertight individual privacy.

That's Aztec:

The first zkRollup to combine public and private into one system.

medium.com/@aztecnetwork/…

If you haven't fully internalized it, a 21 year old was just arrested for leaking Ukraine war plans and America's spy network on a Discord server called THUG SHAKER CENTRAL.

Here's a story of nearly unbelievable idiocy: It starts off with Jack Teixeira, a 21 year old Air National Guardsman, hanging with the homies on a Discord server created "to discuss geopolitical affairs and current events."

Jack is known as "OG"--the most senior and knowledgeable of the Discord members.

Most people are broadly aware that the average life expectancy of an American is 77 years at birth.

But did you know if you live to 65--retirement age--your life expectancy actually becomes 83?

The longer the live, the longer you're expected to live. This phenomenon is similar to the Lindy Effect--the notion that the longer something exists, the longer it is expected to exist into the future.

Say you're a financial institution who wanted the option to someday get a bailout from American taxpayers.

Could you have picked a worse name than Silicon Valley Bank?

Might as well call yourself Unoaked Chardonnay Financial. 12-Course Omakase With Sake Pairing Loan Corporation