The Elevator

The Elevator is a resource for Entrepreneurs sharing experiments, experiences, books and tools that elevate your lifestyle.

Cafe:

* I spent last week at Permissionless in SLC learning more about the current state of the Crypto x Energy x AI market.

* There are some great emerging hedge fund managers I’m interested in following and one day investing with. One is Lumida and the other is Lekker.

* I found Casey Caruso’s panel very interesting and she’s a good follow on the subject. Ditto for Crucible Capital

* Separately I met with Phil Rice from x10 Ventures who helps entrepreneurs accelerate the acquisition process for companies.

Let’s Connect:

* Website

* Twitter

Founder Mindset: Decisiveness = Freedom

Listen to this here: Decisiveness = Freedom

Let’s talk about the freedom that comes from being decisive.

Maybe you’re struggling to make decisions because it feels like when you make a decision or commitment, you’re giving up your freedom.

But what if I told you that freedom lies on the other side of commitment? That freedom actually comes from making decisions and committing to something?

Life and business are both about decision-making.

You don’t have to get everything right, but you do need to decide.

Even not deciding is a type of decision.

And the reason decision-making feels so difficult sometimes is because we crave optionality.

But being stuck is actually being in indecision. It’s about not committing.

There’s a quote from Jocko Willink that says, “Discipline equals freedom.” And I want to share a twist on that—

“Decisiveness equals freedom.”

One practical for you to start making decisions today is by framing decisions as do or don’t.

Make a do list and a don’t list. You can do this for yourself, your team, your company. It’s a way to create structure and clarity. It gives you guidelines and something to follow.

Example: Let’s say you’re running a remote team and trying to build culture. What are the do’s and don’ts of that culture?

* Do arrive on time for meetings. But don’t start right away—take a few minutes to personally connect.

* Do record every session and make it cloud accessible. But don’t book more than three meetings per day, per employee.

* Do contribute to a weekly all-hands roundup email, sharing wins and challenges. But don’t use a negative or aggressive tone in Slack—that’s a conversation for offline.

This is just a quick example, but you can see how defining these do’s and don’ts creates structure. It gives clarity to your team or yourself. When we lack structure, we lack commitment, and we lack follow-through.

Where can you create a do or don’t list to make decisions that create structure?

Where can you make decisions that have been hanging around and holding you back?

If there’s a decision you haven’t made—if it’s hanging there, feeling fuzzy—that’s stuckness.

Make the decision now to clear out that fuzziness and find freedom in your present and your future.

Hope this helps.

I. Are Podcasts Junk Food? I’ve started reading them instead…

Link: Descript

Instead of just listening to podcasts, for the really good ones, I will listen to them, then I will head over to Descript and paste in the link from Youtube to create a transcript.

Then i’ll label the speakers, possibly have AI remove the interviewer, and then paste the text into another doc or PDF.

Funny enough, I’m even thinking about printing them.

What I’ve found is that first listening primes me better for actually understanding what I’m listening to. Then, from there, reading it a second time helps me take notes and actually digest the materials.

Dwarkesh Patel: Okay. Let me ask a meta question. What do you think podcasts are for? What is happening?

Tyler Cowen: To anaesthetize people? To feel they're learning something? To put them to sleep. So they can exercise and not feel like idiots. Occasionally to learn something. To keep themselves entertained while doing busy work of some kind.

From this post from Rob Henderson if you want to read more on the subject:

II. Triple Tap to Turn Your iPhone Screen Red

Link: How to Turn Your iPhone Screen Red

I’ve gotten to be more and more a freak about my light environment and “light diet.” That means I don’t want to beam ultra-bright blue light right into my eyes as I’m trying to go to bed.

I’ve found one of the best hacks to be setting the “triple tap” adjustment on my phone –

Basically if I tap the lock button on my iPhone three times, it auto-turns my screen to a dim-red.

Not only is this perfect for reading Kindle on my phone at night, it also acts as a good reason to not pick up my phone too frequently during the day.

The benefit is the ease. I don’t have to go into settings anymore and I find I use it much more often now because of that.

The instructions are in the post linked above.

III. My Experiment Without Email

Next week I’m going to test out an experiment and remove myself from my inbox for the week. I’ve come to the conclusion that email is basically used for 4 things:

* Scheduling

* Sharing documents

* Newsletters

* Meeting/new-connections.

Looking at email that way…

* Scheduling and sending documents can be done by my VA.

