A wallet address is public. Anyone can view it, and anyone can send crypto assets to it. Think of a wallet address like an email address. Anyone who has your email can send you an email. Analogously, anyone who has your wallet address can send you cryptoassets.

However, there is more to a crypto wallet than just the address itself. A wallet address is a hashed version of your public key. Every public key is 256 bits long. The hashed version (your wallet address) is 160 bits long. The public key is used to ensure you are the owner of an address that can receive funds. The public key is also mathematically derived from your private key. But using reverse mathematics to derive the private key would take the world's most powerful supercomputer many trillion years to crack. Your private key is a randomly generated string (numbers and letters) of alphanumeric characters. A private key is always mathematically related to the wallet address but is impossible to reverse engineer thanks to strong encryption.

The private key is like the password to your email. You can’t send an email from a certain email address unless you have the password to access it. Similarly, you can’t send crypto from a wallet unless you have access to it via private keys (1).

If you didn’t understand the last few paragraphs or didn’t care to read them, don’t worry. The initial design for Bitcoin, while mathematically beautiful and cryptographically sound, wasn’t user friendly to say the least. Satoshi would be the first to say Mea Culpa to that. In addition to the technical complexity, having the masses safely store or remember their own private keys is asking a lot. This has led to hacking exploits that have cost crypto owners dearly. Furthermore, people often just forget and lose their private keys. Chainalysis estimates that 2.3 to 3.7 million Bitcoin has been lost. That’s over 100 billion dollars (as of writing in 2022).

Luckily, centralized exchanges like Coinbase, Binance, and Kraken innovated and delivered user friendly solutions that accelerated cryptoasset adoption. Most people purchase and store their crypto on centralized exchanges. They access their wallets the same way they log in to Facebook - using a username and password. If they forget their username or password, no problem. They can just reset it using their email address or phone number. Centralized exchanges will continue to play a massive role in the advent of global cryptoasset adoption. However, centralized exchanges are not without issues.

Centralized exchanges are still beholden to the governmental legislatures discussed in an earlier post - KYC, KYB, AML, OFAC, etc. It’s possible that governments crack down on centralized exchanges and force them to restrict certain individuals. Worse still, if cryptoassets start to rival USD in terms of market capitalization and volume settled or if smart contracts start to replace conventional corporate governance structure in a meaningful way, governments could forcefully legislate centralized exchanges to seize crypto assets or ban account access to vast swaths of the population.

This isn’t out of the question. President Franklin Roosevelt did this with gold in 1933 with Executive Order 6102 (2). President Jimmy Carter did this in 1979 with Executive Order 12170 (3). Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau did this with protesting truckers earlier this year. I’m not picking sides and advocating whether Roosevelt, Carter, and Trudeau were correct or not. The point is that it’s possible for centralized crypto exchanges and custodians to capitulate and surrender individuals' crypto assets to the government.

“Not your keys, not your coins.”

Colloquial crypto lore pithily states “not your keys, not your coins”. If you store your crypto on a centralized exchange, you don’t hold your own private keys. The exchange holds your private keys for you. You don’t hold or custody your crypto. You hold an IOU. You hold a mere representation of your currency. If you peruse your favorite blockchain using etherscan, blockchain.com’s explorer, solscan, chainalysis, nansen, dune, avaxscan etc. you’ll notice that centralized exchanges agglomerate all their customers' assets into a handful of public addresses and maintain internal ledgers for individual users. If you store your crypto on centralized exchanges, you’re susceptible to government mandated restriction or seizure.

I do acknowledge that owning cryptocurrency on centralized exchanges is better than not owning cryptocurrency at all. However, this isn’t self-sovereign money. Cryptoassets stored on centralized exchanges aren’t permissionless, seizure resistant, or decentralized.

Self-custody presents a better way

Today, one converts fiat to crypto using a centralized exchange or through an on-ramp like moonpay. However, if one wants to custody crypto themselves in a seizure resistant manner, they can transfer it to a self-custodial wallet. A self-custodial wallet is one where you hold your own private keys. No government, potentate, monarch, or God can seize your funds without your private keys. Self-custody is the quixotic zenith of seizure resistant wealth. There are two types of self-custody wallets: hot wallets and cold wallets.

A hot wallet is one connected to the internet. This can be a downloadable software application, a mere browser extension, or a mobile application. The most widely used self-custody hot wallets today are Metamask, Brave, Exodus, Phantom, Coinbase wallet. Hot wallets are free, quick to access, and easy to transact with. However, they could be susceptible to a higher percentage of successful hacks if the right precautions aren’t taken.

A cold wallet is typically not connected to the internet. Most hardware wallets are cold wallets and live on devices that look like USB sticks. Personal cold wallets cost anywhere between $50 to $200. They’re slower to use, but often more secure. Even when a hardware wallet is plugged into your computer or connected via Bluetooth and your computer is connected to the internet, the signing of transactions is done “in-device,” and only subsequently broadcast to the network via your computer’s internet connection. This “signature” allows you to assign ownership to the recipient of a cryptocurrency transaction. Your private keys never leave the device. Therefore, even if devious malware on your computer tried to steal your funds by maliciously “signing” a transaction initiated in your hardware wallet, it wouldn’t be the correct signature so the transaction wouldn’t go through. Cold wallets are less convenient than hot wallets because they require hardware but are generally much safer (4).

With a self-custodial hot or cold wallet, governments can't access your funds. Exchanges can't access your funds. No hacker par excellence can access your funds unless you make a mistake and do something stupid, or they get access to a quantum computer. In that case, Houston we have a much bigger problem. Nonetheless, you can even insure your cryptofunds against hacks using decentralized financial solutions like ArmorFi or Nexus Mutual. Self-custodial wallets are more closely aligned with the sovereign money Satoshi envisioned.

If self-custodial wallets are so great, why don’t more people adopt them? Why do only less than 10% of holders self-custody their crypto? Read our next piece on Problems with self-custody to learn more.

