Dialectic

3: Dan Romero - Why Information Should Flow on Protocols

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Dan Romero (Farcaster, X, Website) is the CEO and co-founder of Farcaster, an open Twitter/X-like social network protocol built on blockchain rails.

Before co-founding Farcaster in 2020, Dan previously worked at Coinbase as a Vice President, among many other roles. He joined the company as the 20th employee in 2014 and left in 2019. He's thought about and used Twitter-like networks for nearly two decades and is passionate about open information flow, market-enabled progress, and individual freedom.

Timestamps:

  • (01:39): We were promised flying cars and all we got was 140 characters
  • (8:48): Bring Your Own Algorithm (BYOA), RSS, Elon, and The News Channel-ification of Social Networks
  • (35:54): The Field of Dreams Fallacy: If You Build It, It Doesn't Mean They'll Come

    • [Farcaster & Crypto-Focused Section Begins]

    • (44:25): Status as a Service and Building the Home for Crypto Status
    • (55:03): What is Farcaster?
    • (59:34): Why not counter-position against Elon?
    • (01:03:42): Programmable social and “Open APIs”
    • (1:14:22): The Future of Farcaster
    • (1:18:01): Farcaster's Value Capture 
    • (1:25:01): Sufficient Decentralization
    • (1:28:44): Why Dan has created NFTs but not tokens

      • [Farcaster & Crypto Focus Ends]

      • (1:29:53): Product Market Fit, Focus, and The Idea Maze
      • (1:37:01): Dan's career arc, contrarian paths, distributed systems, and creative destruction 
      • (01:44:09): Coinbase: pre-2017 learnings, hypergrowth, comparisons between building a culture and social network, and anti-lessons
      • (1:49:20): Brian Armstrong and fostering repeatable innovation
      • (1:52:24): What do you wish Balaji [Srinivasan] could work on?
      • (1:53:20): Group Chats and the pendulum between private and public discourse
      • (01:58:55): Power: Elon, Zuck, Trump? 
      • (2:00:24): Politics, Populism, Going Direct, and the Podcast Era
      • (2:08:48): What have you changed your mind on this year? 
      • (2:10:22): Final Questions

        • Full transcript.

        Links & Resources

        • RSS+ by Dan Romero
        • The Rise and Demise of RSS by Sinclair Target
        • Status as a Service (StaaS) by Eugene Wei
        • The idea maze by Chris Dixon
        • Balaji Srinivasan's paper on the idea maze
        • The only thing that matters by Marc Andreessen
        • v2 frames
        • FC AI/zk trends


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