* Newsletters are something that I can batch read (say once a week on weekends).

That just leaves meeting new people. I’m happy to send *new* emails or old reconnection emails to people in my life. But the aim of that is to move to scheduling.

My plan is to set up an auto-responder that tells people I am checking email ~1-2x per week. Then I’ll have my VA check my email ~daily to help with the above tasks. And I’ll batch read any newsletters on weekends.

I’ll also write in a note any text for an email I want to send or respond to to pass to my VA to send for me. Still my writing, just not via my inbox.

I’m sure there will be some unexpected things that pop up while testing this out that I don’t have a process for.

My goal? What does my day look like when I don’t have email as an option to check directly?

Let’s see how it go...

Hey and welcome to The Elevator from David Sherry – A weekly curation of products, services, and opportunities that help entrepreneurs see the bigger picture of creating a unique life and business.

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What I’m Paying Attention To

When I started my Tiktok account I wanted to learn how to get proficient in short-form video. My first semi-viral video was of Rick Rubin because I was trying to figure out where he got his Blue Light blocking glasses. That led me to find Ra Optics via Twitter, which led me to find a Podcast episode with Rick Rubin, Dr. Jack Kruse, and Dr. Andrew Huberman. I’ve since paused my Tiktok for the time being but that was a useful rabbit hole.

I am not a Dr. and I don’t play one on TV….

But here’s what I’m currently seeing…

The 4 Pillars of Health

* Fitness: Movement, exercise, getting your steps in, mobility or lack thereof, VO2 Max, Resting heart rate, etc.

* Diet: What food is consumed, when, in what quantities, in what varieties?

* *Environment: Temperature, light, dark, toxin exposure, UV exposure, blue-light exposure.

* Mindset: Your mental health’s effect on inflammation. Mental acuity. Brain fog. Sharpness.

Within this list, I’ve (we’ve) underestimated our *environment.

Meaning, if our health and diet are dialed in, but we’re missing some environmental components we may still be creating issues for ourselves. You can think about the environment being almost like via negativa, optimizing everything outside of you rather than within you. The space and container, rather than the object within.

With this new understanding and through some of the resources below…

Why It Matters: Think of the Sun like our Wifi Signal

Fundamentally, we all exist because of the sun. Every day as we rotate the Sun hits our part of the planet, and we’re meant to be synced up with this process, like clockwork.

Due to our modern lifestyles (up early, in offices all day, reading from our phones at night) we’ve put our rhythms out of wack. Getting back into this rhythm sets a foundation for your body and it’s processes to run smoothly.

Here’s the ChatGPT Summary TLDR on Circadian Biology:

Suggests that exposure to natural light, timing of meals, temperature variations, and the management of electromagnetic fields can profoundly affect our circadian rhythms. Misalignment of these rhythms can lead to various health issues, from obesity to chronic diseases. This Dr. advocates for lifestyle changes that align with our evolutionary design, such as getting sunlight early in the day, avoiding artificial light at night, and considering the timing of food intake to support the body's natural circadian cycles.

The key point here is that “Misalignment of these rhythms can lead to various health issues, from obesity to chronic diseases. “

Some additional practices I’m adding:

* Getting outside to see the sun first thing in the morning.

* Trying to spend part of every day walking outside, preferably on the beach, barefoot.

* Wearing light-blocking glasses at night before bed.

* Using red lights in my bedroom before sleep.

You can explore more of the why in the resources below.

An In-Depth Podcast on Circadian Biology

Jack Kruse, Andrew Huberman on Rick Rubin’s Podcast. Please note that this podcast is extremely dense. Also, Dr. Jack Kruse is extremely… let’s say vocal about these ideas. Andrew Huberman does a nice job of being receptive and listening. If you can get past how Jack Kruse presents himself and past all of the dense science it does have a pretty nice payoff.

Brand I’m Buying From

Ra-Optics sells a variety of different light-blocking glasses. I personally love the Clyde daylight lenses. Matt Maruca also has a course you can take on Circadian Biology and Light for beginners. I also bought some smart lightbulbs for red light in my bedroom at night. For another option, you can check out Vivarays.

Air Quality Check

Here is a simple air quality sensor from Ikea. Or check out Awair Element. Its sensors check the temperature and humidity of the air, report on ambient light and noise, and test for chemicals, fine dust, and CO2.

Air Purifier

Here is the at-home room purifier I use for my bedroom. Luckily here in Santa Monica we can keep our windows open almost all year round so we get a good breeze coming through.

