Tom White

The best thing for a company or project’s narrative is to have a lot of people with credibility to the target audience tell stories with roughly similar positive themes again and again over a long period of time, with new examples of the same positive themes added in. The more authentic and the less coordinated it all seems, the better. When it... See more

I spend 90% of my time thinking about stories and narratives, and like so many other things, narrative formation is getting decentralized. This is my attempt to figure out what’s happening and where it’s heading.Crafting and telling stories is part of what makes humans humans. Stories let us coordinate across time and space. Stories are undeniably... See more

To know me is to understand that I have been, am now, and will continue to be knee-deep (read as: submerged) in both web3 and crypto. For better or worse—depending upon who you ask—this is not new; I have been beating the web3/cryptocurrency drum for a number of years now. The disintermediation of trust, from partial third parties to objective... See more

If we can democratize access to a veblen good, status becomes about being a part of something, rather than how much money you have. We already see this in products like Fractional and PartyBid, which enable collective ownership of highly sought-after NFTs, as well as in products like RabbitHole, which allow users to earn crypto by using the latest

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  Readers crave lessons; aspiring diplomats can learn from them; old hands can quibble with them. Cooper calls them “maxims.” One is particularly powerful – and painful. It comes from Robert McNamara and his reflections on Vietnam written in 1995. It is a searing indictment as we ponder the calamity in Afghanistan. It sums up a lot of Cooper’s own... See more

History shows some of the best opportunities come in bad times, not good ones.Though we’re not in the business of prediction here at Stonks, in the words of Lord Byron: “The best prophet of the future is the past.”Put simply, if public/crypto market turmoil persists, early-stage valuations may well drop ~30% or lower (i.e.below levels seen merely a... See more

Those interested in diplomacy will read this book with pleasure and profit. And indulge its idiosyncrasies. Cooper’s analytical skill lies in reconstructing complex chains of events; his synthetic talent, in making sense of it all. The latter was pronounced in his earlier work, Breaking. Here he adds analysis. His is an intellectual apparatus... See more