References:

1. Bitcoin Public and Private Keys for Dummies

2. Federal Reserve History, Essays, Roosevelt’s Gold Program

3. Archives.gov, federal-register, codification, executive order, 12170

4. Gemini blog hot and cold wallets

1. Runaway inflation in western democracies

One could attribute the rising inflation rate (9% as of writing in 2022) to a variety of factors.1.1. The collapse of Bretton Woods in 1971 meant the deprecation of a currency backed one-to-one by gold-based collateral (1). Subsequently, the new dollar system today is neither backed by collateral nor driven by free markets nor governed by well developed algorithmic economic incentives. The dollar today is governed by reactionary and capricious central bank policy. 1.2. The excessive increase in the supply of fiat currency in a short period of time coupled with artificially low interest rates has furthered inflation. 1.3. If the US were a corporation, it would’ve gone bankrupt by now. There’s simply far too much government debt. Policy makers reckon that the way out of trillions of dollars of debt is by printing more money. The USD as the global reserve currency enables this in the short to medium term. However, this will only work for a while. If this continues, as the value of the US dollar depreciates over time, the US stands to lose its reserve currency status.

2. Loss of Private Freedom

Know Your Customer (KYC), Know Your Business (KYB), Anti Money Laundering (AML), and the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) are well-intentioned apparatus instituted to protect citizens from terrorists, money launderers, extortionists, and other bad actors.

These devices allow the governmental-plutocratic nexus to serve as the eyes of Sauron, Big Brother incarnate, or whatever you want to call it. Never in human history has the Right to Transact lay at the behest of the people in power. Individuals and merchants can transact on the internet - which the pandemic concluded will be the dominant trade route of the 21st century - only if they pass KYC, KYB, AML, and OFAC checks. First-order thinking dictates that this is a good thing, right? This is how we prevent another 9/11. True. However, second-order thinking and the events of February 2022 elucidate that this is a little more nuanced.

2.1 Trudeau’s Canada

Certain protesting Canadian truckers lost access to essential banking infrastructure in February 2022. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau explicitly stated that this was mandated because the truckers held beliefs that didn’t align with those of the government (2). What Trudeau and his advisors failed to realize was that the Right to Transact is fundamentally upstream of other constitutional rights like Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Assembly, and Freedom of Religion. Without the ability to use one’s own money, one can’t express Freedom of Speech, Assembly, and Religion in the 21st century.

Without money, one can’t express their views on a website, a pamphlet, or an advertisement. Without money, one can’t rent a public space. Without access to digital financial rails, one can’t participate in the town squares of the 21st century that exist increasingly and predominantly online. To access these town squares, one requires an internet connection and a computer. Both require money.

Therefore, without the Freedom to Transact, there is no other constitutional right (3). I’m not advocating whether the truckers' views were correct or not. The legislature, executive body, and judicial system exist for a reason. If the truckers were guilty, the courts should’ve sentenced them. The rule of law should decide the fate of citizens, not the machinations of the financial technology establishment.

2.2 Putin’s Russia

Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine knowingly or unknowingly precipitated the rise of neutral, sovereign blockchain based monetary rails. In response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the US imposed sanctions by disintermediating Russia from the SWIFT (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications) network. The rest of the world stood in awe. With the snap of an American finger, Russian citizens were no longer able to use their dominant payment mechanism, their smartphones. Apple pay and Google pay were turned off. Russians queued up for hours outside in the cold as they were unable to pay for transportation, bread, and vodka (4).

It doesn’t matter whether you support Russia or Ukraine. The point is that non-American countries, not limited to the Chinese sphere of influence, have realized that they need to institute their own self-owned financial technology rails. They can’t rely on SWIFT or the USD. They can try to build their own systems or turn to blockchain technology.

Privately owned, mathematically computed, cryptographically secure blockchain based digital assets are the latest instantiation of a Smithian free-market imperative. It’s our belief that cryptoeconomics will win out in the ensuing Darwinian evolutionary struggle in the marketplace of finance and technology. Neutral, sound, self-sovereign, and seizure resistant money can solve the problems posed by extractive middlemen and suzerain nation-states that control our existing financial system. The problems of temporal and financial inefficiency in monetary transmission, runaway inflation in fiat currency, and the insidious erosion of personal freedom in our way of life are potentially solvable by cryptoeconomics.

Since February 2021, Bitcoin’s market cap has hovered around USD 1 trillion. 300 million people (3.9% of the globe) own cryptocurrencies. Over 15,000 businesses are already accepting cryptoasset payments (5). Most people don’t have to understand these complex and chaotic systems to believe in them. A simple game theoretic model can explain the rise in adoption of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. Read our next piece on Pascal’s wager for cryptoasset adoption to learn more.

References:

1. The end of the Bretton Woods System (1972–81), IMF official website

2. https://www.businessinsider.com/trudeau-canada-freeze-bank-accounts-freedom-convoy-truckers-2022-2

3. 6529 twitter thread

4. https://www.businessinsider.com/russian-banks-sanctions-apple-google-pay-ukraine-invasion-money-cards-2022-2

5. How many businesses accept bitcoin, zippia

   https://www.zippia.com/advice/how-many-businesses-accept-bitcoin/

6. Loch Inc

Nanos Gigantum Humeris Insidentes. If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.- Sir Isaac Newton, 1675

Gutenberg Printing Press (1440) | Pacioli Double Entry Bookkeeping (1494) == Berners Lee World Wide Web (1989) | Nakamoto Bitcoin (2008)

They say history smiles at all attempts to force its flow into theoretical patterns or logical grooves; it plays havoc with our generalizations, breaks our rules; history is baroque (1). I agree. Historical analogies are never wholly accurate. They’re often miles wide and inches deep. Therefore, predicating a white paper on a historical analogy might seem like an exercise in futility. While the history of technology doesn't repeat itself, it often rhymes. Historical analogies grounded in the present day can bear fruit. Therefore, I proceed hesitantly.

Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press in 1440. 50 years later, Frater Luca Pacioli invented double-entry bookkeeping. Pacioli’s invention allowed familial dynasties like the Medici and the Fuggers to ascend to heights previously impossible in such short periods of time. Pacioli couldn’t have invented nor published his treatise on accounting without the printing press. Pacioli saw further by standing on the shoulders of a giant. The printing press, along with gunpowder, eventually broke the church’s monopoly on violence, truth, knowledge, and power (2). Men like Martin Luther and Luca Pacioli pushed the boundaries of human knowledge further for the better thanks to Gutenberg’s printing press.

Satoshi Nakamoto couldn’t have invented a byzantine fault tolerant peer-to-peer cashless system without Tim Berners-Lee’s internet. In the same vein, Nakamoto’s invention has led to a Cambrian explosion. 1T USD of market cap has been created (as of writing in 2022) in less than two decades. Standing on the shoulders of Satoshi and Berners - Lee, men like Vitalik Buterin have pushed the boundaries of human knowledge further for the better. Nanos Gigantum Humeris Insidentes, indeed.

