Sarah Drinkwater
@sarahdrinkwater
Knowledge beachcomber interested in the ownership economy, flourishing communities, ecosystem building, magic, and knowledge as an end to itself.
Sarah Drinkwater
Notion – The all-in-one workspace for your notes, tasks, wikis, and databases.
nanransohoff.com
The Optimism Collective is a large-scale experiment in digital democratic governance, built to drive rapid and sustainable growth of a decentralized ecosystem, and stewarded by the newly formed Optimism Foundation.
Introducing the Optimism Collective
The Indie Era of Startups
bryce.medium.com
perspectives on funding and venture capital (VC) and venture capital
As the amount of capital raised by venture capital firms nearly 8x’d between 2013 and 2022, the number of new startups funded didn’t even double.
When you take total VC dollars raised, divided by the number of new companies, you’ll see the average startup today has 5x more VC capital available than its counterpart did in 2013.
Rather than fund more ideas or more types of founders, most VCs simply ended up giving more dollars to more of the same founders and ideas they’d always back.
Great businesses aren’t good enough to drive the kinds of returns needed to generate the kinds of returns mega funds demand. As more capital was consumed, more risk was layered on to push from a great outcome to a mega-fund returning outcome.
Today, the fuel for startups and the oxygen for funds are being cut significantly. There is less available capital and appetite for burn
Gitcoin Kernel and She256 are doing a lot of work to build educational onramps.... But what if @dhof and the whole Loot Discord dedicated time to mentoring a group of people who don’t have any way into the space? (not white friends who work in bigcos)
Web 3.0 and
Somewhat to my surprise, I found an answer waiting.I want to follow people who are interesting to me, in a way that’s simple, expressive, and predictable.
Robin Sloan • Specifying Spring '83
📢NEW PAPER!
Where @davidthewid, @sarahbmyers & I unpack what Open Source AI even is.
We find that the terms ‘open’ & ‘open source’ are often more marketing than technical descriptor, and that even the most 'open' systems don't alone democratize AI 1/
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4543807... See more
The way managers are taught to run companies seems to be like modular design in the sense that you treat subtrees of the org chart as black boxes. You tell your direct reports what to do, and it's up to them to figure out how. But you don't get involved in the details of what they do. That would be micromanaging them, which is bad.
Hire good people and give them room to do their jobs. Sounds great when it's described that way, doesn't it? Except in practice, judging from the report of founder after founder, what this often turns out to mean is: hire professional fakers and let them drive the company into the ground.
They win through speed, empathy, and expertise. By avoiding firm politics, solo investors can move more quickly, committing to a round in hours or days. Many are current or previous operators, giving them empathy for founders’ journeys. Some bring unique expertise to the table, too.