Alex Wittenberg

Some of the most important objectives we have been evaluating are portability, scale, and trust. Portability allows people to keep their social life intact even if they switch providers. Scale allows people to participate in global discourse. And trust is created by giving people insight into what services are doing with their data and how... See more

Rippling abstracted this common infrastructure into Unity: a set of middleware capabilities on top of its employee graph. Rippling only needs to build middleware once, and then can amortize the investment across all its modules, freeing engineers to work on new product functionality. As Unity gets stronger, the entire product suite becomes deeper.... See more

Here’s the rub: just because it’s likely that things will continue to compound doesn’t mean that there’s an obvious or easy way to play it.

Defenders of modern capitalism enjoy pointing out that despite how things might feel, we actually have more leisure time than we did in previous decades—an average of about five hours per day for men, and only slightly less for women. But perhaps one reason we don’t experience life that way is that leisure no longer feels very leisurely. Instead,... See more

Know Your Customer (KYC): How can we implement zero knowledge KYC obligations while retaining privacy and freedom for individuals, regardless of who they are or where they're from?Smart Contracts: How can smart contracts be recognized as a viable method of optimizing for compliance, just like how we have accountants to optimize for year-end audits... See more

So, to sum up, beware narratives of technological inevitability. Resistance, if it be necessary, is not necessarily futile, and, as Heffernan reminds us, “Anyone claiming to know the future is just trying to own it.” 

That doesn't mean NFTs are a scam or a fad. Far from it. Only that many projects last year were cash grabs, and we should now expect more from our non-fungible tokens.

Most protocol DAOs currently only hold their native protocol token on their balance sheets. Given the volatile nature of cryptocurrencies, this could mean that DAOs are forced to sell their native tokens during extended bear markets (and therefore at inopportune prices) to finance ongoing operations. Consequently, DAOs should first ensure that they... See more