Solidity and EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine) allow novice developers to spin up smart contracts that encapsulate, organize, and mobilize 100s of billions of dollars in a few weeks or months. These cryptoeconomic organisms, if you will, are decentralized, jurisidictionless entities that exist entirely in cyberspace maintained by a combination of cryptography, economics, algorithmic game theory, and social consensus (3). Maker, Compound, Uniswap, Curve, AAVE, and LIDO are some names that come to mind. These new economic systems are far more efficient than traditional financial products and companies. They don’t have 100s of value extracting and rent-seeking middlemen. Users and deployers of capital interact with and govern these protocols directly without intermediaries.

Some argue that cryptoassets will never be adopted as a means of exchange at scale due to their inherent volatility. First, as the TVL (total value locked) in cryptocurrencies has increased, the percentage change in price over a 24-hour period has more or less decreased steadily. Second, whether one analyzes the Ducat, the Florian, the Mark, or any other historical currency on which data exist, there has almost always been a strong negative correlation between volatility and depreciation of the currency (4). If those arguments are insufficient, then to that I say, we now have overcollateralized and algorithmic fiat-pegged stablecoins that are permissionless, trustless, and usable without intermediaries. Tether, USDC, Dai, and Frax are some names that come to mind.

Settlement times on cryptoeconomic payment rails humiliate and vitiate the existence of traditional financial rails. T+1, T+2, T+30 (courtesy chargebacks and disputes)? No thanks. How about T+10 minutes? Non-fungible tokens promise a better economic model for artists and musicians. Creatives no longer need to prostrate themselves before industry executives to begin and build their careers.

Blockchain based digital assets have the potential of serving as value protection, safety, and security in a world where western central banks and governmental institutions have diminished in effectiveness.

References:

1. The Age of Reason Begins, Will Durant, 267 2. The Sovereign Individual: Mastering the Transition to the Information Age, James Dale Davidon, William Rees-Mogg 3. The Great Wave: Price Revolutions and the Rhythm of History, David Hackett Fischer 4. A Proof of Stake Design Philosophy, Vitalik Buterin, Medium 5. Loch Inc

Most guides provide theoretical and abstract advice. The few practical guides out there are either outdated or ridiculously over-priced. I tried to make this guide as practical as possible. Most books and courses focus on the interview stage, which I have covered in this guide. However, I also spend a lot of time talking about the other 60%: finding the right company, finding the right role, getting a referral, and what to do between interview stages. These things are not entirely dependent on luck. There are proven methods. This guide demystifies them.

I enjoyed reading Cracking the PM Interview, Decode and Conquer, Design of Everyday Things. I also used https://www.tryexponent.com/ to improve my interview performance. These were helpful but not sufficient. Doing well in the interview is only 40% of the battle.

Patrick Collison says that “You could try to pound your head against the wall and think of original ideas — or you can cheat by reading them.” I unfortunately spent too many months pounding my head against the wall. Armed with this guide, I am certain you won’t need to.

This guide contains specific techniques that helped me personally land Product jobs at tech companies in the middle of a pandemic. My friends and peers benefited from using these techniques too.

Please note: This is not a magic bullet. It will still require execution from you.

​

This guide is not for you if:

• You don’t like working hard

• You don’t have any basic programming knowledge

• You are already a Product Manager at an evil large corporation

What you will need:

• A stable internet connection

• The ability to laugh off rejection and learn from it

• Patience

• Audacity and temerity

• An undergraduate education

​

Finding the right roles

First you must find companies that are interesting to you. It will be helpful if you have some experience in that industry. This experience could be from a prior job or some research project you did in college. Having basic experience in the industry will be incredibly helpful.

I would start by looking at portfolio companies of renowned venture capital firms. Check LinkedIn, Twitter, Tech crunch, and AngelList to see which companies have recently raised a new round of funding. Typically, companies that have raised >= $30 million will be looking to hire junior / associate product people.

If you’re lazy like me, you can just subscribe to newsletters from Tech crunch and AngelList. You can also follow partners at the top VC firms on Twitter and LinkedIn. You will be the first to know when a new funding round is announced for a given company. VC twitter can help you find a job. There is a silver lining to the farcical humble bragging show that is VC twitter. The self-aggrandizing does serve a purpose.

Say you have identified companies that you are interested in. Next, you need to go to the company’s website > careers / jobs and see if they are hiring for a role that matches your experience and interest. You must find a role that matches your experience. It’s okay if you have x years of experience and the job requires <= x+2 years of experience. The only thing that matters is that you are able and technically competent to do the work mentioned in the job description.

If you navigate to the company’s LinkedIn page, you can see demographics, skillset, and the number of people who have applied for that given role in the past few days. There will likely be 200 applicants for a single role. Don’t be alarmed. You have a massive leg up just by just from having read this guide. Plus, most of the other applicants are just dweebs and Politburo sanctioned bots.

The roles you’re looking for will be titled Product Operations Manager, Product Analyst (more data oriented), Associate Product Manager, Business Operations and Strategy, or Business Analyst within Product. Essentially, these roles are looking for someone with 3 traits: technical competence, an appreciation for product, and an ability to communicate with clients and business development.

Dan Romero’s blog was helpful here.

Getting an Interview

Don’t waste your time applying directly on the job board of the company’s website or LinkedIn. Use your limited daily hours to increase the probability of getting an interview.

Try to set up a 15-minute phone call with someone at the company. This person should be as close to the hiring decision maker as possible. If this 15-minute call goes well, which it will thanks to this guide, you will likely get a referral.

Here’s how you get a referral:

LinkedIn: Go to LinkedIn’s advanced search criteria. Find all the employees who work at that company. Filter by mutual connections (1 and 2 degrees of separation). If no one pops up, filter by your alma mater or current/ previous company. If no one pops up, that’s still okay. Having something in common – an individual, a past company, a past college, or perhaps an ex-lover – will increase the probability of response. This is not essential. In fact, having the audacity to reach out to someone you don’t know is exactly what these companies are looking for.

Send a connection request to at least 10-15 people in the company with the same tailor-made message. Don’t send an in-mail. Not only do you waste money when you send an in-mail, but also you look like an idiot. Connection requests limit the number of characters you can use. Counterintuitively, this is a good thing. It forces you to be precise.

