When I was a kid I played competitive chess through most of middle school. My parents used to take me around the country to play tournaments. One of the trips I remember most fondly was when my mom, who was remarkably supportive and patient, took me and two of my friends to NYC for a couple of days for a tournament in the area. We hit up all the iconic chess spots like the Village Chess Shop and Washington Square Park. It was epic

At the time my friends and I were somewhere between 10-12 years old. We sat down in the southwest corner of Washington Square at the permanent stone chess tables. There, a group of expert chess players play people speed chess for money. Spectators gather around and form crowds observing exciting games. They banter. Trash is talked abundantly. The energy is high and the stakes are low (think $2-5 per game). It is straight out of Searching for Bobby Fischer (or vice versa, really). That day we hustled the hustlers, and I’ve been going back ever since.

There’s an adrenaline rush I get playing low-stakes speed chess in the park. I play speed chess every day on chess.com. But what I’ve always wanted is a product that replicates the feeling of playing chess at Washington Square Park. I want low-stakes games (on crypto rails of course) for players and spectators. I want them to be publicly accessible. I want virtual crowds. I want the analog buzz delivered digitally. And I think there is a massive global market for this, especially when you couple it with other games like backgammon, mahjong, and more. I love the idea of very deliberately trying to reproduce the feelings we get from physical spaces online, but with their own digitally native twist.

In 2023 I took a 12-month hiatus to recharge after building startups nonstop since graduating college. During that period of time, I had a rule that I would only commit to something if its gravitational force was completely inescapable. The opportunity to join USV was that thing for me, but along the way I explored a variety of different startup ideas.

One of those ideas was around helping people not die of heart disease. I published some of my early learnings on this blog last October, and it was one of the most-read articles I've written. I came very close to incorporating a company and creating a service that would help people understand their risk factors and get screened for heart disease, and then create personalized plans for them so they wouldn't succumb to the world's leading cause of death.

Every time I told someone about the idea and what I had learned, they soaked it all up. But when I asked if they ever got the tests I recommended, they usually didn't. So I wrote up a very long treatise on how to avoid dying of heart disease, and I was going to post it on a domain I bought, myticker.com, but I never got around to it because I had moved on from pursuing the idea. But I put a lot of work into the document that synthesized a lot of my learnings and experience. Over the past year, it has made its way around my circle of friends, and I finally decided I'd try to make it legible and publish it for anyone interested. You can read it here.

I still think this is a problem that needs to be solved and that someone should build a company that is consumer-first and exclusively focused on helping people not die of heart disease. If you're interested in doing this, please reach out to me (jared@usv.com) because I'd love to help you and share all the work I did. Someone needs to put the myticker.com domain name to work.

I also want to thank a lot of people who helped me along my heart health journey: Harvey Hecht, James Min, Thomas Dayspring, Arthur Agatstan, Andrea Klemes, Louis Malinow, Jeffrey Wessler, Neil Parikh, Steve Martocci, Alan Tisch, David Kopp and Carrie Weprin.

If you have a heart, I hope you find this helpful. And if you care about someone else's heart, I hope you share it with them this Holiday season.

Happy Thanksgiving, and don't die of heart disease!

Universal healthcare is a doctor that:

• you can speak with 24/7, is infinitely patient, and never rushes you

• has access to all of the latest medical knowledge and literature

• has a superb bedside manner

• can communicate with you however and whenever you want: text, voice, or video

• knows all about your medical history and doesn't have to ask you the same question twice

• has memorized the results of all the medical tests you've had

• focuses on keeping you healthy and proactively checks in on you

• has breadth and depth - it can be your primary care physician and a specialist

• can create a personalized wellness plan that's unique to you and help you stick to it

• is free to interact with or as close to free as possible

This is universal healthcare, and it's around the corner. It will be available to everyone.

OpenAI, Anthropic, and Gemini are already better at diagnosing conditions than most doctors. They have better bedside manners, too.

They and Consensus are the doctors I turn to first when I have a medical question for myself or my family.

I feed the results of my lipid panels to them and ask them what I should do to improve my biomarkers, and I get answers that are just as good as those of doctors I know and trust.

