Product-Bot Fit

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.

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.

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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 Offensive Questions

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.

Home On The Internet

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. 

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Ride It to the Sky

Written by
Jared Hecht
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