There's been a lot of chatter about Farcaster this weekend. Wanted to share some thoughts as the first employee to have joined the team.
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To set the stage, a little background on me before Farcaster:
- I've always wanted to write software for social good and to help connect people
- Interned at companies like Facebook & Mozilla at a time when it felt like they were making a net-positive impact on the world
- Out of undergrad I joined
Causes.com, a social platform for activism and civic participation (50M+ MAU at its peak, IIRC)
- Couple years in, Causes spawned a new company called Brigade, another civic platform focused on US politics
After spending almost 5 years at Causes + Brigade, it became clear that regardless of how noble your mission, without a sustainable business model you are merely delaying the inevitable—you cannot ride good vibes forever.
I then joined Coinbase because I believed the technology underlying cryptocurrency would be a force for positive change in the world, and that Coinbase would play an important role in that facilitating that change. During my almost 5 years there were plenty of heated conversations both inside and out of the company about its direction. But at the end of the day, Coinbase continued to iterate and improve using a core business model that worked—that's what allowed it to grow and continue experimenting.
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Coming back to Farcaster: I joined the team because I had seen first-hand how Varun & Dan operated at Coinbase. Their focus, willingness to change course in light of new information, and raw work ethic made choosing to work with them again an easy decision. But it was the vision for Farcaster itself that really excited me: to build a decentralized social network using the technologies underlying cryptocurrency—a truly open network. Everything I had been working on for the past decade+ seemed to align perfectly with what we were trying to build, so I jumped in.
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It's tough to realize when something you've spent 4 years on isn't quite catching on. I'm personally not much of a trader or even a die hard crypto fanatic, but I recognize that Farcaster must differentiate itself from existing social networks because it's become clear that most people don't care about about decentralization—they care about whatever the product ultimately does to improve their lives.
It's tough to hear that some people—especially early users that I've seen on here for years now—aren't excited about where we're currently focused, but I understand their frustration. I also really appreciate that they're willing to share their thoughts on the very platform we're arguing about the future of...there's something beautiful in that.
Whatever your thoughts on Farcaster today: thank you for being a part of this experiment—I hope you stick around, and I hope you continue to to share your thoughts constructively and in good faith. We all still want this to be someplace special.
