HBS vs BAYC

At a New Year's Eve house party a few years ago, I met someone who had graduated from Harvard Business School. Among other topics, I brought up something I couldn't figure out: why would someone pay $200,000 [https://www.hbs.edu/mba/Pages/cost-of-attendance-class-of-2023.aspx]

Thoughts from my first web3 conference

In the spirit of documenting my thought process instead of already-formed thoughts, here are my impressions from the recent DevConnect – a major week-long gathering of the web3 developer community in Amsterdam. * Many web3 companies are default-global. Most don't mention where they are based, because it doesn't

Talks & videos

Workshop: building NFT apps with NFTPort

This is a short workshop I gave at the Road to Web3 online hackathon: a brief demo of NFTPort [https://nftport.xyz/]'s APIs to people who have a rough understanding of what NFT [https://www.taivo.ai/notes/__nft/]s are. If you are not one of those

Startup stock options: a beginner's guide

Rationally valuing equity for startup employees

Web3: what I'm doing next

As I wrote before, I ended my startup journey [https://www.taivo.ai/startup-year] in November and started looking for a job. A lot has happened between then and now. I've spoken to tons of people, looked at a broad range of options, and decided to join one

Featured

Foundering founder: the story of my startup year

How I spent a year trying to start a startup -- and failed.

Product before problem

You might imagine all great startups started from a clear mission. Sometimes they were, but usually, that story is woven in hindsight to cover up the gnarly pivots of the early days. In PR-optimised founding stories, the narrative usually goes like this. Our visionary founders found an apparent $PROBLEM in

Diffuse mode: thinking by relaxing

I recently started drinking coffee again. Caffeine has always had the effect of narrowing my focus and reducing mind-wandering. The downside is, caffeine makes me less likely to get into diffuse mode, the other main mode of thinking. Focused mode means taking a direct, head-on approach to work: writing an

Tesla's data engine: the road to full self-driving

I've driven a Tesla only once but looking at Karpathy's recent presentation [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NSDTZQdo6H8] at the CVPR conference, soon no human will. I think Tesla's unique data engine is what will get them there. In their self-driving stack, Tesla

Becoming a definite optimist

Peter Thiel has [https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18050143-zero-to-one] a 2x2 matrix: indefinite vs. definite, and optimist vs. pessimist. I want to be a definite optimist: imagine a better future and work to build it. Recently, I've been more of an indefinite optimist. * Hoping that startup inspiration

If you can measure it, you can improve it

Early this year, I noticed I'd put on some lockdown-weight. I wasn't super worried but wanted to get back to my typical, healthier weight level. My first intuition in this situation was, "let me go on a diet." Diets can work. But they are

Talks & videos

Video: Invest in Estonia, 1993

This is a hidden gem: Estonia's pitch as a startup country, almost 30 years ago. As far as I know, it hasn't been on the Internet yet. This video (and an accompanying paper publication) was distributed in 1993 by the Estonian Privatisation Agency to invite foreign

Integrate work and life

You could separate work from life. As in the phrase "work-life balance", work versus life. They can be separate buckets with separate goals, time slots, people, and emotions. Separation definitely makes sense. Work lets us pay for rent and groceries, but might not be fulfilling. Time with friends,

The negotiation technique that enables deep conversations

The single biggest thing that made me a better friend, partner, colleague, and mentor came from an unexpected place. Two years ago, I was working through a breakup and rethinking how I approach all relationships. At a conference in Berlin, I happened to participate in a Circling workshop. It'

Stock options are hard

As an employee, startup stock options are hard. I'm feeling pretty confident by now, but only because I've seen my friends get burned and been burned myself. What's so hard? 1. At one company, my option contract was to be signed "at a

Talks & videos

Commitment

I'm both a millennial and a startup founder and both of these groups are often considered flaky perhaps, unable to commit. They seem like they're, flip-flopping between startup ideas or between jobs, between relationships. And I think all of this comes from different expectations to commitment.

Cause variance

How do you end up with an outlier success? I guess the common advice would be to "leave your comfort zone". That's hard to do. In the comfort zone, everything makes sense. Things work. Clients are using the product. You might even be growing slightly. It

Digital dopamine-seeking

My nervous system is in a civil war over my actions. The dopamine-seeking side keeps winning. Dopamine itself is crucial: it's a neurotransmitter driving you to achieve external goals. The bad part is being driven to the easiest, least meaningful ones. I try not to feed the enemy.

School-career mashup

There's an abrupt life transition almost everyone goes through: school to job. You might go from middle school to manual labour, or PhD to teacher. But regardless of details, a more gradual shift would be better. Most entry-level jobs could be apprenticeships that mix education and work. Why

Courage in the face of variance

Startups have high variance: the top few % reap most of the rewards. The same is true for artists of all kind, and to a lesser extent, software engineers: some Waymo engineers earn 100x the salary of the lowest-paid programmers. Risk is usually taken to be bad. But it might not

The office

Who needs an office these days? It’s a needless expense. I currently work alone, and when I meet others I do it via video call or on a walk outside. Plus, private offices are expensive. A desk in a co-working space is 150€ — and not an improvement over my

To kill a mock-up, first

I ran my first design sprint last week. According [https://www.gv.com/sprint/] to the creators: > The sprint is a five-day process for answering critical business questions through design, prototyping, and testing ideas with customers. The starting point of a sprint could be a problem like “website visitors

A productive creative

I recently reflected on my productivity and discovered, to my horror, that I’m doing pretty badly! I used to be very organized and do lots of creative, important work consistently every day for months on end. Somehow, I had lost that in the past 3-5 years. Doing what comes

More pre-trained models, please

Every classification task is linearly separable in the right feature space. This statement is a clue to building ML solutions that scale to many different use cases. Here’s a visual explanation. Say you have data points in a given two-dimensional vector space. If you can use a straight line

It's rocket science

“Founders at Work [https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/98233.Founders_at_Work]” is a unique book by Jessica Livingston, one of the founders of YCombinator. It contains un-narrated, almost unedited interviews with founders of successful startups like Paypal, Hotmail, Apple, and 27 others. I’m only through about 10%