NYC Biking
My favorite mode of transportation in NYC is the electric citibike. I ride one every morning to and from the USV office. There's a dock on my block in Brooklyn and a dock around the corner from our office. I love my route - it's a straight shot across the Manhattan Bridge where I get to look at the water and feel the breeze in the morning and early evening, and then through the East Village where I spent years living during and after college.
Yesterday, I was biking across the bridge in the morning and a woman in front of me had a terrible accident and flipped over her handlebars, scraped up her whole body, and was concussed. Thank god she was wearing her helmet, which split in half upon impact. We placed a bike horizontally across the bike lane so people wouldn't run into us and called an ambulance so she could safely be taken off the bridge. Fortunately, she was okay, but it was very scary.
A positive aspect about the experience was that many people slowed down to see if things were okay. But the disheartening thing was that almost everyone sped by and was super irritated if not downright angry that we were slowing down bike traffic to protect an injured person. I got yelled at and called names, and someone even hit my bike that we placed as a horizontal barricade with their bike. As my colleague Matt said, the one thing that pisses off New Yorkers more than anything else is if you slow down the pace of traffic. He's right. The city has a deeply rooted pace that resists being slowed down, and I saw the dirty side of it yesterday.
Bicycles are an important transportation feature of cities, and I am happy to see that NYC has added more bike lanes and widened them over time. But things are getting unruly and dangerous out there. Pedestrians are frequently struck by riders, and many different types of vehicles are riding in bike lanes at unacceptably high speeds. The city needs to tighten its rules around permissible use and rigorously enforce them to keep the streets safe for pedestrians and riders. Here are some ideas:
If a bike moves fast and doesn't require peddling, it doesn't belong in a bike lane. I've seen mopeds, vespas and massive eBikes that are powered by throttle, not your feet, racing through bike lanes and wreaking havoc. These are effectively motorcycles and don't belong in bike lanes. They also don't belong on sidewalks. They belong in car lanes. I am fine with upright scooters which use a throttle to move so long as they go at a reasonable pace.
To enforce this, police officers should be stationed at both ends of a bridge and confiscate these vehicles as they come off the bike lane. They should sell them at a discount on a marketplace and use the revenue to enhance bike lanes and make citibikes free or subsidized for those that can't afford them. They should do the same thing whenever they see these vehicles in bike lanes or sidewalks on the city streets.
Delivery workers should be permitted to use a throttled ebike, but one that is intended to be ridden on the road, not offroad, and is not a moped. There should be some speed cap on the throttle for these bikes. I do think some carveout for delivery workers is needed, but I am unsure of what it should be. This idea is one that's just off the top of my head.
Bikers who ignore traffic signs should be fined regularly. We need to find a way to disincentivize this behavior. I am guilty of it and cringe every time I do it and navigate around pedestrians who have the right of way.
If you do not pick up and clean your dog's shit off the sidewalk, you go to jail for life.
There's probably a long list of things I'm ignoring here that should be considered. But we need mopeds and super fast and dangerous bikes out of bike lanes and in the car lanes where they belong. Bikes are a blessing to cities, and we need to be explicit about what a bike is. It's time for NYC to clean up its act here.
DePIN and Secular Trends
Decentralized Physical Infrastructure, or DePIN, has the potential to reshape the dynamics of some of the world’s most important markets. Over the past decade, projects have tackled a broad range of industries: information storage, 5G and LoRaWAN, mapping and weather data, computing power, internet bandwidth, and many more. As a variety of DePIN projects have scaled over the years, they have taught us some valuable lessons regarding the unique dynamics of scaling both supply and demand.
Historically, supply has been the easiest component to build. Many projects have proven that tokenomics can drive early adoption within web3 communities. Ecosystem participants love to spread the gospel of certain projects, especially when referral incentives are baked in. A nice feature of web3 communities is that people are excited to try new things. Sometimes, that’s because of a deep belief in the promise of crypto and user-owned networks; sometimes, it’s because it’s fun and the memes are good; sometimes, it’s because of a belief in the potential economic upside of early participation.
An emerging dynamic in DePIN projects is that they are much easier to scale when users do not have to purchase new hardware to participate and can lend something from existing machinery, be it compute, storage, or bandwidth, to get up and running. Filecoin, Arweave, Render, and Grass all benefit from this dynamic - it’s a low-cost endeavor and onboarding experience for a user to join the network, contribute to supply-side growth, and benefit from the upside.