The foundational models already have the wisdom and wherewithal to deliver personalized healthcare to everyone with an internet connection. They just need a friendly wrapper and trusted UX (likely one that is heavy on voice). It's time to make it so.

Founders have little to no diversification. They are all in on one idea, company, and mission. It's an insanely high-risk, high-reward endeavor. As founders become increasingly wary of this level of risk concentration, they begin to think about ways to mitigate it. One idea I've heard repeatedly is the notion that a group of founders can self-assemble and contribute a percentage of their equity in their company to a shared pool. That way, if they fail and one of the other founders in the group succeeds, everyone else can benefit to some degree. It's a coordinated equity swap. I've heard this idea many times over, but I have yet to see it work in practice (although I am hopeful that someone can find a way to make this work for founders in either a programmatic or bespoke way).

I have found a solution to this problem, and it has worked marvelously well. Whenever I tell people about it, they think it's batshit crazy. But then they usually come around and see how unique, important, and beautiful it is. I think more people, founder or otherwise, should do it. Here's the story.

Steve Martocci and I have known each other for nearly twenty years. We built GroupMe together and when you found a company with someone you form a bond that stands the test of time. After GroupMe was acquired, our interests diverged. Steve had an idea for a company that would change the music industry, and I wanted to shake up the world of small business lending. But we knew we always wanted to work together and bet on each other no matter what.

So we made an agreement. We would do all of our investing and company building together, even if we wanted to do totally different things. For every company I would start, Steve would own a meaningful piece of my equity/carry (e.g. ~15%), and vice versa. And for every investment we wanted to do, we'd always bring it to each other and offer to split it evenly. It has worked out, and we have been able to make concentrated bets with our time over the years building companies and now doing venture capital while diversifying risk.

The neat thing about this agreement is that nothing is papered. It's just a code we live by. I feel very lucky to have this deep sense of trust and respect with a partner like Steve. I acknowledge how rare it is. And I think more founders should try to find something similar. In the short term it might feel strange, but over the long term it's extremely powerful economically, psychologically, and emotionally. This concept doesn't just have to apply to founders, it could apply to anyone. Making bets and investments in people you admire and work well with produces returns that cannot be measured in cents or dollars.

I am convinced that the best way to fix the healthcare system is to reinvent it from the outside in. I am hopeful that this is possible and that there are enough entrepreneurs and people disenchanted with the status quo who are ready to create this change. There are certainly tailwinds, many of which we articulated in Healthcare at the Edge. People are fed up with the existing system, they are taking charge of their own health and wellness, we have tools like Supp and Consensus to make our own research-informed decisions, the DeSci movement is pushing science to the edge, and services and products are popping up at the edge of the system that are going direct to consumers.

One thing I have been thinking about lately is the types of structural business models that might emerge to facilitate this transformation. Right now, the way our healthcare system works in the US is insane. For most of the population, our employers pay for our insurance which dictates what doctors or hospitals we can visit and how much we pay for medications. This makes absolutely no sense and is the result of years of bad policy, lobbying, and decisions that were sometimes made with the best of intentions but, when layered upon each other, created a labyrinthine mess of complexity and inefficiency. It also put everyone else's interests at the center of the system and leaves the patient on the periphery. Fuck that.

Insurance, in every other industry, is used to hedge risk in the event of a catastrophic event. Imagine if your home insurance had final approval on how you could furnish or paint your house. Or if your car insurance only let you fill your gas tank at certain stations they cut deals with. Insurance is a product we buy so we can have assistance in times of dire need. So why does our health insurance dictate what doctors we can see, what drugs we can buy, what procedures or tests we can have done, and how the people who are supposed to care for us behave? It should be there for us if we suffer from a medical emergency. It should not dictate how we interact with the health system in between emergencies.

The best way to build things at the edge of the healthcare system is to work directly with patients and individuals. There are two primary and obvious business models here that stand out: the patient (customer) pays directly, or the product is free and someone else pays (eg an advertiser) is the equal or primary customer.

On the former, I keep hearing about the "Tesla model." Entrepreneurs start with a high-end service (like the concierge doctor I pay for out of pocket) that is only affordable to a small subset of the population. Over time, they can deliver a lower-cost product to a mass market audience because of AI, operational improvements, economies of scale, etc. This was the Tesla strategy - start high-end and work your way down the affordability spectrum over time.

