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.

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.

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.