While many projects have solved supply-side growth, it has proven more challenging to crack the code on scaling demand and building a big business. One hypothesis is that DePIN is best suited to thrive in categories where an emergent secular trend is expanding and creating new types of demand for a product offering. It is not about replacing existing infrastructure to meet existing demand; it is about reshaping it to meet the needs of an entirely new category.
Competing with incumbents with a stronghold on physical infrastructure is very difficult, especially when market conditions are relatively stagnant. These companies have long-term contracts with customers, decades of experience, and sometimes some form of regulatory capture. Usually, there’s no forcing function for a customer to switch providers.
To win a market with DePIN it must be in the process of being reshaped, and the project must be structurally suited to take advantage of that change. A good way of thinking about this is asking, “What new secular trends, markets, and pockets of demand are emerging because something is different in the world?” There’s a chance that a DePIN project may be best suited to capture that market. I like this approach because it’s a problem with market tailwinds in search of a solution instead of vice versa.
Grass, a residential proxy network enabling individuals to contribute unused bandwidth to provide data to train open-source AI models, is doing this. In the past, this market has been focused on scraping web data for marketers to track competitors' pricing and advertising trends, but today there is insatiable demand for all types of web data to train emerging AI models. Grass is structurally advantaged to service this emergent demand while existing residential proxy networks do not have the right type of supply or business model to compete. Render has a similar dynamic by providing compute for model training instead of data. AI is creating an infinite need for both data and compute, and Grass and Render are building decentralized networks to become highly aligned people-powered providers to this market.
In these examples, some new technological pressure is emerging that is beginning to change the shape of a market. And in these instances DePIN may be a meaningfully better solution than a centralized player. These projects can strategically sit adjacent to incumbents while providing a similar service to a different customer set in a way that is technologically and economically challenging to compete with.
As ideal as it is to think about how DePIN can scale the supply of critical infrastructure in novel ways, at the end of the day, a revenue-generating business must be built, and we must think about the evolving dynamics of the end market: what are the critical thresholds of supply that are required to meet new types of demand? What are the scale requirements across geographies for the service to be valuable? What are the barriers to building a viable business and what’s required for the project to tackle these challenges? Where is the structural competitive advantage relative to existing incumbents?
As more entrepreneurs seek to reshape large and important markets with DePIN, they must be thoughtful upfront about what the underlying business will look like. It’s much easier to ride the tailwinds of an emerging or evolving market than to battle against incumbents in a zero-sum game. We now definitively know that it is feasible to build decentralized infrastructure across the globe - now, we need to build the next generation of important businesses on top of them.
Chessvision.ai
I'm a chess player and one of the things I still enjoy about twitter is stumbling on diagrams of chess tactics and trying to solve them. A couple weeks ago I thought I had the answer to a tactic so I started to scroll through the responses to see if it was right. That's when I saw someone respond by tagging @ChessvisionAI and I discovered an awesome product.
ChessvisionAI is a twitter bot. Someone responds to a tweet with a chess diagram in it by tagging the bot and then Chessvision.ai analyzes the position and responds with links to both chess.com and lichess.org with an analysis of the next best move. Here's an example of it in action.
I really like that ChessvisionAI responds with options to analyze positions in both chess.com and lichess.org and gives the user a choice as to which service they want to use (preferences can be pretty polarizing in the chess world). The experience is smooth and fast, and I now see ChessvisionAI popping up in the responses to virtually every chess tactic diagram. It's taken ahold of the chess world.
I find the idea behind this bot to be very powerful. It's a headless application, summoned in certain contexts and responds within the UI of that context. There's no home or central application for ChessvisionAI. It can live across Twitter, Discord, Reddit, etc. It's fluid and interoperable.
ChessvisionAI was created and is managed by one person, Pawel Kacprzak. He wrote a great post explaining the initial inspiration behind the idea and how he built it which went viral on Hacker News years ago. It's cool to see one individual have such an impact on the way we interact with chess diagrams and how their flexible approach meets users wherever they are.
Uber Appreciation
Earlier this week, I hopped in an Uber with my family to get to our Lisbon apartment rental, and I felt a profound appreciation for the company. We were in a foreign country, and with the tap of a button, I could summon a car to safely get us home. It was reliable and worked the exact same way it does when I’m home in NYC or traveling anywhere else for that matter.
