In this post, I share some notes about attending Farcaster’s Dev Day and SoGal’s AGM, plus a quick roundup of what I’ve been reading, watching and doing.

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I attended Farcaster Dev Day in NYC this past Friday. About 100 developers building on Farcaster were invited to come together for face-to-face networking and collaboration, listen to an update from founders Dan Romero and Varun Srinivasan, attend a Q&A, and meet the Merkle team.

It was an awesome day. The vibes: engineer-y, serious and warm.

I shared my detailed feedback on Farcaster, but I’ll also summarize my notes here.

I walked out of Dev Day feeling just as confident in Dan & Varun’s judgment and leadership as I have every time I’ve heard them speak since first learning about Farcaster 3 years ago.

Their presentation centered on the current product strategy of Discover. Trade. Create. which leans heavily into crypto, a bit of contrast to past messaging which was far more social oriented (e.g. Farcaster is a Social Network not Social Media, URL to IRL, make friends and make money). What stood out to me wasn’t the strategy itself but the consistency in messaging.

There’s an underlying message Dan has repeated in every single presentation I’ve heard him deliver and it’s all about growth:

• If you don’t solve for growth, nothing else matters.

• Growth must happen in orders of magnitude.

• Keep experimenting, keep iterating, keep learning.

People invariably get upset whenever priorities shift (devs should build alt clients! no, frames and miniapps! we’re onboarding journalists and creators! channels is the key! investing in vertical video! crypto everywhere and everything!), but if you pay attention to the underlying message that growth is the most important factor, it’s hard to stay upset.

As for the current direction toward crypto and the trader experience: it’s great! I’m not a trader. I’m not a gambler. As an independent developer, I’d love to see better dev experience, mature tooling, better docs, and a DevRel team. That might help me the most. But I can’t make the argument it would drive growth.

And their logic for focusing on what will drive growth is sound. Early signs indicate it’s the right move. So, let’s go for it!

Honestly, I just really like being around the Farcaster dev community. Being together was a good reminder of why I build here. The community is filled with people who are smart, technical, and kind.

I loved meeting members of the Merkle team face to face—Horsefacts, Deodad, Shane, Linda, Daniel—all first-class humans. And shoutout to Grin and Maxp, who helped me unblock an issue with my AI Bot that I’d been ignoring because I didn’t have a good solution to. Nothing beats in-person time: a few minutes of hallway talk saves me days of research and debugging.

And finally, huge kudos to Linda and Emma for organizing the day. Logistics were smooth as butter.

I left Dev Day feeling confident in Farcaster’s future, and excited to keep building miniapps, bots and livestream news shows on top of Farcaster.

If you’d like to try Farcaster, you can create an account using my referral code here. And feel free to reach out if you want help onboarding.

Note: If you’re reading this via my syndicated Paragraph publication, you may only see one photo above instead of a photo gallery. To view the full set of photos, refer to my Substack newsletter.

I attended the SoGal Ventures Annual General Meeting and Summit last week. Wow do these women know how to put on an event! The location was a cool soho loft, decorated in style, with yummy specialty snacks and drinks, 20-minute founder talks, a fun two-minute pitch competition, dinner and drinks with DJ, and an epic swag bag.

I’m really impressed with GPs Pocket and Elizabeth, not only through a financial ROI lens, but for building such a passionate and large community. SoGal is led by all-women GPs, backed by 80% women LPs, and invests in women founders across industries shaping a better world.

Many conversations started with, “So, why are you here?” For me, it’s because I’ve spent my entire career in male-dominated spaces, and I believe investing is one of the most powerful ways to help shape the future you want to see. I want a future with more women in tech, more women in leadership, more women in finance, and more women owning and running their own businesses. When I wanted to learn more about venture investing in early 2022, SoGal was the first investment I made as an LP, and I’m really glad I did.

Same Note As Above: If you’re reading this via my syndicated Paragraph publication, you may only see one photo above instead of a photo gallery. Refer to my Substack to see the full gallery.

Here’s a quick rundown of some of the other things I’ve been reading, watching, and doing.

• READ Careless People by Sarah Wynn Williams, who worked on public policy at Facebook and went from being optimistic about its potential for good to deeply disappointed by internal politics, content moderation challenges, and how the company engaged with governments. It’s an easy/quick read and I liked the firsthand account of what it was like working there in those earlier years, especially the tension between Facebook’s “growth at all costs” and “engineering mindset” and the nuances of social media policy. Another theme I found interesting was the tension of her being a mom in a leadership position, working closely with Sheryl Sandberg during the Lean In era. Her belief was she could influence Facebook “from the inside” but you can imagine how that ends up. Overall, an interesting book but her conclusion felt a bit lazy; she sums her entire experience up as “it didn’t have to be this way” without giving any serious vision for an alternative way.

• READING The Hobbit. I wanted fiction I could get lost in and somehow had never read Tolkien before. Enjoying it so far!

• READING 1929, Andrew Ross Sorkin’s new book about the people and events leading up to the Great Depression.

• WATCHED Task, on HBO. The plot isn’t entirely believable, but as long as I kept reminding myself it is a series about characters and not plot, I came to really love it. Definitely recommend. It was by the same creator as Mare of Easttown.

• WATCHED The Network State Conference. 9 hours, watched over a few days. Really good. A lot of optimism for the future.

• LISTENED to Brian Eno on The Ezra Klein Show. A beautiful conversation about art, humanity, modern life. And yes, we got a scenius shoutout.

• TRAVELED to Ann Arbor for a quick tour of UM with my middle daughter who is in the middle of college applications.

• ATTENDED the Aptos Experience in Brooklyn.

• PLAYING with Sora, Open AI’s new video creation app. It’s fun. While the output isn’t so great yet, I like experimenting with new tools. My favorite output so far is me as an Eagle Huntress.

I started this substack in December 2022 as an experiment to see if developing a writing habit would help clarify my thinking and/or provide other benefits. You can read about my original intentions in my first post or my more recent reflections after sticking with it for a year.

I write about twice a month and share musings, meditations, and links to things I’m finding interesting as I build out a farcaster-native media company, a modern technology consulting company, raise my kids, and have fun creating and learning in the worlds of crypto, tech, finance, science and wellness.

Thank you for supporting my writing and journey. If you’d like to get in touch you can reply to me here or find me on X and farcaster.

Until next time, keep putting good into the world. —adrienne🌏❤️