Try to reach out to individuals as close to the top of the totem pole as possible. Don’t be afraid to reach out to CEOs, Co-Founders, VPs, Heads of Product, etc. Even if they don’t like your profile, they will respect the hustle. They are looking for temerity. Trust me. Most people will reach out to other associate product managers, business analysts and so forth. Been there done that. Don’t waste your time. You could be at the bar. Drinking.

Here’s a sample connection request message I used that was successful.

Hi , I hope this finds you well. My name is Prithvir and I'm a <school’s name> CS and PPE grad currently working at . I'm very interested in applying to <your company’s name>. Would you be willing to please spare 15 minutes of your time for a quick phone call? I would really appreciate it. Thank you. This message exactly fits the max limit for an “add note to connection request” message on LinkedIn. It’s free. It’s short and sweet. It demonstrates interest. It’s polite. It’s not too aggressive, but not docile or pusillanimous. Did I mention it’s free? I have tried many different formats. This one seems to work best. However, you should have your own trial and error method to find what works best for you. For me, the ratio of replies to ignores was about 1 to 4. Lo and – behold, using that exact message I got a response from the CEO and Co-Founder of a $500M valued company and we set up a 30-minute zoom call the next day. You will be surprised. If you know what to say and send a large enough volume of messages, I believe at least 1 out 4 people will respond to you. The probability of response is FAR higher than people expect. This is especially true, if your profile picture is professional and you have something in common with the person you are reaching out to. Email: Let’s say that you don’t want to use LinkedIn. Maybe you believe your profile is not impressive. Maybe you just watched the Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma. Or maybe you hate Reid Hoffman. How could you hate him? He’s such a cute chubby guy! Either way, I get it. While this isn’t ideal, there is a work around. Cold emails are perhaps the most under-utilized communication tool in our arsenal. A well-made, surgical cold email can be wielded like a Tomahawk. You can find any individual’s email(s) in the world using a website like https://rocketreach.co/ or https://www.apollo.io/lp/email-finder/. Here is a sample cold email format below. Credit goes to Tim Ferris for this mail format. Dear XYZ, I know you’re really busy and that you get a lot of emails, so this will only take 60 seconds to read. My name is Prithvir and I’m <introduction about yourself and why you are reaching out. No more than 2 sentences> …… I wanted to ask you <your request: quick phone call with 2-3 specific time slots, book recommendations, specific question about some project they worked on, etc.>…. I totally understand if you’re too busy to respond, but even a one-or-two-line reply would really make my day. All the best, Prithvir ​ General advice about cold emails: This might be surprising for some, but you must keep the email as precise as possible. The fewer words the better. Get rid of fluff. Notice how I did not start the email with “I hope you and your family are well” or something equivalent. You want to stand out. You must grab the reader’s attention from the first sentence. You must have a clear and straightforward ask. Notice how I didn’t say “I would love to have coffee or drinks or tea or, you know, get married”. Crisp and clear is the name of the game. People think that they need to be polite. That is correct. However, you need to be polite and concise, not polite and verbose. If you are asking for a quick 15-minute phone call, I recommend giving the recipient 2 or 3 time slots. This reduces the amount of work they need to do to coordinate. You want to have them reply with as little effort as possible. If they respond saying yes, Monday 4 pm ET works well for me. Fantastic. Send a quick one sentence thank you and send the damn calendar invite. The message must be tailor-made. Make sure to add in something that shows you’ve done your research about the individual to prove to the recipient that it’s not a mass email. Depending on how well you follow 1-5, I personally found the response rate to be 1 in 6 emails. Crushing The Interviews The 15-minute pre–referral phone call You have a quick 15-minute phone call with someone you’ve never met and know nothing about. The internet is a crazy place, isn’t it? Here’s how you should prepare for the call. You should have read every single publicly available piece of information about the company. Study the company’s website. Know the different types of products the company builds. Know its clients. Know its competitors. Know its financials (whatever is available). You don’t need a premium Crunchbase or Pitchbook account. You can find everything you need on TechCrunch, Axios, LinkedIn, and Twitter. Take a large sheet of paper and physically write out the important building blocks of the company. List out the products and what each does. Write the company’s financials (funding, revenue, valuation, whatever exists). List out the competitors. Having this sheet of paper in front of you during your call is psychologically helpful. You must convince yourself first that you have done the work and are deserving of the phone call. Only then can you convince the other party of this. We rarely use pencil and paper anymore. I do think there is something to be said about the thoughts and emotions that are elicited when the pencil touches the paper. It triggers a deeper level of thinking that just can’t compare with Microsoft Word, Roam research, Notion, iNotes, or whatever new age note taking app you use. As Blake Scholl the CEO and Founder of Boom Supersonic puts it - “Think on paper.” It’s like first gear for thinking: you go slower but can climb much steeper hills.” In addition to understanding the company, you must come up with a list of at least 7-10 questions to ask the individual about their own prior experiences leading up to this role. It’s okay to be stalkerish. People have LinkedIn profiles for a reason. Come up with intelligent questions about the company, the industry, the products, the competitors, and the individual. Do your research. This blog is helpful for questions to ask https://medium.com/future-vision/how-to-make-the-leap-from-consulting-to-a-startup-ee02fd80dbf7 Below are some questions you can ask. Don’t just resort to this list. Make sure your questions go deep into the company and the individual. You must subtly demonstrate that you have done your research. Your questions are the easiest way you can stand out from the other candidates. Every word you use is a strategic weapon wielded to defeat to the other 200 dweeby LinkedIn candidates and Kremlin bots. Why did you choose to join company x? Now that you’ve been at company x for y years, what are some positives and negatives of working there? Who are your biggest competitors? What differentiates your product(s)? What do you want to be doing in 5 years? Do you think you’ll still be at company x? What was the interview process like? What are the key characteristics you’re looking for when hiring for this role so that the individual is as impactful as possible? Say I were to join next week, what would I be expected to accomplish in 30, 60, and 90 days? What are the current OKRs (1) of the company? What is the growth of customers like? What is the churn like? What does your day to day look like? What is company culture like? You should also practice answering some of the basic / fundamental questions that you are guaranteed to be asked. I recommend recording yourself doing this on video. Watch the videos, find mistakes, edit, and redo the recording. Again, and again. Treat this as a work-out. Do your reps. Photobooth (2) is your swimming pool. You are Michael Phelps. Yes, this will be painful and cringeworthy. There’s no denying this. But at least this way you only embarrass yourself in front of the NSA and the CIA who are watching and not the important stranger you will soon be talking to. Here are some questions I would prepare 2 or 3-minute-long answers for. Tell me about yourself? Why are you interested in this company? Why are you interested in this role? What is your long-term plan? What do you hope to achieve on a 5 or 10-year horizon? Why do you want to leave your current job? ​ During the phone call, DON’T ASK FOR A REFERRAL. If you come across as intelligent, well – researched, passionate about the problem the company is solving, your job is done. The individual will