YouTube Channels I’m Watching

Max Gulhane for semi-in-depth coverage on similar topics, with more of a science view. If you’re looking for a bit more high-level and less Dr. speak you can check out Health Babes, especially for women’s hormone optimization related to light.

P.S. Substack seems to be really evolving

The number of high-quality writers continues to grow, and they keep adding new features. I may begin playing more with “notes” and the Substack Chat, especially for keeping a reading list. Comment or reply to let me know how you’re liking it or what you’d like to see more of.

Have an epic weekend,

David

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In 2018/2019 I felt certain that the “retail” investor was on the rise. I was extremely excited about all of the new applications being built to service this class, and even started a 10-part podcast series documenting apps like Robinhood, Public, etc.

My thesis was basically that, for the first time, individual investors had access to more knowledge, information, and opportunities than ever before. This was when we saw…

* Public blockchains launch, with alt-coins functioning as pseudo-VC

* Rolling Funds, both lead by and invested in by individuals

* New financial tools and primitives, apps like Composer or Uniswap.

Then, fueled by stimulus and lockdowns, the retail investor had its moment in the sun.

There were a few key moments that stick out to me which have happened since then:

* The AMC/Gamestop/Robinhood moment.

* The fundraising for “ConsitutionDAO”

* Ukraine aid in the form of cryptocurrency donations

All three of these were about the coordination of capital by a large set of retail investors.

Money is a way to coordinate energy and attention.

These moments gave hints at a future wherein, by coordinating capital, crowds can direct attention and resources on a dime. This, no doubt, has massive political ramifications.

The pushback against crypto bills in congress, and the support that has come with politicians using crypto to garner political capital also hint at the way that there is a new overlap between the world of media and influencers and finance.

What I don’t know is where this trend goes, if anywhere at all? Will retail traders have this type of power/influence in coordination in the future?

One thought: I can’t help but think that retail was sucked into the last push of the bubble which is now being drained of liquidity.

In today’s podcast I share some thoughts on where this is might be going.

XX I’m David Sherry, I coach early-stage founders, invest in crypto, and write on the overlap of investing, crypto, and the creator economy.

You can join my Telegram chat for more real-time notes on what I’m thinking.

The “Trend Council” is a series of interviews I’m testing via Death to Stock with the people who are building what’s next in culture and brand. We dig in through short-form, curated interviews to bring you an updated way of thinking and acting as you build your brand.

In today’s edition, I have pulled together notes from my conversation with Matt Klein.

Matt Klein does trend research and forecasting for top brands like…Meta, YouTube, MetLife, and American Airlines, as well as TV producers, VC investors, non-profits and government agencies. He’s currently the Trend Lead at Reddit.

He’s also got a Substack you can see here:

Here is what we cover in our conversation:

* Why “Trend Reports” often feel so repetitive

* 3 Questions to ask yourself to identify trends most brands will overlook

* Which trends to jump onto as a brand and when to avoid trend following

* Remixing as a way of incorporating trends

Quotes:

Trends help you resonate with culture:

"If you see any trend, you can't copy and paste it, you have to understand what's driving it..."

"I view trends as trailheads... when you're attempting to provide value and resonate with a culture, you need to first understand the culture."

When in doubt just look to the edges:

"What are the weird fringe, bizarre, sexy, strange things that are occurring on an everyday basis, and how do we validate that?"

The Core idea: You want to understand what drivers of trends exist to spot them early:

"If you're just thinking about sustainability and climate change or the climate crisis, you're late to the party. The train has left the station."

3 Questions to ask to identify deeper trend insights than the norm:

1. What is "outside" of the trend?

Example: We know how someone in NYC views climate change... but how would someone living on the equator approach this? What does climate migration look like outside of the US or Europe?

2. What is the "other side" of the trend?

Example: We know people care about sustainability, yet prefer two-day shipping. Why don't we recognize this other side of the sustainability crisis?

3. What is the "dark side" of the trend?

Example: The dark side of the climate crisis could be how therapists are coming together to figure out how to approach patients' anxiety from climate change.

Thread:

XX I’m David Sherry, I coach early-stage founders, invest in crypto, and write on the overlap of investing, crypto, and the creator economy.

You can join my Telegram chat for more real-time notes on what I’m thinking.

Many investors look to “Counter Signals” in the market to tell them when to fade the crowd.

