Timour Kosters

@timourkosters

Investor & builder working in blockchain and ml. Tweeting: @timourxyz

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Key Ideas

The core question explored in this post: do highly decentralized DAOs work, or should their governance start to more closely resemble trad corporations?

Vitalik's main point: there are certain use cases where decentralization is very important. There may be a relatively small number of these orgs, but they will be the very important ones.... See more

Vitalik Buterin • DAOs are not corporations: where decentralization in autonomous organizations matters

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

First Round Capital • Airtable's Path to Product-Market Fit

A focus on ‘missing middle’ housing: The plans feature housing that is fairly high density but not high rise — a combination of "row houses" between 2-4 stories high, and apartment buildings going up to 8 stories. This is the type of neighborhood that makes up the most beloved places in the world. Places like Amsterdam, Venice, Santa Monica, Lake... See more

Devon Zuegel • Part 3: The first walkable city in America in a century

Alpha: Stay lean while you de-risk your biggest hurdle.

Beta: Test, test, test — but push to go faster.

First Round Capital • Airtable's Path to Product-Market Fit

SHEIN’s explosion is nothing short of remarkable: SHEIN has grown over 100% every year for eight straight years (!), and its latest private market valuation makes it worth more than Zara and H&M combined.

Rex Woodbury • The TikTokization of Everything

The last decade showed that questionable business models can subsist for a long time (and even flourish) when capital is abundant. Thirteen years after its founding, Uber is still figuring out how to be profitable: the company’s gross margins actually declined seven percentage points over the past three years, and the net profit margin is -3%.

Digital Native • Revisiting Lifetime Value and Customer Acquisition

What we’re seeing is AI emerge from the infrastructure layer to the application layer—the parts of technology that everyday people interact with.

Rex Woodbury • The TikTokization of Everything

By combining multiple works, kinds of work, and the creators’s contexts in one bundle, onchain records provide creators a format that reflects the multi-medium, multi-message, worldbuilding reality of releasing creative work today, while also creating a canonical record of that work’s existence.

Yancey Strickler • The old shit doesn't work anymore

Don’t follow the fad: “We were a bit contrarian. At the time, it was all about the Lean Startup, getting early customer validation and failing fast. This book making the rounds called ‘ The Four Steps to the Epiphany ’ espoused this lean company development model, where you put out a super rough prototype to get to know the customer and quickly