likely offer to give you a referral at the end of the phone call. If not, you can subtly ask them “The xyz role listed on the website seems particularly a good fit and interesting to me. Do you reckon I apply directly online or is there another better way to apply?” This should do the trick. If it doesn’t, you know that either the role is not the right fit, or you messed up with your research and questions. This is fine. You will have to go back to the drawing board and fine tune your process. You will have to do some stochastic tinkering and A/B testing. Try to pin-point the exact thing you said that changed the individual’s tone towards you. Interviews ​ You managed to get a referral. Of those 200 nerdy LinkedIn applicants, only about 20 made it so far. Well done you cheeky bugger. Depending on the company, you may have 1 to 10 different interviews. Your research from the pre referral conversation will likely come in handy. Each interview will likely be conducted by the hiring manager (a senior product person at the firm), the HR manager, or lateral employees in other departments that you will likely work with. The lateral employees will range from Engineering to Sales to Customer Support and so on. The interviews will have a behavioral component and a technical product component. I will not attempt to demystify the technical product component. Far braver souls have done a better job than I could ever aspire to achieve. However, since I have studied all these resources thoroughly, I will point you to which portions of which books are particularly helpful. Product Component: Most people will have read Cracking the Product Manager Interview, Decode and Conquer, and the book from Product School. I personally much preferred using https://www.tryexponent.com/. If you decide to purchase exponent, you will not need the books. Some additional resources include Good PM Bad PM, Design of Everyday Things, High Output Management Cracking the Product Manager Interview by Gayle Laakmann McDowell I can guarantee that every single aspiring PM has read this book. I read this book many times in college. It was not enough. Yes, it’s a good primer and can perhaps be your bible. But instead of reading it again and again I recommend utilizing the other resources available in the cornucopia that is the internet. In terms of specific sections, I recommend reading chapter 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15. Decode and Conquer by Lewis Lin This book is a little different than Cracking the Product Manager Interview in that it’s made up of only question and answers. It solely consists of actual Product Manager interview questions with perfect answers from PMs at Amazon, Google, Facebook, and so on. It’s an intriguing take on the Socratic method. While interesting and helpful, it’s again, not enough. Don’t read this again and again. I suggest reading it once, highlighting what’s important and then moving on to other resourced. In terms of specific sections, I recommend reaching chapter 1, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16. Product School Book by Product School This was recommended to me by many successful PMs. I have never read it. It’s free on Amazon Kindle. TryExponent.com The website is built by Stephen Cognetta. He’s an ex-Google PM, Princeton undergrad, and Stanford MBA. Believe me when I say it, if you buy the PM course you won’t need to buy any of the books. And no, he is not paying me to give this review. The course consists of videos and tutorials on how to answer the various categories of Product Management Interview questions. The course also contains videos of sample interviews with real PMs. It contains the frameworks from the various books and articles all in one. It also gives you access to a Slack group chat where you can reach out to the founders and instructors and other fellow PM applicant warriors. You can even use the slack chat to set up practice interviews. The most valuable thing you can get out of this course is the video series. Reading the books can only get you so far. You will be better off practicing on your own and recording yourself on photobooth and re-watching/ redoing the videos. You need to learn and practice the verbal and non-verbal cues PMs use while answering product questions. I think you can learn far more in a shorter period by just watching how the pros do it than by reading about structures and outlines. You will learn things like how to split the time you’re given in answering a complex product design interview. I could not recommend this course enough. I genuinely learned a lot from it and don’t think I could have landed the offer without it. ​ Behavioral Component: An early mistake I made was just focusing on the product, engineering components of the interviews. The behavioral component is more important. If you read the books and do the courses, it’s likely you will pass the Product component. However, with the behavioral component, it isn’t so simple. You need to practice. Here’s what you should do. ​ Take the job description and break it down. For each bullet point in the job description, come up with one story / experience that relates directly to this. You can use some project you did in college, something you did at your prior job, or some other bull shit side project. Yes, you must have done those things. But what’s more important is how you package your story and structure it. Break down each story into three components. 1. Why is this important/ related? 2. What did you personally do? 3. What was the outcome and learning? Try to use as many numbers as possible to quantify your outcomes. Listeners latch on to numbers amidst a sea of words like a sailor to lighthouse on a stormy night. This is the most annoying, painful, and cringey part of the process. I understand. I promise that this is the only part of the process that feels like some sort of Faustian Bargain. Unfortunately, like the pre-referral screen, you will need to practice this. If you didn’t have the pre interview referral process and somehow magically reached so far, go back, and read that section. The advice there will still be helpful here. Video record yourself answering questions. See where you make mistakes and see where you don’t. The more you practice this, the less rejections you will face. You should have at least 5-7 stories. Each recording should be approximately 3 minutes long. You don’t need to have memorized the stories word to word. But you should practice enough that you can visualize the flow of what you’re saying and minimize the “ummms”, “uhhhs”, and “likes” as much as possible. ​ You could ask a friend to look at these. However, this will lead to irredeemable cringe. I don’t believe that you don’t need anyone else. Just watch your recordings. Redo them. Improve them. Master them. Trial and Error are your only friends here. If you’re really struggling with interviews and need some additional help, seek it. Go to themuse.com and find a coach. The returns on the investment will probably be commensurate. ​ Chasm after Interviews You’ve done one, two, three, four, five or a million interviews with the same company. You think you have done well in all of them (unlikely). In fact, this was perhaps the 5th or 6th company you interviewed with. At this stage, you’re quite certain that you did not mess up your behavioral or technical answers. You read everything I told you to read. You practiced your answers many times. However, there is no response from the recruiter or the hiring manager. You diligently sent them a follow up. And then another follow-up a week later. The trail has gone cold. What the F*ck?! Welcome to the chasm. Most candidates fall into this abyss and fade away here. ​ People think that you can land a dream job in Product at a tech company Via Negativa (3). You cannot get this job by just avoiding mistakes. You must step outside the box. You must stand out. Here’s a little secret. You can tilt the scales in your favor by doing a voluntary research project. In fact, think about it from a purely empirical and statistical basis. It’s likely that the candidate who does get the job, amongst 100s of other applicants, will have done some voluntary additional project. Whenever you fall into the chasm, the voluntary research project is your ladder out. If you get really cheeky, you can even preemptively prevent falling into the chasm. Whether in the pre-referral phone call, interview 1, interview 2, or interview n, once you have asked your questions and you are about to say goodbye and thank you, say this- “Hey, I was actually particularly interested in xyz feature/ product/ API and I took the time to