What Uber has accomplished over the past 15 years is nothing short of miraculous. I remember sitting outside TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco in 2010 when Travis pulled out his phone and showed Steve and me (and anyone else in a 2-mile radius who would pay attention) how he was calling a black car to pick him up. The app was clunky and the wait time was something like 20 minutes for a ride. Today I wait less than five minutes for a ride that is cheaper and safer than a taxi and available to me through the same app in virtually every city in the world. I don't think I've witnessed another company do anything like that in my career.
The media did an exceptional job vilifying Uber during its rise, and as a result, its history is often associated with scandal. That’s a shame because there are many important and positive things to learn from the company. Three of them are presently top of mind as I reflect on it:
Super outcomes require superhuman effort. Emil Michael, Uber’s chief business officer, has been a long-time friend of mine and was an advisor to both my companies. I watched him as he helped to build Uber from a company that had recently achieved product-market fit to a global behemoth. I’ve founded two companies and I’ve never worked as hard as he did when he built Uber. Absolute commitment to winning was part of the culture of the company. As my family was safely being transported around a foreign city earlier this week, all I could think was that wouldn’t have been possible were it not for the Uber teams’ maniacal work ethic. I remember it being commonplace to vilify the company and its leadership for its intense work culture. It would have never worked without it.
Another underappreciated aspect of Uber was its bold and innovative “capital as a moat” strategy, rapidly raising billions of dollars round after round. They were criticized for their lack of profitability and for using equity capital to block their competitors from markets and investor pools. They were deemed a capital-inefficient business that was never going to work. But they took that capital and built out physical infrastructure across the world in one decade in a way that had never been done before and at a speed that, in retrospect, seems unfathomable. Now it’s a $150B market cap and cash flow positive company that pioneered a bold and counterintuitive capital raising model currently employed by everyone involved in another transformative category, the LLM wars.
Think for yourself, and don't get swooped up by media narratives. Uber caught an infinite amount of flack as it was coming up. It was as if the world, particularly the media, was rooting for its downfall. During the moment, its hard-charging culture and agglomerate-all-the-cash strategy seemed like a recipe for disaster. At least that’s what the public narrative portrayed. But look at it now. It is almost certain that the global infrastructure Uber has built over the past 15 years would not exist were it not for the things that most people once lambasted about the company. Yes, absolutely Dara has done an exceptional job as CEO, shepherding the company as a public institution. But you don’t get to a place where you can hire a CEO like Dara without breaking some eggs along the way.
It took an Uber ride in a foreign country to appreciate these things fully. It’s easy to sour on companies as they are growing for doing things differently and for making mistakes publicly. But you don’t go from nothing to iconic without trekking through many gray areas. It’s important not to rush to judgment when the narrative and public sentiment turn. We see this every day in national politics, and we also see it when startups and new technologies make their way into the zeitgeist. Sometimes, things that are different that ruffle our feathers end up being true superpowers. I'm trying to be more conscious of that.
Portugal. The Country
We just had a family vacation in Portugal. Last summer, we took our kids to Italy for two weeks and showed them Rome, Umbria, and Sardinia. It was a magical trip so we decided to do it again and this time traveled across Lisbon, Algarve, and Santa Cruz for roughly ten days.
There are so many things to love about the country. Some that stood out to me on our trip:
The beaches are beautiful, serene, and remarkably clean. Even on the most crowded of beaches, I don’t think I saw a single piece of trash on the ground.
The view from one of our favorite restaurants, Bronzear 
A beach in Algarve The climate and topography very much remind me of California. The Santa Cruz area is like Big Sur with big cliffs that drop into the ocean. There are beaches here that are totally deserted and wild and make you feel like the last person on earth.
The view atop the cliffs at Praia do Seixo Surfing in Santa Cruz is a super fun family experience, even in the cold water
Like most of Europe, the food is meaningfully different than the US. I am rather disgusted by our domestic food system. It costs an arm and a leg, and it’s practically a full-time job to be able to heat healthy whole foods and avoid processed poison. I feel great after meals in Europe, and Portugal has delicious, fresh and affordable food all around. The seafood is incredible.
One thing I really like is how rest stops on the highway have delightful restaurant-like areas with terrific food you can either grab to go or comfortably sit and eat there. They also have quaint outdoor picnic areas. It was a delight to see a service stop be idyllic.