The examples tend to be from media that is “Supposed” to be intelligent: Time Magazine, or The Economist.

For lack of a better term, there is the idea of the IYI that Nassim Taleb writes about, the “Intellectual Yet Idiot,” who miss what is happening on the street because theoretically something “should be” a way that it is not.

“The IYI pathologizes others for doing things he doesn’t understand without ever realizing it is his understanding that may be limited. He thinks people should act according to their best interests and he knows their interests, particularly if they are “red necks” or English non-crisp-vowel class who voted for Brexit. When plebeians do something that makes sense to them, but not to him, the IYI uses the term “uneducated”…

Typically, the IYI get the first order logic right, but not second-order (or higher) effects making him totally incompetent in complex domains.”

So when you see The Economist speaking about the market crashing, or TIME speaking about never-ending inflation, it’s possible that this is the peak fear/envy and things are headed for a reversal.

The way that I deal with complexity is to seek symbols that represent themselves for their own sake.

If you can isolate the right symbolic moments, maybe they provide us with signposts.

If The Economist is sending us “counter-signal” what sends us a proper signal?

If overthinking is the curse of the IYI, maybe seeing the obvious is the zen practice that I must follow to understand the world.

Here are some “symbolic” moments from the recent past:

* January 6th Mob Enters the White House

* The U.S. Evacuates Afghanistan

* Beeple sells his NFT for $69M to a pseudonymous buyer from India.

The point is to not interpret the symbol through your lens of bias or opinion. The point is not to color the symbol at all. The point is to simply see the symbolic moment, and ask yourself “What might this mean about the underlying system?”

If the IYI is judgemental to those things they don’t understand, this process is about removing judgement and analysis and seeing things for what they are.

Symbolic events act as signposts – they compress a huge deal of information about what is happening at the layer of complexity below the surface.

Why January 6th happened, when it happened, is very complex.

The fact that it did happen, though, speaks volumes as a representation of the state of the complex system.

May we be present to the symbols that are shown to us, and seek to understand the omens they provide.

Stay in touch, and as always let me know how I can help,

XX I’m David Sherry, I coach early-stage founders, invest in crypto, and write on the overlap of investing, crypto, and the creator economy.

You can join my Telegram chat for more real-time notes on what I’m thinking.

Disruption of money.

The immaculate inception moment of Bitcoin over a decade ago marked a new paradigm, one in which all global currencies now face disruptive competition from digital-native currencies.

This competition is playing out as we speak, and slowly balances and dislodges the monopoly of money and state.

As nation-states adopt a digitally native monetary good, the game theory will perpetuate an incredible cycle of momentum.

The dam is starting to break.

Disruption of Media.

The internet disruption to media is obvious: What used to be 3 channels to choose from on cable, turned into 1,000 channels on satellite…

Today there are millions of channels on Youtube, with over 720,000 Hours of Video uploaded every day.

Disruption is oftentimes inversion.

With media, the public creator dwarfs legacy media in its publishing power and reach.

Disruption of Digital Value.

Blockchain tech similarly inverts the creation of new forms of scarcity native to the digital world.

Just as anyone could create a website and start blogging, everyone will soon launch a crypto, token, or NFT as the functional basis of how they do commerce online.

Simply look at Coinmarketcap.com

This will be comical 10 years from now. Right now we’re in a moment where you can list almost every blockchain on one site. This is like the yellow pages for websites.

Coinmarketcap will become more like Google, an indexing engine rather than a list-based page.

The inflation of the total marketcap of crypto will skyrocket into the tens of trillions not simply because of new money inflow, but because of the broad distribution and acceleration of new chain launches.

“On-Chain is the new On-Line”

We have passed the tipping point. There was a time when people discussed having an “on-line” strategy. This strategy eventually switch from default off-line to default online.

We are in the early stages of migrating everything to being “on-chain.”

Everything of value will have digital representations of value, seamlessly transactable on blockchains and wallets.

Telecom Disruption

Helium inverts Telecom. By allowing the public to host hotspot beacons for the internet of things, users are no longer paying to use the network, but being paid to host the network. Helium is the fastest roll out of telecom services ever. Skipping the expensive installation phase of poles and wires and going directly to people’s homes due to a totally unique incentive structure recorded on the blockchain.

Cloud Services Disruption.

Render takes a similar approach to Helium but skips the physical hardware device and utilizes your existing GPU. This is a rendering network that is scalable because it uses individuals as nodes.

