Flavors of post-authorship in the age of agents: what happens when working on hard problems no longer gets you credit for solving them? Alternatively, when major inventions can no longer be effectively attributed to just one person?

Really interesting and probably on the nose. Strongly echoes the entrenched informal economy that exists in most quickly developing countries - not sure how to feel about this fact.

Everything that has worked well in the West is built on a thick foundation of property rights, backed by the brittlest and most vulnerable identity layer possible. This is just now starting to catch up to us.

Incredible content. Why is “hit piece” the default tone for a profile.

And just like that, X dot com had a security incident. I couldn’t help but wonder… how can I make this about me?

I remember having to explain to our bank that although POAPs were NFTs, they were unlikely to be used as part of money laundering schemes or to defraud collectors. Happy to see we are entering brighter times.

It's been a common trope that many product focused founders have a somewhat dismissive approach to marketing. The mindset can be very "if you build something people love, the rest will work itself out". If you identify with this characterization, or see it in a founder you know, here is a cautionary tale. _ Let's say that you build something people love, and for a little while it works. Early users show up, word spreads, and especially when you're riding on a hot narrative, things go pretty well. The product is good, the market is finding it, and things are working. You are not worried about marketing. Phase One: The Tailwind. You're growing, and you attribute it to the product. Maybe you're right. But you're also riding timing, novelty, or a wave that has nothing to do with you. Your marketing team, if you have one, is "getting the word out", launching products where your audience will see them, and hoping that's enough. Phase Two: The Plateau. Growth slows and you assume it's a product problem. So you build more features, ship faster, talk to users. You do everything except ask the harder question: do we actually know how we win? Because in the end, this is what marketing is - it's doing the work of figuring out how you win. Everything else is tactics. Phase Three: Doubling Down on Tactics. Maybe you push harder on outbound and content, try to ship faster, or in general do more of what you're already doing. Maybe you try to bring in a senior hire whose job is to "formalize" a strategy that was never really developed. None of this goes especially well. Phase Four: The Reckoning. You eventually realize that neglecting marketing is just neglecting figuring out how to make your business work in the long term, when the narrative dies and the competition shows up (which it will if your business makes any sense.) Hopefully you still have time to change your ways. Positioning and messaging are the foundation the rest of your company is built on: if you haven't spent time figuring out what you are, who you are for, and how you make their life easier -- and you don't revisit this question on a semi regular basis -- worse products that are clearer about what they are will win customers that should have been yours. The actual work of marketing is not promotion, it's figuring out how you win your market. Dismissing the importance of winning your market is, in every case, eventually lethal.

Legendary run @rish_neynar , and the rest of the team currently spearheading @farcaster_xyz and the surrounding ecosystem. Pivoting a network is really, really hard.

I think startups investing in goodwill by creating cozy third spaces is good, actually.

When I announced POAP was winding down, the response absolutely floored me. People shared what their collections meant to them, reminded us of moments we'd helped preserve, shared pictures of their favorite POAP swag and moments. So many people reached out with a simple "thank you, for POAP". The vast majority of it was genuinely, overwhelmingly heart warming. Thank you all for taking the time to share your good memories of what we built together. You will forever be part of how I remember this chapter. Then there was the remainder. Some people took the opportunity to dunk. Fine. You have no idea what happened behind the scenes, what we tried, or what drove our decision making. Someday I'll share a full postmortem here, but of course you can disagree with how something ended, and give your armchair commentary. That's fair game. But a specific slice of that remainder, went somewhere else entirely. "Woman founder attaches photo to an announcement, must be looking for attention." I am, in fact, going to be looking for a new job. Being visible isn't the whole of how you get hired, but it certainly helps. Don't hate the player, hate the game -- and all I can say is, tremendous respect to the various women of CT who have been consistently showing up here to say the things they need to say without dimming their light. Meanwhile, I'm watching @shawmakesmagic from @elizaOS get torched, and I have to say I genuinely feel for him. Sued by ambulance chasing lawyers after being through the gauntlet of running a token at the pleasure of CT, sacrificing his health and sanity, and here he is getting dragged on the tail end of an objectively hard outcome. This industry makes an effort to eat its founders either way, with just a little difference in seasoning. We chew people up and spit them out when things end. That part is equal opportunity. But the way we chew you up tells you something about what the crowd actually sees when they look at you, and that's probably something for all of us as an industry to reflect on. To the vast majority of you, who remind the builders of the good times when the going gets tough: thank you for making the peanut gallery that much easier to tolerate.

With all the B2B tools rolling out CLIs for agents, I wonder when the first consumer product will follow suit. Would love to book a flight, or analyze my credit card spend data, right in the terminal.

Sign of the times: DeSci has entered the Overton window.

The positioning shift @Kalshi is making from “prediction market” to “derivatives exchange” needs to be studied.