1/ Topic: Blockchains are the new app stores 🧵 2/ If you were an ambitious, risk-seeking founder in the mobile golden age circa 2009-12, you built a new mobile app. That was when Uber, WhatsApp, Instagram, Venmo, Snapchat, and many other top apps were built. 3/ Mobile has since moved up the technology adoption S-curve. Great mobile apps will still be built, but the low-hanging fruit has been picked. The computing frontier of this decade is building apps on programmable blockchains like Ether...

1/ Topic: Blockchains are the new app stores 🧵 2/ If you were an ambitious, risk-seeking founder in the mobile golden age circa 2009-12, you built a new mobile app. That was when Uber, WhatsApp, Instagram, Venmo, Snapchat, and many other top apps were built. 3/ Mobile has since moved up the technology adoption S-curve. Great mobile apps will still be built, but the low-hanging fruit has been picked. The computing frontier of this decade is building apps on programmable blockchains like Ether...

Certain categories of web2 websites and apps fall into a usability-monetization death spiral. 🧵 Relying on ads and monetizing at low CPMs, the incentive is to add ever more intrusive ads to increase click rates. User experience degrades, requiring more intrusive ads, in a downward cycle. News sites, cooking sites, games, music, Q&A, travel, and many other web2 categories that didn’t figure out subscriptions or high-CPM business models fall into this trap. This isn’t the fault of the sites or...

Certain categories of web2 websites and apps fall into a usability-monetization death spiral. 🧵 Relying on ads and monetizing at low CPMs, the incentive is to add ever more intrusive ads to increase click rates. User experience degrades, requiring more intrusive ads, in a downward cycle. News sites, cooking sites, games, music, Q&A, travel, and many other web2 categories that didn’t figure out subscriptions or high-CPM business models fall into this trap. This isn’t the fault of the sites or...

1/ Topic: Turning networks into economies 🧵 2/ We spent the last 20 years building networks on the internet. Social media platforms like Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, and Discord are networks, which can be divided into billions of smaller networks, consisting of followers, friends, subscribers, backers, etc. 3/ These platforms gave many people an audience who didn’t previously have one. But due to fundamental structural misalignments between the networks and the companies that own them, we’ve...

1/ Topic: Turning networks into economies 🧵 2/ We spent the last 20 years building networks on the internet. Social media platforms like Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, and Discord are networks, which can be divided into billions of smaller networks, consisting of followers, friends, subscribers, backers, etc. 3/ These platforms gave many people an audience who didn’t previously have one. But due to fundamental structural misalignments between the networks and the companies that own them, we’ve...

How open lost to closed in Web 2 — and how Web 3 can bring open back 🧵 As @alexismadrigal wrote in this excellent essay, back in 2007 it looked like open services would dominate the internet going forward: theatlantic.com/technology/arc…From "The Weird Thing About Today's Internet" in The AtlanticBut with the launch of the iPhone and the rise of smartphones, proprietary networks quickly won out:Ibid.In other words twitter.com/cdixon closed, controlled by centralized company Beat out: cd...

How open lost to closed in Web 2 — and how Web 3 can bring open back 🧵 As @alexismadrigal wrote in this excellent essay, back in 2007 it looked like open services would dominate the internet going forward: theatlantic.com/technology/arc…From "The Weird Thing About Today's Internet" in The AtlanticBut with the launch of the iPhone and the rise of smartphones, proprietary networks quickly won out:Ibid.In other words twitter.com/cdixon closed, controlled by centralized company Beat out: cd...

1/ Topic: Going from Web 2 to Web 3 - “Your take rate is my opportunity” 🧵 2/ Jeff Bezos famously said "your margin is my opportunity" referring to the way Amazon took market share by lowering prices and eating into competitor margins. 3/ What Amazon did in commerce is what the internet did more generally. Lowering prices and redistributing value back to users has been the internet’s core economic dynamic since the 90s. 4/ Craigslist did this with classifieds, Google and Facebook did this wi...

1/ Topic: Going from Web 2 to Web 3 - “Your take rate is my opportunity” 🧵 2/ Jeff Bezos famously said "your margin is my opportunity" referring to the way Amazon took market share by lowering prices and eating into competitor margins. 3/ What Amazon did in commerce is what the internet did more generally. Lowering prices and redistributing value back to users has been the internet’s core economic dynamic since the 90s. 4/ Craigslist did this with classifieds, Google and Facebook did this wi...

The Web 3 playbook: using token incentives to bootstrap new networks. 🧵 The killer app of the internet is networks. The web and email are networks. Social apps like Instagram and Twitter are networks. Marketplaces like Uber and Airbnb are networks. Networks get more valuable with more participants, which is great when they are at scale, but cuts the other way when starting out. This is the bootstrapping problem. In the Web 2 era, overcoming the bootstrapping problem meant heroic entrepreneur...

The Web 3 playbook: using token incentives to bootstrap new networks. 🧵 The killer app of the internet is networks. The web and email are networks. Social apps like Instagram and Twitter are networks. Marketplaces like Uber and Airbnb are networks. Networks get more valuable with more participants, which is great when they are at scale, but cuts the other way when starting out. This is the bootstrapping problem. In the Web 2 era, overcoming the bootstrapping problem meant heroic entrepreneur...