NFTs as Business Model Disruption.

NFT’s cut out middlemen by allowing companies to build direct relationships with customers, bypassing existing channels and cutting out middlemen taxes on these relationships.

Coachella can go from tickets to NFT’s – removing Ticketmaster in the process.

Wallets serve as the new basis for this relationship.

NFT’s are no longer just a feature of blockchains, but a truly emerging sector. NFT’s, like websites, are a ubiquitous tool that will form the foundation of the new digital world.

Investment/Corporate Structure Disruption

DAO’s provide a new corporate structure beyond LLC and the Corporation. This structure will find itself especially suitable for capital formation.

Via Balajis,“Mirrortables are to cap tables what stablecoins are to fiat currencies. They streamline and internationalize the logistical mess of angel investing.”

It’s an exciting moment in time, one in which these models have not yet normalized.

Stay in touch, and as always let me know how I can help,

XX I’m David Sherry, I coach early-stage founders, invest in crypto, and write on the overlap of investing, crypto, and the creator economy.

You can join my Telegram chat for more real-time notes on what I’m thinking.

Since mid-2020 to Jan. 2022… we’ve been in strong market conditions for risk assets due to massive stimulus and tailwinds from lockdowns.

We were in a period where our trades were clear, and working.

You could jump from Layer-1 to Layer-1.

You could mint and flip JPEGs you knew nothing about.

You could sector rotate to gaming, metaverse.

You could stay MAX-Long and be rewarded for it.

Now this has broken down as tightening concerns are on the horizon and market participants are rethinking strategies and valuation multiples.

I don’t know what will happen next, but my sense is that this is the most dangerous time (short term) for retail investors.

In this audio I share a bit of my thinking.

This is not to FUD but just to help you play the longer-game, one that helps you not put yourself in an over-extended position.

It’s a time to conserve your energy, have patience, and most of all, not blow up.

In the long run my personal thesis has not changed much.

That doesn’t mean there are short term risks worth managing for yourself if you are overextneded.

If this is a race, it’s time to bring it back to a jog that can sustain, rather than a sprint.

What this might mean for you:

* Raising cash from names you don’t have conviction in

* Raising cash to ensure your cash-flow is ok for a 3, 6+ months

* Mentally prepping for volatility.

* Being open minded, and flexible to observe without bias

Things can change fast, yet, you don’t want to topple over the precipice by running so fast you didn’t know it was right ahead of you.

XX I’m David Sherry, I coach early-stage founders, invest in crypto, and write on the overlap of investing, crypto, and the creator economy.

You can join my Telegram chat for more real-time notes on what I’m thinking.

More than ever, we have new options for investing. What used to just bonds became stocks and bonds, and then become stocks, bonds, derivatives, Forex etc. and now to crypto.

It’s to the investor’s benefit that many different investment opportunities continue to emerge.

My excitement with crypto, in part, sparked with the realization that the number of investible assets would trend toward infinity.

Given that we have more assets to invest in, I don’t think people have quite really dissected or discussed the balanced relationship of these new assets to traditional assets.

What I mean is that, undoubtedly, portfolio construction will look different in a world with dozens of new asset classes.

While all financial innovations are just repackaging of simple primitives, this still doesn’t mean that how we invest in the future will look the same as today.

What’s most interesting to me at the moment is the interplay of 4 different “investing buckets” that you can rotate between depending on your porfolios construction.

Ironically, each of these buckets owns its own space on Twitter. While many people are focused deeply on their own verticals, not that many are discussing the mixture of them altogether.

So, this concept is naturally not for maximalists.

Here is the breakdown of the different buckets:

1: IRL Speculative Investing

This bucket is Venture Capital and Angel Investing.

This is where you speculate on “Web2” or traditionally structured VC and angel deals. You gain value by an end-state liquidity event that is a price massively higher than your original investment. It is a speculation on future value.

Risk: Total Capital Loss

Benefit: Robust market processes, high multiple returns.

2: Digital Speculative Investing

This bucket is token and NFT investing.

This is where you speculate on the future value of Web3 assets. You gain value when the price massively appreciates, and you can take liquidity at any stage along teh way.

Risk: Market Cycles, Total Loss, Rug Pulls, Regulation

Benefit: Massive Multiple on Price Appreciation, Immediate Liquidity

3: IRL Cashflowing Investing

This bucket is real estate and SMB investing.