I barely noticed a police presence anywhere, and at no point did we feel unsafe in Lisbon (which was crowded). We maybe saw two groups of police officers in the city.
Portuguese fashion is awesome and places a focus on sustainability and quality. It’s now up there for me with Japanese apparel, and I am going to go out of my way to shop for Portuguese brands. There are tons of cool stores and places to shop in Lisbon, and street art is part of the culture.
Crack Kids, a store devoted to street art in Lisbon August is becoming impossibly hot to travel in Europe. We will likely do these trips in June and early July to avoid the heat and the crowds.
I am looking forward to returning to Lisbon and exploring other parts of Portugal like the Douro Valley and Silver Coast. I really love our annual summer Europe trip and im glad it’s now a tradition of ours.
Vinyl Records
The other day I woke up to the sounds of A Love Supreme by John Coltrane.
We recently bought a record player for our home. Carrie requested one for her birthday. I never grew up with vinyl records, so I didn't "get it." But now I do. It has been a gift that keeps on giving.
One of the best parts about it is that our kids have taken to it in such a special way. They love putting a record on and watching it spin and listening to the music come out of the speaker.
Every morning when he wakes up, one of the first things my seven-year-old does is run to the record player and throw something on. His favorite album is The Best of the Pogues. He picked it out himself when we visited a record store in Kingston called Rhino Records. It's a lot of fun to go record shopping with your family because you get to talk about all the different artists you see. The owner also gave us two free classical records when we checked out, Vivaldi and Debussy, because he wants more people to be exposed to the genre.
Watching my kids play with vinyl records reminds me of how I felt playing and collecting CDs growing up. Sitting on the floor of my room reading the lyrics in the album booklet while following along with the music. I can't help but think that this is a similar experience for them. There's something uniquely physical about it, and stands in stark contrast to a world filled with streams and screens. It's nostalgic, but also extremely present.
I remember several months ago my partner Albert sent me this chart about a resurgence in vinyl record sales.
I now understand why. It's such a special way to experience music. It's very akin to the idea of deep reals. This record player has been a wonderful addition to our home, and it has already become an important fixture in our lives. I'm really happy about that.
Brian Eno and Generative Film
This week my wife Carrie, a documentary film producer, took me to see Eno. The director of the film is Gary Hustwit, who previously made the film Helvetica. Eno is a spectacular film and I encourage everyone to see it. I never realized how profoundly special Brian Eno is. He is a true artist-philosopher, the perfect personification of what we may envision to be a master of a craft.
What was most exciting to me is that Eno is a generative film. No two screenings of the film are the same. You will never see the same film I watched the other evening in a sold-out theater, and that is by design. The director, Gary, started building software more than 5 years ago that would enable him to feed footage into a system and for that system to create different permutations of the film, indefinitely.
The resulting films, while similar in length, are always different. New footage can be added or removed whenever the director wants and the underlying system can be altered in any way. I didn’t realize it, but Brian Eno produced and pioneered generative music in the same way, so it makes sense that this new film format mimics its subject’s unique style.
After the film Gary stayed back for an interview onstage. I asked him if he planned to let other filmmakers use the software, and he said yes. He made it because he grew disenchanted with the linear format of films. It’s the same thing every time, and that constraint was a relic of the past and never adequately challenged. Why shouldn’t a film be a different experience for every view and viewer? Why should its mood not be different in the evening than the daytime, or be influenced by the weather or current events? These ideas are now possible to achieve, generatively.
Gary talked about how there may be novel ways to stream the film. Perhaps it can be customized to a streamer's environment. It's unclear how this would work, but everyone can watch Eno while nobody sees the same film twice is powerful. This is the type of idea that drives people to see bands like the Grateful Dead and Phish hundreds of times. You never know what you're going to get on any given night.
I'm a believer that AI-powered tools will lead to the creation of new media formats and change the way entertainment is created, but this film showed me that generative media doesn't need AI to create content or art. I'm looking forward to seeing what Gary does with this platform. One could experiment with film length, styles, and more. A piece of media that "feels" the same to everyone but never truly is is a new form of art in my book, and I'd love to see what happens when it's unleashed for the world to experience.
Vitalik: An Ethereum Story
For the past several years my wife Carrie has been working with Optimist and Linda Xie to make a documentary film about Vitalik Buterin, the creator of Ethereum.
