Timour Kosters
@timourkosters
Investor & builder working in blockchain and ml. Tweeting: @timourxyz
linktr.eeTimour Kosters
If everyone owns a slice of American value creation, everyone will want America to do better: collective equity in innovation and in the success of the country will align our incentives. The new social contract will be a floor for everyone in exchange for a ceiling for no one, and a shared belief that technology can and must deliver a virtuous... See more
Sam Altman · March 16 • Moore's Law for Everything
DAOs can’t yet do the same complex things as big companies, like managing complex supply chains
Rehash: A Web Podcast • S3 E6 | DAO Decentralization Thesis & Artificial Intelligence w/nintynick
Companies with poor unit economics found themselves propelled by aggressive venture dollars (which themselves were propelled by a low-interest-rate environment). Those companies then turned those dollars into aggressive customer acquisition. Until recently, the market rewarded growth at all costs.
Digital Native • Revisiting Lifetime Value and Customer Acquisition
Over the years, plenty of responsible experimenters – think of the more pragmatic elements among the back-to-the-landers, kibbutzim, Tolstoyan farmers and so on – have managed to demonstrate that new societies can form successfully at modest scales. The best among them also managed to establish a productive and beneficial relationship with the... See more
Matt Prewitt • Secret Societies, Network States, Burning Man, Zuzalu, and More: Thoughts on New Political Communities
Early on, the way we approached our go-to-market was opposite of what most companies do, which is start with a super niche audience, find them, target them and expand to new markets
We started completely horizontal with a blank-slate product, and we got more and more narrow with our focus on landing customers over time. We started seeing organic
... See moreFirst Round Capital • Airtable's Path to Product-Market Fit
Ursula Le Guin: "They talked, and new worlds were born of their talking. It is of the nature of idea to be communicated: written, spoken, done. The idea is like grass. It craves light, likes crowds, thrives on crossbreeding, grows better for being stepped on."
The early vision was to democratize software creation. We all felt we had this crazy superpower of being able to build software, which had given us these advantages in our careers. You can have tremendous influence in an organization — even if you’re not in leadership — by building software and deploying it to people. So broadly, we were exploring
... See moreFirst Round Capital • Airtable's Path to Product-Market Fit
meta-crisis and New Ideas for the Future
There is a peculiar attitude, here at the beginning of the 21st century. On the one hand, we agree things aren’t fine. On the other hand, there’s a widespread feeling that there’s nothing to be done.
The first thing to recognize is that this isn’t always how the present feels: often in the past, people had a sense that there was something—something huge — to be done. Essays like the Communist Manifesto give people this sense. Before that, at the dawn of modern democracy, documents like Common Sense (in the US) and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (in France) gave people the same sense. There was something to be done.
Human nature, far from being fixed, is read differently from age to age. These different readings give rise to totally new ideas for institutions. And these new readings and new institutions seem to reshape us. Often, what works out in practice would have seemed impossible on the previous views. Furthermore, the traits we are supposedly balancing — autonomy, collective responsibility, equality, etc — are themselves changing. They, also, are expressions of one view of human nature or another.
Indeed, each of our present-day institutions can be traced to a vision of human nature which swept through society. Each new vision led designers to focus on different features of a desirable society, and to recognize different approaches as viable. This made new institutions attractive.
Behind these conversations is a fundamental change of the digital age that applies to essentially every creative field: in the past, consumers bought and collected physical editions of creative work, creating a direct value exchange between fans, artists, and producers. Today almost all creative work is digitized and essentially rented — lowering
... See more