This is where you buy a cash-flowing business, it’s the Laundromats, the Storage Lockers, the Apartment complexes. This is the type of person who wants an asset that pays them monthly, with little premium placed just upon the exit.

Risk: Market Cycles

Benefit: Cash Flow, Traditionally Safe Asset.

4: Digital Cashflowing Investing

This is yield farming and staking.

This is where you stake your tokens to produce regular cash/token flows. This is where you help risk bootstrapping new networks for immediate payment for staking services.

Risk: Rug pulls, Token price declines, Market cycles

Benefit: Incredibly high yield

So, how do you invest across each of these asset classes?

This is the question I’m getting at. How do you roll cash flow from Real Estate into Crypto, into startups, into yield farms, back into crypto, back into real estate…? And how do you do this in a tax-advantaged way? And how do you maximize returns?

I don’t yet have answers, and maybe this is too many skills to master. But I have a feeling those who find their own unique mix of these assets will outperform “traditional” portfolios while producing a new and unique format for generating returns over time.

XX I’m David Sherry, I coach early-stage founders, invest in crypto, and write on the overlap of investing, crypto, and the creator economy.

You can join my Telegram chat for more real-time notes on what I’m thinking.

Pre S: This is part 2 of a podcast series on big ideas in Crypto.

You can Check out Part 1, takeaways 1-4 right here if you’d like to get the initial context.

Now, on with Takeaway 5.

Takeaway 5: Always be Incentivizing.

The mechanism of marketing in the future is to continually think up how to incentivize your user-base to share, sell, buy, remix, contribute, earn, and farm your products.

The best marketing in the crypto world is incentives, social, or capital.

You are never done incentivizing your community to pay attention and get involved.

Remember, the EIP1559 proposal was an update to the governance and incentive mechanism of Ethereum. This type of upgrade changes the incentive dynamics and sparks new marketing. “The Burn” is a marketing-meets-tokenomics play.

That leads to narratives, and “burn” based marketing sites.

It’s working.

Takeaway 6: Always be “Exiting.”

One of the most important use cases for crypto is “Liquidity”

Crypto gives artists liquidity, gamers liquidity, businesses liquidity…

Therefore, the traditional idea of a company “exit” will be a very narrow view of what is now possible.

When you are always “exiting” you are selling your liquid tokens for other liquid tokens. You are crowdfunding, and then crowdfunding again.

You are taking chips off the table as you scale, and rotating them as you see it.

liquidity exists infinitely and indefinitely…

Takeaway 7: DAOs are the next corporate structure, and we’re in the experimentation phase.

What does a company look like without a leader? What does coordination of thousands of people, not “employed” but contributing produce? What happens when you open-source the building blocks of your business for others to build on top of, for a truly open platform?

DAO’s are simply the next experiment in coordination beyond the corporate structure. This change allows people to take blurred roles where they used to be static and fixed. No longer “employee” or “investor” – but “employee-investor-delegate-mercenary.”

Takeaway 8: Multiple Identities will be the norm.

It may therefore become the norm to have many different identities. On-chain resumes will help track and verify our own work across time. Some identities you hold will have your investments, others your contributions. Maybe it will be the norm to have 3 identities… One that is social, one that is work, and one that is personal (your true identity).

This will all be facilitated by better verification. Zero-Knowledge Proofs will allow us to verify our identity or asset holdings without giving away specific details we don’t want to be public. For the first time, you can confirm the truth without being indiscrete with the details of the truth..

Takeaway 9: Activist Shareholders are gaining Power

ConsitutionDAO, Gamestop… both were versions of a new future of activist shareholding. In the future, when a company is going to “exit” it will be put to a vote.

“Exits” will be token-mergers, and there will be people both for and against these events. In an open-source world, governance and corporate attacks by shareholders become more likely.

Facebook is a legacy of the past, given its board structure puts so much power in the hands of one person. Activist shareholders will fork protocols, push back against changes, and campaign as they see fit to gain power, capital, or status.

XX I’m David Sherry, I coach early-stage founders, invest in crypto, and write on the overlap of investing, crypto, and the creator economy.

You can join my Telegram chat for more real-time notes on what I’m thinking.

You can listen to me talk through these 4 theses in more detail by listening above (~15 min)

PRE-S: Unplugging and learnings from time away.

In my last post, experiments in cutting inputs, I mentioned that I was away on a bit of a retreat to a cabin in Northern California. The plan was to unplug, get off Twitter, and see if I had any original thinking on Crypto. By original, I don’t mean built whole cloth from scratch, but rather clarifying my own thinking in a way that I begin to integrate more deeply my understanding of crypto markets and the future.