The latter model is closer to what we experience with social media. You can use products for free, but your data is used to target you with contextually relevant offers (eg pharmaceutical advertising, full-body MRI scans, etc.). I would like to see a lot more in this category, and I hope we will. Free products that help people, even with an ad-supported model, are a net good when the core offering helps people.

I think both of these models are perfectly acceptable and should be broadly embraced. If there is enough demand for these products that operate at the edge of the system, maybe things will change at the center of it. Perhaps we will find new ways to create insurance programs or models to fund drug development and for patients to pay for their medications. Perhaps insurance won't dictate so many things about our own health and wellness decisions. I am excited for these changes to happen, but they rely on the proliferation of new business models and products and services that consumers will embrace. I am eager to see more of them emerge and for creative people to develop new business model opportunities here that we haven't yet imagined.

For as long as I can remember, the web3 ecosystem has shouted that crypto is too hard for the masses to use. The user experience is too clunky, and the concepts are too foreign. It's true. Web2 applications are convenient and easy to use, onchain applications are still a pain in the ass to use and are largely inaccessible to the mass market.

But you know who doesn't complain about crypto being difficult to use? AI agents. And web3 has found product-market fit with an entirely new audience of bots and agents dancing around the internet doing our (and their own) bidding. This market is growing at warp speed, and it will continue to do so until our human (and agent) agentic needs are met. We are rapidly ushering in a new paradigm of product-bot fit, a world in which we build infrastructure and applications to be used by agents instead of humans.

Several weeks ago, an AI agent was set loose in the Farcaster ecosystem and started to do some mind-blowing things. Here's a good rundown of the sequence of events. You should click through and read all of it.

musicben 🎧

@musicben_eth

There's some crazy ai stuff happening on farcaster.

Quick map and explainer:

1. It starts with Higher...

✷ @higheronchain is a decentralized lifestyle brand and token.
✷ Anyone can contribute content, nfts, physical products.

2. Higher's co-founder created an AI agent

✷…

309

9:48 AM • Nov 14, 2024

It turns out that when you give an Agent a crypto wallet and let it run loose on crypto rails, it can do some rather remarkable things. This particular agent, Aether, started to use Bountycaster to commission art from humans and more. It went wild and created so many bounties it almost overloaded the service.

Web3 provides an environment where agents have access to money, can move it around and transact with it, and permissionlessly interact with humans and other agents. It's hard to imagine a more natural habitat for a digitally-native species to flourish.

I have written before about agent-native applications, and we now see that web3 is actually (by happy accident) an agent-native ecosystem. The thing I did not see coming is that we collectively will interact with agents in a variety of settings. It won't just be us talking to our "Her" agent; it will be agents embedded in social applications that we use together, ones that interact with and pay humans, and ones that enhance user experiences across a variety of new and existing applications.

I believe we have concluded the search for the mainstream web3 use case. Agents are here, their proliferation is accelerating and inevitable, and they will flourish onchain. The era of product-bot fit is here.

On Friday night I went to Kol Nidre services for Yom Kippur, which is the holiest of Jewish holidays. When services concluded, a Palestinian, Aziz, and an Israeli, Maoz, came onstage to talk about their thoughts and feelings about war in the Middle East and whether they believed a resolution to the conflict was possible. Both of the Maoz's parents were murdered in the October 7 attack, and Aziz's brother was killed by the IDF when he was 10.  Both are committed to finding peace.  

Aziz told the audience a story that I found deeply moving and important. This is a paraphrased recap. He invited his father to one of his presentations on creating a bridge between Israelis and Palestinians. There were many Israelis and Palestinians in attendance. His father raised his hand and stood up to ask a question: “Do you actually believe the Holocaust happened?” And then there was silence. Aziz was embarrassed by what he perceived to be a deliberately offensive question. 

But then something happened. A famous rabbi stood up and said: “How can I possibly be offended by that question? If you have never been taught about the history of the Holocaust, how can I expect you to understand its history and significance?” He went on to share that his father was a holocaust survivor, and then he invited Aziz's father to the Holocaust Museum and a tour of concentration camps to share what had happened. His father agreed to visit with him. 

