Overnight

overnight

There are many metaverses in Web3 with more springing up overnight. Some bright spark recently called the metaverse just space on someone’s computer (or more correctly computers) but on February 15, JP Morgan issued a report on metaverses which concluded by saying that the  metaverse will most likely infiltrate every sector in some way in the coming years, with the market opportunity estimated at $1 trillion in yearly revenues. It’s a bit loose on specifics but the report leaned much more heavily into the hype than reality (from the title of the report). Someone who knows first-hand the opportunities involved in the metaverse, before it was even given that common term, is Sebastien Borget, co-founder of Sandbox (TSB), arguably one of the most successful metaverses and certainly leading the pack in this increasingly crowded field. Today there are more than 2 million wallets registered to TSB, a growth of 1000% year on year. There are 18,500 LANDS owners, a 375% increase year to year. The current value of the TSB world based on the secondary market price is close to $1.5 bullion while the TSB marketcap is $3.3 billion and ranked #37 overall by total market cap, per . CoinMarketCap Borget himself comes from a gaming background. As a teenager he began playing video games and was hooked. “I really wanted to make my own video games but creating games on consoles was prohibitively expensive and you needed big teams and a publisher. It was out of my reach.” Then in 2011, he got his first smartphone and instantly realised it would be possible to create a mobile game with just one or two people. With his colleague and fellow games producer, Arthur Madrid, they founded Sandbox to allow game creators to develop their 2D pixelated characters and games. The platform was predicated on user generated content. “It took off. Over the next eight years we attracted 40 million installs and 70 million user generated worlds. And the game generated good revenue for the company. “So that made us happy, but we were also frustrated as we could not reward the creators of these worlds, these games, and typically they would leave after a year or so.” Then in 2017, Borget and Madrid found out about blockchain technology. “We tried playing crypto kitties. Now the breeding of new kitties was not new, but the fact that cats were NFT digital assets that could be owned, transferred outside the game and sold to other people – that made us sit up. Creators could now monetise their work outside the game.” This led to the precursor of . The concept was to take user generated content and NFTs and provide utility for those in a new platform. The game moved from 2D to 3D, from single player to multiplayer and from mobile to both PC and Mac. the Sandbox metaverse “We spent the last four years building more than a game, we were developing a virtual world platform with creation tools, a free editor, game maker, a map and a marketplace. We are proud of what we have achieved so far and are building on more.” This is where the ‘overnight success’ title is rejected. This was eight years in mobile gaming and four in blockchain. Still Borget’s real pride lies in the fact that they can reward creators for what they develop or even for staying on the platform. “The timing is right.” Sandbox has also been very successful in attracting brands to the platform, including big names such as The Walking Dead, Atari, Rollercoaster Tycoon, Care Bears, The Smurfs, Shaun the Sheep, and Binance. With his cofounder Madrid, Borget credits both the entire team and the community for its growth. “We’ve been unlucky at times and also lucky. I wouldn’t pretend we invented anything. The ingredients were all there and we were able to piece them together with meaning, value and utility. Now we are focused on how we develop this form of entertainment. We started with gaming but we are open to any kind of entertainment and want to bring in more culture, more lifestyle, more immersion and more socialisation in ways not seen before.” Currently the Sandbox is run as a centralised entity, but the economy is being decentralised through NFTs – Borget calls it a progressive decentralisation. “We want to give our vision and then to inspire others but in time we will probably step away and let the community take over.” Also published here.

The Sandbox - An Overnight Success (10 Years in the Making)

