Staying the course
This morning I’ve been playing with Warpcast, which is an Twitter(X)-like interface to the service called Farcaster. It’s very much like Twitter (X), but built on a blockchain-powered network instead of a centralized network. Or, if you want it to be like Discord, you can use a different app called Farcord and it be kind of like that, too.
A couple of years ago, I wondered why we weren’t seeing social platforms built on decentralized networks.
The answer at the time was: the pipes haven’t been built yet. Well, Farcaster is the pipes and now I’m looking at a real social media experience built on top of a platform with different incentives. It’s pretty cool.
I’m excited about what could be possible with social platforms built as infrastructure rather than as media companies.
Playing with crypto products this morning has me thinking about when to zig and when to zag. Staying the course on a technology that has become uncool is hard: it’s extra hard to find funding if you need it, it’s harder to get media coverage except for failures, and you have to find new words for what you’re building (“decentralized”) so you don’t get laughed out of cocktail parties.
If you manage to make it through the first part with your company intact and with your team able to execute, there is an advantage: now you get to set the terms of the conversation instead of having to live within the hype and the assumptions created by the market at large. The new reality can be a fun place to operate.
In the past year, so many startups, influencers, and investors have changed from “crypto” to “AI,” which doesn’t help the reputation in either space.
Obviously sometimes it’s a good idea to re-frame the narrative around what you’re building so that you can find customers or investment. But there are a lot of people who jump wholesale from trend to trend, trying to take advantage of the general enthusiasm for the new thing.
Staying the course is a signal that you had true vision in the first place, and that what you’re building has enduring value to real customers in the real world, regardless of the language that people use to talk about it.