do a little project. Could I send that over to you to get your thoughts and feedback. I really enjoyed doing the project and I do think your company will benefit from my learnings.” Boom. Mic Drop. Silence. The listener will undoubtedly be impressed and will likely move you to the next round regardless of how awful your project is. If you forget to do this during the interview, that’s fine. You can send the project as an attachment in a follow up email. Voluntary Additional Project: So, your project shouldn’t be awful. It should be respectable. You must spend at least a few hours doing it. If it’s well researched and well-written, you should be fine. You could do a usability test for a product from the company. You could run the company’s public API and write a pros and cons list of what worked and what didn’t and what could be improved upon. Whatever you decide to do, make sure to write a 3-5 page word document about it. This will go a long way to show the recruiter and hiring manager that you are not like other candidates. You will stand out. You will demonstrate that you really want this job and that you are qualified for the role. These two blog posts do a phenomenal job of explaining how to do these projects and how to write about them. They have specific examples too. These projects will probably take a whole day to do. Don’t do these projects for all the companies you apply to. You should probably do them for about 3/5 companies that you really like, and you think the role is perfect for you. https://medium.com/@RaghavHaran/how-to-get-virtually-any-job-you-want-even-if-you-dont-have-the-right-experience-a622149262d5 https://medium.com/bridge-collection/a-guerilla-usability-test-on-dropbox-photos-e6a1e37028b4 You don’t have to send this project when you’ve fallen into the chasm. You can send it in whenever you think there’s a good opportunity. This little project will go a long way. I guarantee that 95% of applicants will not do this. This is how you stand out. I wrote .8x number of voluntary projects for every x company I went to the final round of onsite interviews with. Take home assignment You did well on the interviews and maybe even sent in the voluntary research project. You are now presented with a take home assignment. The point of the assignment is to see how technically competent you are and how well you can communicate in writing. They are also testing to see how far you can go before you need to ask questions. Unless you are GPT-3 level AI, you will likely need to ask clarifying questions to the hiring manager to answer the assignment completely. My advice to you is to first make sure you have tried everything (google search, hours of tinkering, asking a friend, etc.) before you reach out to them. Yes, you must eventually reach out to them with questions. But make sure you have exhausted your own resources first. The assignment really varies company to company. It’s quite difficult to provide specific guidelines on how to do well on the assignment. The Medium articles on the voluntary research assignment will be helpful. At the end of the day if you do the work, write well and clearly, and spend time thinking about your work, you will be fine. Remember to attach screenshots of your code, results, terminal window, etc. in the word doc to demonstrate that you did the work.You can skim through these too. https://www.themuse.com/advice/heres-what-the-hiring-managers-actually-looking-for-in-that-dreaded-takehome-assignment https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/interview-process-take-home-project-sean-hurley/ Additional Advice Say you are technically competent and have done a good usability test of a product or API. It’s still imperative that you can communicate your results well on the voluntary take home assignment. Furthermore, the take home assignment also necessitates that you are be able to clearly communicate your thoughts well in writing. I learned about Scott Adam’s writing advice via a Naval Ravikanth podcast. I make sure to leave this article open on a sticky note every time I write. It’s brilliant and immensely helpful. I have added it below. The Day You Became A Better Writer by Scott Adams of Dilbert Comics I went from being a bad writer to a good writer after taking a one-day course in “business writing.” I couldn’t believe how simple it was. I’ll tell you the main tricks here so you don’t have to waste a day in class. Business writing is about clarity and persuasion. The main technique is keeping things simple. Simple writing is persuasive. A good argument in five sentences will sway more people than a brilliant argument in a hundred sentences. Don’t fight it. Simple means getting rid of extra words. Don’t write, “He was very happy” when you can write “He was happy.” You think the word “very” adds something. It doesn’t. Prune your sentences. Humor writing is a lot like business writing. It needs to be simple. The main difference is in the choice of words. For humor, don’t say “drink” when you can say “swill.” Your first sentence needs to grab the reader. Go back and read my first sentence to this post. I rewrote it a dozen times. It makes you curious. That’s the key. Write short sentences. Avoid putting multiple thoughts in one sentence. Readers aren’t as smart as you’d think.
 Learn how brains organize ideas. Readers comprehend “the boy hit the ball” quicker than “the ball was hit by the boy.” Both sentences mean the same, but it’s easier to imagine the object (the boy) before the action (the hitting). All brains work that way. (Notice I didn’t say, “That is the way all brains work”?) That’s it. You just learned 80% of the rules of good writing. You’re welcome. Aligning the Sub-conscious This is probably going to be the section that will receive the most criticism. You might completely dismiss it. That’s fine. You can probably land a job in Product at a tech company without reading this section. Read this at your own peril. Your life may not be the same after reading it. Don’t worry this is nothing like Roko’s Basilisk. Say you’ve hit rock bottom. You’ve been getting rejected left right and center. You’re not making any progress. Take a sheet of paper and write on it 15 times “I will get the right job for me.” Do this consistently at the start of every day for 30 days. Science behind this: Have you ever noticed that when you’re in a crowded public place and there is a lot of noise, you can’t really differentiate between the different conversations? You can’t clearly understand a conversation unless you direct conscious effort and thought to it. But if someone quietly mentions your name from across the room, you suddenly hear it? How does that work? How does your brain involuntarily choose what to pick up on and what to ignore? The truth is that your neurological machinery can only filter so much. It physically can’t render every single stimulus that it receives. The number of inputs it receives every day far exceeds the number of available neurons to process this information. Thus, it naturally has a filter to automatically choose what to render and what to ignore. From an evolutionary standpoint this makes sense, right? Your subconscious will be hyper-aware of stimuli involving the most important things concerning your survival. It’s possible to communicate with this neurological machinery. You can prime it. You need to prime it. You need to prime your neurons to be extra aware of something you want to achieve. Therefore so many productivity gurus and coaches recommend writing down your goals and aspirations. You need to prime your subconscious to filter out the ideas, recommendations, and insights that will not help you get closer to this goal of finding the right job for you. ​ Now, I don’t know if this is voodoo. But it helped me. It could help you. It seems like an asymmetrically positive behavior. You spend only 5 minutes a day every day for 30 days and it could radically alter your life for the better. Conclusion Remember, patience is key. It will take at least a couple of months to receive your first offer from the moment you first read this guide. It will take time to study the product and behavior guides. It will take time to find the right roles. It will take many iterations to improve your interview performance. Rome was not built in a day. You will persist. ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ Footnotes: Objectives and Key Results. https://www.whatmatters.com/get-started If you don’t have a mac use whatever equivalent product you like you heathen. 3 “The path to heaven is achieved by studying how not to get to hell” – St. Augustine. Nassim Taleb calls this Via Negativa. ​

