Hello friends,
Apologies for the short hiatus — I became a dad a couple of weeks ago and have been adjusting to a new and improved version of reality.
It’s great to be back.
Visual of the week
If it looks simple, it was hard.
VV x NFT
We jumped into the NFT world yesterday minting an edition of one, “Chisel” — You can check out the auction here.
No question that this space is insane at time of writing, but I’m very excited about the general trend — infrastructure that allows creativity to be monetized directly can only result in more creativity.
Full Circle
If you’re a member of the VV community, you’ll be aware of the recent experiment with some new software — we attempted to migrate 3,000 people from Slack to Circle over the past month or so.
Long story short, we failed, and we’re back to slack.
Lessons:
It’s incredibly difficult to get people to change behavior at scale
“If it ain’t broke…”
We spent a chunk of change building a ton of automations and infrastructure — to find out the solution we slapped together in 15 minutes 18 months ago works perhaps 10x better.
Another example of momentum beating meticulousness.
Meme update
Still seeing great traction on the meme front with @memebuilders.
Anecdotally, the more any given example makes fun of something I find myself doing, the better it tends to perform.
Perhaps that’s an incredibly obvious observation — but introspection is an endless well of inspiration.
Extra Curricular
I’ve been up and down the Bitcoin rabbit hole many times, and I’m currently quite far down.
If you’re remotely familiar with the space you’ll know Michael Saylor, who, regardless of our opinion on Bitcoin, we can all learn a lesson from: An absolutely massive demonstration of public conviction, putting $4B of BTC on his companies balance sheet.
We’ve been taking down this 9 episode podcast series for the last week, where Saylor explains money from first principles, using a huge array of simple but provocative analogies from anthropology, history, and science. A masterful example of how to explain complex things in compelling way.
Listen here or search via your favorite podcast app.
As always, I appreciate you and wish you a prosperous week ahead.
Jack
Congrats on the little one!
QQ on community migration. Was the challenge migration/changing habits, or were there functionality limitations in Circle?
Hi Jack, love your newsletter and tweets. Was curious if you’ve looked into Discord? Have been seeing a lot of Slack communities migrate there.