Ved

Finally catching up on my DMs and timeline. What did I miss?

It is human nature to want to go fast! You want to learn quickly, get stuff done quickly, hear back from others quickly, receive your food order quickly, finish your homework quickly, get promoted at work quickly, improve at sports quickly. Everyone loves fast, give people fast

Startups are about solving problems for people (and capturing a portion of the value associated with avoiding that problem). But that's too simplistic of a description Startups are about solving problems for people. But more specifically, they are also about identifying the minimum problem that someone will pay you to solve, building something really crappy that solves that problem, and then charting a path that always bites off slightly larger portions of a bigger problem that solves more for more people, while improving the product and scaling up the business appropriately Viewed in this light, startups are about navigating path dependency and charting a path that ultimately gets you to juggernaut pillar-of-the-industry status while building revenue and product incrementally in logical order That seems obvious but lets take a simple example: Calendly Calendly is a business that everyone immediately understands how to build. You need a google calendar integration, a web interface for scheduling / canceling, and some basic config management stuff We all look at this and think "I could build that but it would cost thousands of dollars of my time to do that so I'll happily pay $10/month". This is the core of the business To launch a Calendly, you would build this first. You would build the absolute simplest version of the product, get users, and make sure they happily continue to subscribe. If it is really hard to get the first few users, then the thesis is invalidated, go back to the drawing board and solve a different problem Assuming that the product has initial traction, you would now need to rank the list of possible improvements (in order of what is likely to grow the customer base the most). This could be based on reasons people chose not to enroll, or intuition, or whatver. In the case of Calendly maybe this is SSO support, or a better billing portal, or the Microsoft Teams integration, or a sleeker frontend, or hiring a sales team If you choose well, this will grow your startup by a lot. If you choose poorly, it will grow the startup by only a little, or not at all (and will cost resources). This is part of what makes the startup journey fun. It's a game of wits Startups are about finding initial pmf, and charting a course of growth that incremental and strategic. That makes sense. If you look at the codebase or employee roster of any big company, there will be millions of lines of code, and thousands of employees, and millions of dollars of revenue. But it's not very useful to look at it and plan to build all of that in order to replicate the level of success. The buildup of all of those features and team members, is only possible through careful strategic growth In crypto, founders are expected to offer a compelling vision, which (more often than not) means describing that final state where there is a massively-adopted business generating tons of value and capturing tons of revenue However, near-term tactics still require identifying much narrower problems for a small set of users that will rabidly consume the product, before incrementally expanding the capabilities When I talk to a founder, I enjoy hearing their vision and definitely see the ability to clearly articulate a grand vision as being a helpful ingredient. But I am mostly asking questions to understand their near-term tactics - who is the user that is absolutely demanding to use their product? Why is that user not being served right now? How do you reach those users? What will you build next to expand the user base? - to understand how they will be able to get to that grand end state.

Let’s unlock DeFi with a fast EVM (250x ETH gas per second on Day 1 testnet)

Does anyone have any really gas-intensive EVM contracts?

I have minimized all windows but one and am attempting to write the Monad equivalent of @dumbcontract2's "ok so what the fuck is the deal with solana anyway"