Jay Matthews

Early-stage VC: Venture investing attracted me for several reasons. The most compelling of them was the limitless opportunity it presented to discourse with visionaries from a myriad of industries, play a critical role in the innovation life-cycle of companies, and create value and jobs in the process.

“I ask you, dear sir, to have patience with all that is unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves, like closed rooms, like books written in a foreign language. Don’t try to find the answers now. They cannot be given anyway, because you would not be able to live them. For everything is to be lived. Live the questions now. ... See more

“The word “poverty” was a fine, somehow noble word. It evoked an image out of old schoolbooks: poor but clean. Cleanliness made the poor socially acceptable. Social progress meant teaching people to be clean; once the indigent had been cleaned up, “poverty” became a title of honour. Even in the eyes of the poor, the squalor of destitution applied o... See more

The internet will not survive.

People call too many meetings when they want to feel more in control; those meetings often make you worse at completing whatever task or project you’re struggling to complete, in part because they’re conducted in a mononchronic way, reinscribing systems of authority, obsessed with (inactionable) action plans, and never actually building any sort of... See more

10 lessons from the past year

1. There has to be value: product market fit, there must be fundamental value for users


2. Web3 and crypto are not consumer friendly: people want problems addressed regardless of labels or terminology — " Crypto will scale when the technology becomes the invisible enabler of what consumer actually care about "


3. Incentive desig

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An incredible encyclopaedic work on the work of Sir Patrick Geddes, a trans-disciplinary theorist with long reaching influence including the origins of ecological design, GIS software, bioregional design, and "Think Global, Act Local".

Therefore, creativity does not happen inside people’s heads, but in the interaction between a person’s thoughts and a sociocultural context. It is a systemic rather than an individual phenomenon.

And that purpose was to communalize trauma, to create the conditions where — the word “amphitheater” in Greek means “the place where we go to see in both directions.” “Amphi-” — I see you, you see me; both directions. “Theatron” — the seeing place. So we go to the amphitheater in the fifth century, B.C., to see each other, to see ourselves; to see ... See more