Quite simply put, Genome editing is a type of genetic engineering in which specific changes to the DNA of a cell or organism are made. An enzyme cuts the DNA at a specific sequence, and when this sequence is repaired by the cell itself an ‘edit’ is made to the sequence. Unlike earlier genetic engineering techniques that randomly insert genetic materials into a host genome, editing is able to target specific locations with incredibly high accuracy.

I believe that any biological support of genetic editing is by proxy a utilitarian and economic support of genetic editing. Over the next couple of decades, targeted gene editing could help humanity overcome some of the biggest and most persistent challenges in global health and development. The technology is making it much easier for scientists to discover better tools to fight diseases that kill millions of people every year. It is also accelerating research that could help millions of farmers in the developing world to grow crops and raise livestock that are more productive, more nutritious, and hardier. Thus, a biologist’s argument in support of genetic editing is actually a manifestation of a macroeconomist’s argument. If we are able to cure a certain disease that affects millions of people, we are able increase the size of the labor force by millions of units. Some supporters even go so far as to say that genetic engineering has the power to unlock a new phase in human evolution. Yuval Noah Harari, in his book, ‘Homo Deus’, claims that Homo Sapiens is not the final stage in human evolution. The next stage is Homo Deus, which directly translates to “Demi God”. This entails that with the advent of genetic engineering, we can create a new species of supremely intelligent, disease resistant humanoid creatures that are more powerful and capable than ever.

Biological and economic arguments against genomic editing stem from the notion that the human life has been around and evolving on this planet for almost 4 billion years. Human evolution has been shaped by inconceivable amount of time through multiple iterations of trial and error. Given that this research is nascent it seems a little risky, given that it has the power to impact future generations. While this type of thinking is important, I think this type of thinking is regressive and the economic/ biological upsides far exceeds the downsides.

Supporting genetic editing gets a little dicey once we begin to think about the moral considerations involved. There are two broad moral arguments against genetic editing. The weaker argument against gene line editing is that it opens up a Pandora’s box for what parents can do to their children’s embryos prior to birth. The argument goes that gene editing surgery will start off as disease preventive in nature. For example, a parent seeks to reduce their child’s likelihood of cystic fibrosis by using germline editing. This seems fair and moral. However, in the future does this mean that a parent can alter the child’s height, skin color, intelligence levels, or even its ability to cope with emotions? I believe that the argument from eugenics and the notion of designer babies is weak in that if one is against designer babies they are probably against a variety of the medical practices prevalent today. How different are designer babies (other than in magnitude of the alterations) to the individuals on reality television that undergo countless rounds of plastic surgery in order for their faces and bodies to contort in a certain way? How different is sending your children to the most expensive private institutions in order to enhance their EQ and IQ if you can afford it?

A stronger ethical argument against genetic editing is that this surgery doesn’t just alter the fate of one individual, it alters the fate of every single individual that is to come from the bloodline of the human whose embryo has been altered. This is terrifying if we look at the laws of compounding and exponentiation. By altering just one baby, 15 generations later, we have inadvertently altered 32,768 babies (2). Furthermore, there is absolutely no way, today or in the near future, to scientifically test the results of future generations. Unless someone were to build a time-machine or be able to predict the future with orders of magnitude far greater than statistics today, I do not see any viable argument against this ethical consideration.

In conclusion, genetic editing is a topic that is susceptible to strong bias if not considered holistically and from an interdisciplinary perspective. Myopic or non-interdisciplinary analyses might miss the point. A purely economic or biological argument is likely to support genetic editing; but, a more holistic, ethical, and philosophical argument is likely to be skeptical about it. Hence, a PPE perspective is important and could lead to deeper insights that might otherwise have been ignored.

Footnotes:

1. Clusters of regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats

2. 2^15 = 32,768. If we assume each parent has two children, then by the 15th generation the first genome edited individual has around 32000 ancestors.

​

​

​

​​

References:​

Belluz, Julia. “Is the CRISPR Baby Controversy the Start of a Terrifying New Chapter in Gene Editing?” Vox.com, Vox Media, 22 Jan. 2019

Homo Deus, Yuval Noah Harrari

Gates, Bill. “Gene Editing for Good.” Foreign Affairs, Foreign Affairs Magazine, 6 Mar. 2019,

If we were to plot a graph of global human economic output vs time, from the beginning of our time on earth till today, we would see three sharp exponential phases of increasing economic output: the agricultural revolution, the industrial revolution, and the modern computing and artificial intelligence revolution. There is little doubt that the artificial intelligence revolution has started and will continue to enhance human productivity at a scale that rivals previous two. Artificial intelligence refers to the ability of computing systems to carry out tasks that previously only humans could perform. Today AI can perform highly specific tasks like image recognition, electronic trading, remote sensing, medical diagnosis, etc. with accuracy and speed greater than humans. The silicon chips on which AI are programmed perform at lightning speeds that are much faster than firing of the synapses and neurons in our brains. Furthermore, these silicon chips can store far more data than our brains can. This enables our economy to exponentially increase output while reducing labor input.

I believe that purely economic arguments against AI and automation should not be entertained, especially arguments that reject AI and automation because they displace working class jobs. These arguments are anti-development in nature and resist the pioneering spirit of innovation and adventure that this country was founded upon. In fact, technophobic ideas against automation and AI the resemble the Luddite movements of the industrial revolution. There will always be a segment of the workforce that gets left behind when there are capital and technological gains in the economy. Simultaneously, it is true that the trajectory of this particular revolution will likely lead to millions of citizens could losing their jobs. The sheer number and proportion of individuals that will lose their jobs is staggeringly high, much higher than it was in the industrial revolution (McClure, 153).