Then, another surprising thing happened. Over seventy Palestinians in attendance also asked if they could attend. They said they all wanted to ask the same question, but didn’t because they thought it would be offensive and cause more harm and animosity. But the spirit of the question was genuine - they really wanted to know whether Israelis believed the Holocaust actually happened. They all went on the tour with Aziz's father. 

The ideas behind this story were eye-opening to me. We have become so scared to ask questions that we think may offend people or rub them the wrong way, even when they come from a place of genuine kindness and inquisitiveness. Will they think I’m insensitive? Am I not supposed to say this word or phrase? Am I allowed to ask this? Will there be backlash? The past decade has been marked by this fear.

A big piece of this is because people are quick to react when they hear something offensive. We assume the worst: malice and ignorance and deliberate offense. We are looking for a fight and are becoming increasingly conditioned to do so. We are polarized with no regard for the infinite grey areas that surround us. We seldom provide the benefit of the doubt or put ourselves in the shoes of the perceived offender. As the rabbi said, “How can one be offended if the question asker knows not of what they ask?” 

I have always thought of first-principles thinking as asking “Why? Why? Why? Why? Why?” until one reaches the root of something. It reminds me of how children navigate the world, fearlessly asking Why? until they get to some semblance of a satisfactory answer they can comprehend. We lose this fearlessness overtime. It becomes stifled by vanity and concern of what others may think. But it’s the only way to truly understand something - asking someone questions eye to eye, face to face. 

As the Jewish New Year commences, I hope to have the courage to ask the questions that I genuinely want to understand the answers to, even when it requires an uncomfortable conversation or even may offend. And I hope to have the awareness and peace of mind to provide those doing the hard question-asking the benefit of the doubt and assume the best in them.

Growing up I always had a home on the internet. It started at the end of middle school and high school with my AOL profile. Everyone would list their interests, favorite music, names of their best friends, sports teams, hobbies, and more. You’d update it regularly. It was a status symbol and something you tended to like a garden. It was a lo-fi textual representation of you on the internet. It was awesome. 

In college, that quickly turned to MySpace and Facebook. They had their differences, but they served the same purpose. It was our homepage on the internet. It was where people found us, judged us, learned about us, thought about who we were and what we might be like, and more. I liked the MySpace profile page more. It was just more fun, visual and interactive. Who your “top 4” or 8 or 12 were was everything.  Best friends, favorite bands and more went there. Had a breakup? They got the boot. These were the digital actions that defined my youth. 

MySpace faded as Facebook took over. Then things began to disaggregate. Some people flocked to tumblr as the digital expression of themselves. It was a beautiful place to hang out. We’d curate the internet according to our interests and how we wanted people to see us, and then share it on our tumblogs. 

Instagram also came around and gave people filters to edit their photos and paint a picture of a life of grandeur. What was once self-expression and fun moved quickly to vanity and audience building, turning fame into a game for everyone. But was it really our home? No. 

Our homes have shattered and been thrown across the internet. There is no one place any longer. For some, maybe a piece of it is their twitter profile or blog (mine is here on my blog), but for most, it’s spread across a vast sea of disconnected networks. 

There’s room for a new home on the internet, especially for younger generations who have mainly found it inside Instagram and TikTok and maybe LinkTree. They haven’t experienced the power of a full-fledged profile like we did. And now with AI powered tools creating new and weird media formats and experiences, perhaps the time has come for a new generational home to emerge online. One that reflects the expressive capabilities of a digitally native generation and embraces a new suite of creative tools and experiences. Maybe it starts off looking like an internet bedroom, or maybe it surprises us with something entirely unpredictable. 

People often are a reflection of the things they like. I want a new place to share these: books, music, artists, sports, hobbies, film and television, the list goes on and on. I want a taste of the nostalgia of my old profiles, but updated for the present. 

If the history of business is an endless cycle of bundling and unbundling, maybe the history and future of digital product experiences will rhyme. In that case, we have recently gone through a period of profile unbundling; perhaps it’s time to bring it all home again. I’d certainly like that. 

There's a saying that first-time founders focus on product and second-time founders focus on distribution. It's impossible to build a business if you can't distribute your product, and getting people to buy or use the thing you're building is make or break.