Inspired by what they learned, they have developed the film in a crypto-native way and will release it in a similar fashion. In 2021, they raised funds for the film through a pplpleasr NFT crowdfund on Mirror (a USV company that has since merged with Paragraph, another USV company).
They plan to continue to release the film and a variety of other associated stories onchain through a combination of mints on Zora and Base. They have thoughtfully detailed their release plan in this post. The gist is summed up in the article:
Minting the trailer, tickets and ancillary content for the film not only unlocks viewing access but will help to fund the feature documentary’s self-release in theaters and on streaming platforms worldwide, making it accessible to people both within and outside of the crypto space...
...By harnessing the power of crypto for the film's trailer, ancillary content and ticketing, we’re creating a distribution model that gives the community direct access to the film while funding a decentralized release of Vitalik: An Ethereum Story in theaters around the world and on a traditional streaming platform.
This is a film that is pioneering a new model in how stories can be financed, distributed and experienced. It has been inspiring to watch how this plan has evolved in conjunction with the growth of web3. Today, the team released the trailer for the film, which is now available to mint. Soon, tickets for the film will be available for purchase onchain, and the film will premiere IRL in theaters across the globe. Ultimately, it will be distributed on traditional streaming platforms, but the Ethereum community and anyone who wants to will be able to experience it together in person and online beforehand.
I'm excited for the world to see this film and to watch how creators all over the world can learn from this model, build on top of it, and transform the way film and other types of content and art are funded, distributed, and owned in the future.
Shitty First Drafts
Several years ago, I read Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott. She writes about a concept called "shitty first drafts" that has stuck with me ever since:
Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere. Start by getting something -- anything -- down on paper. A friend of mine says that the first draft is the down draft -- you just get it down. The second draft is the up draft -- you fix it up. You try to say what you have to say more accurately. And the third draft is the dental draft, where you check every tooth, to see if it's loose or cramped or decayed, or even, God help us, healthy.
To me, shitty first drafts is a mindset. It's about getting ideas on the page and out of your system, however convoluted or unintelligible they may be. It's a release of whatever pent up energy and thoughts and ideas you've had stewing. And it's about not judging yourself when you put the words on the page. They're not intended to be perfect or poetic. They're just there to be the first step on the journey or the first rotation of the snowball rolling down the hill.
I like this because it's not just about writing. This mentality is applicable to many different things. Building and shipping products is one of them. Perfect is the enemy of good. Most of the time, you just need to start and ship and see what happens. 99% of the time you won't get it right the first time so just get it out there and revise, revise, revise.
This blog post is a shitty first draft. I've thought about and talked about this idea at least ten times in the past several months, and it's time to get it out of my system. It's a cathartic process.
Anything that requires creativity is well suited to a shitty first draft. The more shitty first drafts, the merrier.
Real-life Networks
This is part two in a series about how web3 will influence the future of social networks. In Part One, I wrote about how public social networks will be unbundled and siphoned off into smaller networks that form around interests (e.g., Phish Phans, bird-watching enthusiasts, biohackers, Swifties, etc.) and have unique user experiences and business models that are specific to that network.
This second installment focuses on private social networks. I think of these as communities of people who know each other in real life and frequently assemble in groups on messaging applications. When we were building GroupMe we called it the “real life network.” We thought of it as a network of smaller networks and a place for people to stay connected to their “close ties.” Private social networks are the group chats that keep you connected with your family, your best friends from school, your kid’s little league team, your church group, your fitness buddies, and of course, your crew that you go see jamband concerts with. These networks are usually persistent threads in your life. Sometimes they’re hyperactive, and sometimes there’s a lull in the conversation for a week, month, or year(s). But they usually stay with you for a very long time, if not a lifetime.
What’s interesting about private social networks is that they live primarily in messaging applications: groupme, WhatsApp, iMessage, signal, discord, telegram, etc. They’re fragmented, but they seldom burrow themselves into a broadcast platform. That means that the ways we interact with them are fundamentally different than the way we interact with traditional social media. We don’t sit there scrolling and consuming content - we engage and tell jokes, share photos and videos and memes, make real-world plans, wish friends happy birthday, etc. The UX that supports these groups is distinct and simple, but it is also overdue for an upgrade.