The takeaway: It took about 7-9 days for me to start having ideas come to me.

While this post is sharing some high-level points on my thinking, I find it fascinating that it wasn’t until about a week in that my mind had “settled” from all of the inputs I typically consume.

Hiking, making fires, and being outside helped. I like to think the air here has something to it, given that I’m not breathing in city life but instead getting a bit more in tune with nature by eating apples from the garden nearby, and breathing in the microcosm produced by the nature nearby.

Nature helps with more grand thinking.

So I find a lot of my views on crypto had “zoomed out.” I have been thinking less about the short-term price movements and more about where we are going as a whole.

Here are some things I’ve been thinking about…

*Stay tuned for part 2, with takeaways 5-9

Takeaway 1: Crypto isn’t just “Crypto”, it’s a pillar of a broader global change taking place.

One thing that tends to happen with crypto is that the more you zoom out and look at the big picture, the more you begin to understand that this macro change happening right now is so massive that I think we are still drastically underestimating what is occurring.

Because Crypto is not just “Crypto”, this scene lives in the context of the backdrop of global markets, COVID, political polarization and populism, technological disruption, and more.

I emerged more bullish than ever, mostly because I think the macro winds of decentralization, digitization, and polarization play in favor of crypto-economics.

Because the tectonic plates are shifting, we’re in a unique moment where there exists an opportunity to rebuild many of our past institutions from the ground up. Crypto’s wedge into creating change is by replacing and upgrading the base layer of our coordination stack: Money. This will have implications for almost every other layer of the stack (including culture).

Takeaway 2: The velocity of money, transactions, and trust all increase as the friction to transact is removed.

When I started Death to Stock, my business partner was in New Zealand. We worked with artists in Australia, South Korea, the Philippines, and more. Almost everything we did was based on trust. We used slow payment methods and had many social contracts with the people we worked with.

When we don’t need that trust, because of cryptographic proofs, blockchains will remove many of the frictions for this type of commerce.

Any time you reduce friction, you onboard more people, and velocity increases. I can imagine many of the “friction” based, trust-based elements of how we conducted being replaced by blockchains.

The velocity of money in the crypto markets is massive and will continue to grow because we continue to remove friction from the movement of money.

This leads to many more people working in this fashion with people around the globe, and you won’t even need to know their true identities.

Takeaway 3: The internet still “wants media to be free,” but it has discovered how to monetize the long-tail.

Perhaps a bit contrarian, but I do believe that the best state of all media is free. We want to utilize the infinite scalability and replication of media to spread our ideas as far and wide as possible.

However, when we re-package the long tail into a marketplace, people will pay.

NFT’s give us a great example of this. The minting of an NFT arguably should be near free, given that the larger the distribution, the bigger the market for resale.

Because NFT owners take a cut of resale, what matters is the distribution and growth of secondaries. The more relevant to the market, the more transactions can happen that will monetize the attention.

There will be exceptions of course, brands that have already built cache, can continue to capitalize (picture famous artists, luxury brands), but for new brands, it’s more important to continually be spreading awareness.

I can imagine books that launch free, or always have free versions. Special editions will be bought and sold and transacted which will accrue to the creator. Remixes of the book turned into videos will help spread the message that leads back to sales.

Takeaway 4: The Moat of Web3 tech businesses will be how many contracts are written to their “base layer.”

What creates and retains value for a business in the future, when everything is open and transparent?

Companies will accumulate “contracts” to their base layer. This means code, media, and capital, all pointing (like Google backlinks) to your trusted base layer. The more trust you build, the more people will write their contracts to your business.

The more contracts, the harder it is for a competitor to catch up, and get your user base to switch. While people will have easy means of interoperating their data, capital, and media, they have to have the will to do so.

If you create accumulating benefits, with a base layer they are happy to commit to, competitors will have to work hard to pry your existing contracts to their chains or protocols.

Trust is accumulated over time, as you accrue more social and capital commits that power your business, it becomes more difficult for a competitor to get the “nodes” in your community to change.

*Stay tuned for Part 2: Takeaway’s number 5-9

XX I’m David Sherry, I coach early-stage founders, invest in crypto, and write on the overlap of investing, crypto, and the creator economy.

You can join my Telegram chat for more real-time notes on what I’m thinking.