Timour Kosters
@timourkosters
Investor & builder working in blockchain and ml. Tweeting: @timourxyz
linktr.eeTimour Kosters
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
I think of product-market fit as the transition moment you feel as a founder when you go from "pushing" your product on people to them "pulling" it out of your hands. But the path to get there is deeply personal. One founder’s journey to product-market fit may look totally different from another’s, and yet both paths could be completely valid —
... See moreFirst Round Capital • Airtable's Path to Product-Market Fit
One major reason for this is the quality of SHEIN's recommendations. Just as Bytedance anticipates the content you’ll want to watch, SHEIN anticipates the clothes you’ll want to buy. SHEIN is to commerce what Bytedance is to content.
Rex Woodbury • The TikTokization of Everything
Google, Facebook, and Amazon are monopolizing digital ad spend, and even newsfeeds and search results are finite. Limited supply + growing demand = rising prices
Digital Native • Revisiting Lifetime Value and Customer Acquisition
Web3 Is the Opportunity We Have Had All Along: Innovation Amnesia and Economic Democracy
cryptocarnival.wtfcryptocarnival.wtfCapitalism and
Polarization and gridlock have become increasingly synonymous with democracy.
This is not for lack of opportunities. Recent decades have seen social movements and technologists develop numerous experiments in more textured, responsive, and participatory forms of collective decision-making. These include participatory budgeting (Cabannes 2004), liquid democracy (Hardt and Lopes 2015), sortition (Gastil 2000; Bouricius 2013; Pek 2019; Fan and Zhang 2020), citizens’ assemblies (Niemeyer 2014; Chwalisz 2017; Giraudet et al. 2022), crowdsourcing (Hsiao et al. 2018; Bernal 2019), and various alternative voting systems (Posner and Weyl 2014; Emmett 2019). A growing field of platforms for online citizen engagement has emerged to facilitate these processes (Stempeck 2020). Yet in even the most advanced applications of technology-enabled governance, from Madrid to Taiwan (Hsiao et al. 2018; Smith and Martín 2021; Tseng 2022), the new mechanisms serve in solely advisory roles; participatory budgeting processes, while more likely to be binding, apply to only small fractions of public budgets.
Governments could be eagerly transforming themselves into the vibrant, creative, networked institutions that the networked world arguably needs them to be, but they are not.
Polarization and gridlock have become increasingly synonymous with democracy.
This is not for lack of opportunities. Recent decades have seen social movements and technologists develop numerous experiments in more textured, responsive, and participatory forms of collective decision-making. These include participatory budgeting (Cabannes 2004), liquid democracy (Hardt and Lopes 2015), sortition (Gastil 2000; Bouricius 2013; Pek 2019; Fan and Zhang 2020), citizens’ assemblies (Niemeyer 2014; Chwalisz 2017; Giraudet et al. 2022), crowdsourcing (Hsiao et al. 2018; Bernal 2019), and various alternative voting systems (Posner and Weyl 2014; Emmett 2019). A growing field of platforms for online citizen engagement has emerged to facilitate these processes (Stempeck 2020). Yet in even the most advanced applications of technology-enabled governance, from Madrid to Taiwan (Hsiao et al. 2018; Smith and Martín 2021; Tseng 2022), the new mechanisms serve in solely advisory roles; participatory budgeting processes, while more likely to be binding, apply to only small fractions of public budgets.
Governments could be eagerly transforming themselves into the vibrant, creative, networked institutions that the networked world arguably needs them to be, but they are not.
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
Alpha: Stay lean while you de-risk your biggest hurdle.
Beta: Test, test, test — but push to go faster.
Beta: Test, test, test — but push to go faster.
First Round Capital • Airtable's Path to Product-Market Fit
Minimum density is 20 units per acre: The voter initiative locks in at least 20 units/acre (~50 people/acre) as the minimum average density. This is similar to beloved neighborhoods such as Marina in SF, Centrum in Amsterdam, Kensington in London, and Historic Charleston in South Carolina. Even though people love these places, we’ve built close to... See more