Several weeks ago, groupme rolled out its largest release in over a decade. It became one of the first messaging applications to integrate AI into the group chat experience and shipped a handful of other features and upgrades, too. I have long felt that messaging applications - the place where our real-life networks live - have hit an evolutionary wall. There has been little to no innovation with regard to how we interact with these groups, and the UX has been relegated to a chat interface that looks and feels the same across these important applications.
There are three core areas of functionality that need to be explored: applications, money, and AI.
Every real-life network should be able to access a robust suite of applications they can invite to a group chat and interact with together. Years ago when we were building groupme we used to talk about how we were going to create a world where developers could build applications that groups could use together in the app. We wanted people to be able to play Words with Friends together right in their groups. Why can’t groups play interactive games together in a group chat? Why aren’t there applications for collaboratively planning and booking trips, reservations, events, etc.? Real-life networks have real problems and needs, and they should be addressed in the interfaces in which they live.
Groups of people use money to do things together. Splitting the bill at a restaurant? Paying for rent with roommates? Planning an event? Going on a trip? Paying dues for Little League? Making friendly wagers? The list is endless. All of these are pain points. Money needs to be native to group experiences. Every group should have a ledger of contributions, easily be able to split payments, and program their collective and individual money to do whatever they want.
AI is the thing that can keep groups interesting, fun, and useful and give them longevity. MetaAI is available to chat 1-1 in WhatsApp, and now co-pilot is enabled in groupme. Groups should be able to ask agents questions together. Agents should be able to make helpful recommendations to groups and provide value to them in novel ways: suggestions of activities to do together, reservations at places, birthday reminders, surfacing old photos and choice quotes from the chat, rekindling activity when things have gone dormant, telling jokes, etc. The possibilities are limitless. They can be general purpose or even entertainment oriented: imagine inviting an AI into the group that you created together in the image of a friend or one that represents a historical figure, celebrity, musician, etc. AI can be a friend, comedian, personal group concierge, facilitator or counselor in service of your group.
These are all relatively rudimentary and obvious ideas, but they are sorely missing from real-life networks. Why? All of our groups are stuck inside monolithic messaging applications that are designed to service the needs of their owners and not our own. Incumbents care about retaining users in their own messaging applications. They will prioritize the features and strategies that are best suited to entrenching the parent company. This usually means a focus on locking in its username and being closed to outside developers. As a result, messaging applications are way behind the innovation curve. Sure, they are fast and secure, but those are tablestakes characteristics. This thread by Shane Mac, the founder of XMTP, does a good job highlighting this issue:
The answer: privacy, security, and our commitment to being open.
The protocol update we released today is the biggest improvement since we started XMTP.
Groups with the highest level of privacy and security.
It takes…
Learn…
8
I believe the only way to create the real-life network experience we deserve and to unseat the incumbent messaging applications is to be Open. An open ecosystem means that anyone can build a client on top of a messaging protocol. People should be able to build unique user experiences for certain demographics without having to rebuild the network itself (similar to the idea in Part One). Building the killer “use case” experience, like a college-focused one, a church congregation, or a recreational sports team, should be much easier. This is why I am excited about protocols like XMTP that are laying the foundation for these ideas to be realized.
Being open means that the applications and AI agents that are invited into every chat can be accessed by every client as well. Imagine an open marketplace of applications that you can invite into 1-1 and group chats that are accessible across any messaging application built atop a shared protocol. What an incredible feature for developers to build once and ship everywhere. The exact same experience could extend to a marketplace of AI agents. I don’t want to only be able to use Meta AI or MSFT’s whatever-they-call-it-today bot. I want to choose for myself. And when it comes to the economics of these real-life networks, being open means lock-in is not possible. Money that moves around within and between groups can also flow from client to client and in and out of the protocol.
For nearly a decade, I get a pitch every month or so from an entrepreneur saying they are going to build the groupme killer. Nobody has done it yet. It’s not because groupme is a stellar application, it’s because you need a forcing function to move all your groups to another application. The only way to do this is to pray the app either gets shut down or to build something that is 10x better. It’s really hard to build something that is 10x better. WhatsApp is a superb messaging application. So is Signal and Telegram. 10x better means something important needs to be fundamentally different. Being open and nurturing a robust developer ecosystem of builders who are chomping at the bit to push forward the paradigm of messaging and real-life networks feels like the way to go about it. People need a reason to switch. It’s time to give them one.