While it is unfortunate that so many working class citizens will be replaced by autonomous machines, I believe that they must adapt and build new skills in order to participate in the economy. Charles Darwin, once wrote that ‘it is not strongest of the species, nor the most intelligent that have the greatest probability of survival; It is the ones that are most adaptable to change’. Morally speaking, it is up to the rest of society to help this segment of the labor force make this transition. We are already seeing vast amounts of venture capital investment influx into online platforms that allow individuals to learn new skills from the ground up such that they can contribute to the economy. And this influx is only going to increase in the future. Historically, automation has led to a decrease in certain jobs but a net increase in overall jobs. This will likely continue. Thus, I am not at all pessimistic about AI and automation when it comes to their impact on the labor market. Our planet has a cornucopia of untapped resources and AI will force us to find and utilize them.

The worrisome aspect of AI is in regard to its existential and metaphysical nature. Today AI is at the stage where it can carry out highly specific tasks with high accuracy and speed. This type of AI is known as weak AI; I am not fearful of weak AI as it is merely another capital tool that enables us to be far more efficient than we have ever been. Strong AI, on the other hand, refers to the type of AI that is no longer specific to the task at hand. I.e. The AI becomes capable of successfully performing a variety of non-specific tasks with greater accuracy and speed than humans. There are various proposed manifestations of Strong AI. Some of which include human brain interfaces (1), human brain emulation (2), general AI (3) and more. Either of these versions of Strong AI pose a direct and terrifying threat to the very existence of the human race. Nick Bostrom, in his book Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies, explains various possible scenarios in which the default outcome of strong AI is doom. The most convincing and easy to understand of these scenarios are Infrastructure profusion and Perverse instantiation.

Perverse instantiation refers to the scenario in which a superintelligence discovers some way of satisfying the criteria of its final goal even though it violates the intention of the programmers that actually defined the goal. Let’s say we were to program an AI to make us happy. What ends up happening via perverse instantiation is that the AI begins to parallelize human facial musculatures to constant beaming smiles by manipulating facial nerves. It figured out a way to realize its final goal to a greater degree than the methods we would normally use. For obvious reasons, this is highly concerning.

Infrastructure profusion, on the other hand, refers to the notion that the only thing that the AI cares about is its reward signal; it is programmed to do whatever it takes such that it completes its tasks and receives its rewards for doing so. Thus, it will devote all the possible resources it has access to in order to carry out its task. For example, say the goal of the AI is to make ten paper clips. One would think that the AI would stop once the ten paperclips are made. But, if not programmed correctly, the AI would keep carrying out tasks in order the ensure that the astronomically low probability that it is unsuccessful has been minimized. It will recheck the paper clips again and again ceaselessly. In doing so it could possibly use up an unimaginable amount of resources. While this example is a microcosm, its implications are clear; If we give the strong AI some highly complex task, it will not know when to stop. It could potentially consume all of the resources and energy available in the entire universe in order to achieve its end goal.

I understand that these are just two theories representing one highly abstract point of view. Furthermore, many unprovable arguments against perverse instantiation and infrastructure profusion exist. However, the nature of these threats is so grave that even the tiniest probability of their occurrences deem that we must not ignore them. This is not to say that we must stop striving to make progress in the field of AI, but that we need to pay copious attention to the developments that are taking place. I commend Elon Musk and Sam Altman’s OpenAI project (4) and support Stephen hawking’s view that some kind of global regulating body must be set up so that we are in preemptive mode and not reactive mode, given that reactive mode will be too late (Caughill, 3).

In conclusion, I am optimistic about technology, automation, and AI when it comes to the global economic output, but the existential threat cannot be ignored.

Footnotes:

1. Imagine transmitting signals directly to someone's brain that would allow them to see, hear or feel specific sensory inputs. Consider the potential to manipulate computers or machinery with nothing more than a thought

2. A proposed technique which involves transferring the information contained within a brain onto a computing substrate. The idea of uploading the entire human cognitive process onto a computing system

3. The most basic example of this is when a computer can pass the Turing test

4. OpenAI is a non-profit AI research company, discovering and enacting the path to safe artificial general intelligence. https://openai.com/

​

​

​

​

​

References:​

Franssen, Maarten, et al. “Philosophy of Technology.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Stanford University, 6 Sept. 2018, plato.stanford.edu/entries/technology/.

Patrick Caughill, Artificial Intelligence Is Our Future. But Will It Save Or Destroy Humanity.

Nick Bostrom, Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies

​In 1969, a German mathematician named Dietrich Braess discovered that adding one or more roads to a network can counterintuitively increase the congestion and slow the flow of traffic. He used rigorous mathematics to prove this theory. Practical examples of Braess’s Paradox can be seen in Times Square. In fact, this theory is extensible to completely unrelated topics like the tension force in springs and competitive sporting events like the Olympics (Roughgarden, 5).

​So how does this apply to fintech? If the designer of the game (entrepreneur) doesn't consider that players of the game are strictly selfish and strategic, mayhem can ensue. Despite the designers’ good intentions, a Nash Equilibrium in which all parties are monotonically worse off could result. The burden lies on the system designer (founder / entrepreneur) to anticipate strategic behavior, not on the participants to behave against their own interests.

​For example, Facebook, or shall I say Meta, has received considerable excoriation from the public for its crypto project Diem / Libra. Zuckerberg and his advisors failed to consider Braess’s Paradox. Simply adding a new road to the Facebook network was a misstep and backfired. Similarly, other companies trying to embrace cryptoeconomics should meticulously consider and anticipate all stakeholder’s strictly selfish strategic incentives and resultant behavior. Few organizations have done this exceptionally. Classic examples are MakerDAO, Uniswap, AAVE, Compound, etc. These organizations welcomed Byzantine and adversarial actors to their ecosystems. Their automated economic incentives were set up to make the price of anarchy as close to 1 as possible.

References:

1. No. 2814: BRAESS'S PARADOX by: Andrew Boyd, University of Houston, https://www.uh.edu/engines/epi2814.htm

2. Twenty Lectures on Algorithmic Game Theory by Tim Roughgarden, Stanford University