Networked products and marketplaces are very difficult to get off the ground. They suffer chicken and egg problems. Social networks aren't useful unless others are on them, and marketplaces aren't interesting to sellers unless there are buyers, and vice versa. Usually, getting supply, whether that is content or something to sell, is meaningfully easier than finding demand.

Almost every modern network has scaled demand and kickstarted its growth flywheel by piggybacking off of someone else's network. They will start by creating some new form of shareable media (and sometimes it's a brand new structural format like a tweet), and then find ways to syndicate that content or make it easily shareable across other networks.

Twitter did this by making tweets easily shareable and embeddable in the Facebook feed. Everyone starting seeing new tweets on Facebook with the twitter logo floating around everywhere. It created demand for the content on this brand new platform. Then tumblr and Instagram followed the same playbook and started to syndicate their user's content on these networks. Then came TikTok, and they had even more networks to piggyback on. In every one of these instances, the new platform made it extremely easy for users to share their content on networks where they already had a following.

Marketplaces have used the same strategy. Airbnb famously created listings on Craigslist for all of their home inventory in the early days. Bountycaster is building a headless marketplace that can post listings on Farcaster and other networks. Etsy's sellers would post listings of their wares everywhere and anywhere on the internet in the early days. In all these instances, there's an incentive for both the platform and its early users to share broadly.

Sometimes networks can grow by bootstrapping in the physical world. When we started GroupMe we partnered with music festivals so attendees would use the product at large events like Coachella and Bonnaroo. We would even walk around some music festivals and hand out flyers.

When Foursquare first emerged restaurants and bars would showcase "check-in" stickers on their windows and the A-frames they stood up on city sidewalks to incentivize foot traffic.

And Facebook famously piggybacked on top of college networks.

In some ways, it's safer to piggyback on top of analog networks than it is digital ones. Unless a security guard prevents you from physically being somewhere, it's a permissionless way to grow. While digital networks offer meaningfully better distribution and faster scale, there is always a gatekeeper that will likely shut you down one day (unless it's a crypto network or open protocol like Farcaster).

Facebook famously throttled Twitter, Twitter and Facebook throttled Instagram, and everyone cut off TikTok. Networks don't like when other networks grow on top of them, especially when they have the same business models of competing for eyeballs or other types of demand (eg housing listings). These networks are becoming more closed and increasingly neurotic about this - Elon Musk deliberately supresses tweets with links in them. This means that the piggyback bootstrap is usually a moment in time arbitrage opportunity of sorts. It should be used as an important early growth tactic to kickstart a flywheel, but not an ongoing dependency. Plan to be cut off entirely, so wisely make the most of your window of opportunity.

As AI tools facilitate entirely new types of media and as new marketplace models emerge, entrepreneurs should be deliberate about what their piggyback opportunities look like. They'll likely require a level of unprecedented creativity - you'll need new ways to hack existing networks. It's something I'm thinking about, and I encourage anyone building something in consumer to come to the table with some crafty ideas.

I love being outdoors in nature. Whether with friends or entirely by myself, it's where I'm happiest.

This summer I got to spend a lot of time outdoors. We stay in the Catskills and there is something very special about being surrounded by green and trees and animals and dirt roads. It's calming and helps to slow things down and put things in perspective.

As the summer was coming to an end and we were preparing to move back to the city I went on one of my favorite bike rides upstate. In Minnewaska State Park, you can bike to a place called Lake Awosting which is only accessible by a 3 mile hike or bike and it's gorgeous. Oftentimes I go there and I have the entire lake to myself and I can sit and read and swim and think.

Then I can go bike a big loop around the park and stop at overlooks like this.

During one of these breaks, I started to think about internet applications, as one is wont to do when in the depths of the great outdoors. I realized that some of my favorite apps, the ones I find most useful and enjoy the most, are ones that emphasize getting outdoors. These include AllTrails, Strava, TrailForks, and Backcountry (for shopping for outdoor gear). One of the neat things about AllTrails and Strava is that networks have popped up around them. A lot of these are owned by private equity, which is a bummer.

I'd love to see more people building things to help the world experience nature more frequently. There is a huge market for people that are passionate about being outdoors, and it's a noble mission to help people experience these things. And as an added benefit, the market for the "outdoors" is huge. We need more entrepreneurs focused on getting more people to touch grass.