1/ New technologies often arrive with flaws: toy-like, expensive, janky, lacking clear applications, etc. To predict how they’ll develop, it’s important to dig deeper. Here are a few common ways new technologies can be misunderstood. 2/ “It’s just a toy.” This was the mistake made early on about breakthrough technologies like the telephone, personal computers, and social media.The next big thing will start out looking like a toyChris Dixon's blog.https://cdixon.org3/ When the telephone w...

1/ New technologies often arrive with flaws: toy-like, expensive, janky, lacking clear applications, etc. To predict how they’ll develop, it’s important to dig deeper. Here are a few common ways new technologies can be misunderstood. 2/ “It’s just a toy.” This was the mistake made early on about breakthrough technologies like the telephone, personal computers, and social media.The next big thing will start out looking like a toyChris Dixon's blog.https://cdixon.org3/ When the telephone w...

Composability is to software as compounding interest is to finance 🧵 A very high percentage of the software in the world is open source. Most datacenter software is open source, mobile phones OSs make heavy use of open source, most next-gen devices like self-driving cars, drones, and embedded computers run mostly open source software. Open source began as a fringe political movement in the 80s and remained mostly a curiosity through the 90s, but started growing exponentially in the 2000s and...

Composability is to software as compounding interest is to finance 🧵 A very high percentage of the software in the world is open source. Most datacenter software is open source, mobile phones OSs make heavy use of open source, most next-gen devices like self-driving cars, drones, and embedded computers run mostly open source software. Open source began as a fringe political movement in the 80s and remained mostly a curiosity through the 90s, but started growing exponentially in the 2000s and...

What’s next in web3? 🧵 First, where are we today? Let’s start with some anecdotes. We have an awesome games team led by @Tocelot that invests in founders out of top game studios like Riot, Epic, Blizzard etc. Almost 100% of founders they've met with recently are exploring NFTs in some way, or are already building NFTs into their games I get regular emails like this from web2 founders (this is verbatim the other day from a top web2 founder) “Hey Chris, hope all is well. I’m going deeper ...

What’s next in web3? 🧵 First, where are we today? Let’s start with some anecdotes. We have an awesome games team led by @Tocelot that invests in founders out of top game studios like Riot, Epic, Blizzard etc. Almost 100% of founders they've met with recently are exploring NFTs in some way, or are already building NFTs into their games I get regular emails like this from web2 founders (this is verbatim the other day from a top web2 founder) “Hey Chris, hope all is well. I’m going deeper ...

1/ Tokens are a new digital primitive, analogous to the website 🧵 2/ Major computing waves generally have two eras: the skeuomorphic era and the native era. 3/ In the skeuomorphic era, the design thinking is largely adapted from older domains. For example, the early web was mostly digital adaptations of pre-internet activities like letter writing and mail-order shopping. Websites back then were mostly read only. 4/ It took about a decade for technologists to start seriously exploring the ide...

1/ Tokens are a new digital primitive, analogous to the website 🧵 2/ Major computing waves generally have two eras: the skeuomorphic era and the native era. 3/ In the skeuomorphic era, the design thinking is largely adapted from older domains. For example, the early web was mostly digital adaptations of pre-internet activities like letter writing and mail-order shopping. Websites back then were mostly read only. 4/ It took about a decade for technologists to start seriously exploring the ide...

1/ Topic: The internet treats bad business models as defects and routes around them. 2/ Let’s start with this fascinating chart (from https://matthewball.vc) which raises the question: why has the video game industry grown alongside new technologies, while the music industry has not?3/ For a long time, video games and music had the same, straightforward business model: charge money for a perpetual license to the base content — the game or music itself. 4/ When the internet came along, video g...

1/ Topic: The internet treats bad business models as defects and routes around them. 2/ Let’s start with this fascinating chart (from https://matthewball.vc) which raises the question: why has the video game industry grown alongside new technologies, while the music industry has not?3/ For a long time, video games and music had the same, straightforward business model: charge money for a perpetual license to the base content — the game or music itself. 4/ When the internet came along, video g...

Why Web 3 matters 🧵 Web 1 (roughly 1990-2005) was about open protocols that were decentralized and community-governed. Most of the value accrued to the edges of the network — users and builders. Web 2 (roughly 2005-2020) was about siloed, centralized services run by corporations. Most of the value accrued to a handful of companies like Google, Apple, Amazon, and Facebook. We are now at the beginning of the Web 3 era, which combines the decentralized, community-governed ethos of Web 1 with th...

Why Web 3 matters 🧵 Web 1 (roughly 1990-2005) was about open protocols that were decentralized and community-governed. Most of the value accrued to the edges of the network — users and builders. Web 2 (roughly 2005-2020) was about siloed, centralized services run by corporations. Most of the value accrued to a handful of companies like Google, Apple, Amazon, and Facebook. We are now at the beginning of the Web 3 era, which combines the decentralized, community-governed ethos of Web 1 with th...