They came out of nowhere, now they’re making millions… They’re an overnight success! I’m sure you’ve heard this before or at the very least something like it. Publications love to bombard us with stories of entrepreneurs who find instant success. . The problem is “instant success” simply doesn’t happen Sure the stories get clicks, sell magazines, and excite young entrepreneurs into thinking they can fast track their journey and become the next Jobs or Musk. But if you’re setting out to become an “overnight success” you’re setting yourself up for failure. The hard truth is that: Behind every ‘overnight success’ is years of commitment, hard work sleepless nights and a touch of good luck. As part of my work at Altar, I get to see first-hand the struggle that entrepreneurs face getting a startup off the ground. Success is never guaranteed. Even for entrepreneurs with years of industry experience, a top-notch solution to a very real problem, wrapped in a product with a beautiful UX/UI. In this article, I’ll share three stories from successful entrepreneurs who I sat down with as part of our content series They’re prime examples that startup life isn’t going to bed poor and waking up rich – no matter how good you are. The Startup Journey. The Stories Behind the “Overnight Success” The following businesses, and the entrepreneurs behind them, have all reached incredible success in their chosen industries – whether that takes shape in hundreds of millions in funding, a successful exit or in some cases both. To the outside eye, it’s very easy to mistake them as an “overnight success”. But as I learned when sitting down with these founders, that could not be further from the truth. Let’s get started with Yaron Samid. Yaron Samid – BillGuard Yaron Samid is the founder behind multimillion-dollar fintech startup, BillGuard. His startup seemingly shot to success, with the personal finance app seeing rapid adoption when it launched. The first iteration of BillGuard however, wasn’t a personal finance app, but a “set & forget” security app designed to identify fraudulent credit card transactions. But people weren’t excited about that product, so adoption was low. They had to pivot the business several times to achieve success, as when sharing his story with me. Yaron recalled recently “People had the intent, but when we launched, suddenly nobody stopped what they were doing to sign-up and use it Taking action is not free. People have to make the decision to go get your product. That requires a driving force. Like if you have a headache, you will stop what you’re doing and go and buy some medicine. Unfortunately, we did not have that. Nobody is excited about their security products. So we pivoted to a B2B model. We tried to sell the technology to the banks. However, the sales cycle for banks is very very long. It’s painful. The kind of pain I wouldn’t wish on anybody. Simply, we were not set up to just sit there and wait for the banks to deploy. So, after two years of investing in a B2B marketing and sales team, with pilots in major banks, we made one of the hardest decisions we had to make. To pivot back to a consumer app. This meant letting go of some amazing talent we had brought in to sell to banks.  They just weren’t the right fit for a consumer business model. It was heartbreaking. We completely redesigned the product and built a personal finance app as opposed to a “set & forget” security app. We changed the discussion from security to saving money: ‘Do you want to pay full price for that coffee? Or do you want to get a notification on your phone that gives you a 25% promo code as you walk into the coffee shop?”. Everybody wants that product! If you see someone standing in front of you in line getting 25% off their coffee the first thing you do is say: “Hey, what’s that?” and they say: “It’s my BillGuard savings alert. It shows me that there is a coupon here I can use and automatically downloads it to my phone.” Boom! Everybody standing in line is suddenly downloading the app for the coffee they are about to buy. That drives massive organic adoption and growth. When we did this and made other UX tweaks to the mobile app, it brought down our CPA to less than $2 per newly registered user.” What could easily be seen as an overnight success actually took years of pivoting (and overhauling the majority of the team) to achieve. Ali Halabi – Volt Lines Ali Halabi is the brain behind Volt Lines – a subscription-based transportation service aimed at corporations. Volt Lines has rapidly become the leading corporate transport service in Turkey – and to the outside eye, it’s easy to think that Volt Lines went from $0 to $7.5M in funding in a heartbeat. As you can probably guess, that couldn’t be further from the truth. Volt Lines may have been received by the market with open arms, but Ali’s journey started four years before with his original idea “Volt” – a P2P carpooling service. He told me the full story in a : recent chat “I quit my corporate job in 2013. Quite an irrational decision from someone who had only lived in the city a year – who still didn’t speak the language. I set out to build Volt, an on-demand carpooling service. It was my first startup. We were essentially connecting drivers and passengers going in the same direction in inner-city Istanbul. The carpooling model failed due to product-market fit, so I pulled the plug on it in 2017. Which left me trying to figure out what to do next. I ended up jumping from one end of the spectrum to the other. Having focused on C2C with my first startup, my second focused on B2B. I created a completely new company that focused on corporate transportation. That’s how Volt Lines was born. It’s like the Netflix of Transportation, the Spotify of buses. I started selling Volt Lines six months before we actually incorporated the company. Almost a year before we signed our first customer.” Again, it’s clear to see that what may look like an overnight success actually boils down to hard work, trying (and failing), perseverance and listening to your market. Garrett Gafke – IdentityMind Garrett Gafke brought the idea of digital identity to Silicon Valley with his startup IdentityMind. A startup that, before being successfully acquired last year, solidified its place as an industry leader and raised over $21M in funding. But this success certainly didn’t happen overnight for Garrett. He that when he first had the idea, he and his team struggled to portrait its value to the market: told me recently “We would talk about it with people and they would look at us blank-faced. I’ll give you an example of how far this goes back. I was meeting with people like Jeff Bezos, who was getting the bookstore (Amazon) going at the time. I was speaking to Peter Thiel & Elon Musk, who were at PayPal with another friend of ours Bill Harris. They were just getting that going with Max Levchin. Marc Andreessen was over at Netscape. I was over at Verifone. No one had ever discussed what Digital Identity was. We had to take that time to educate the market. We were pioneering the digital identity market. This meant lots of conversations about things that were unknown and confusing to people.” After being told no countless times, Garrett and his team went into stealth mode for four years. What got him through it? His mindset and the people around him: “Of course, my co-founders and I saw the lack of demand. Sure, we were told “no” a million times – like a lot of entrepreneurs. After all, failure is the primary denominator in the entrepreneurial process. What it comes down to is your own drive, values, and commitment. Grit and tuning out the naysayers is critical.  You must be resilient! Moreover, you’ve got to “scrap” as I call it. The best CEOs and entrepreneurs I know are what I call very scrappy people. And what I mean by that is we work hard. We work incredibly hard and give everything, every piece of our being to these journeys – even if they end unsuccessfully. More than that, scrappy people are also very resourceful. You figure out a way to work for very little money. The other major factor is, you and your co-founders make a commitment to each other. Do not underestimate your partners in any journey, business or personal. When times were tough, often what kept us going was our commitment to each other as a founding team.” Garrett’s story is further proof that success comes from years of hard work and the grit to get through the toughest hurdles. Key Takeaways These are just three examples of what it takes to build a successful company. I could show you many more, but instead, I want to leave you with some actionable advice that I’ve picked up along the way. First, foremost and somewhat unsurprisingly, don’t expect to become an overnight success. Instead, commit to the problem you’re trying to solve for your users. Then surround yourself with the right people to build that solution and get it into the hands of your users as quickly as possible. Listen to those users, and iterate that product to make it the best possible solution on the market. Critically, while you’re doing all of these things, know that there will be hurdles and there will be times when it feels like your startup is on death’s door. The best way to make your way back from those moments is, firstly, by not being afraid to ask for help. When I , he summed it up perfectly: sat down with another entrepreneur, Wade Eyerly “We’ve all needed so much help to get to where we are, that we understand and most of us are still calling people looking for help! So when you call an entrepreneur and say: “Hey, can I get 20 minutes? I want to bounce an idea off you.” The answer is: “Yeah. Okay.” Every single time.” Pair that ability to ask for help with an entrepreneurial mindset of never giving up. Think about why you started this journey. Look at the team around you who have all committed to you and your startup. Always remember that . As Garret told me: perseverance is a key trait to successful entrepreneurship Whether or not your startup makes it depends on your ability to go past where most people would throw in the towel. Most entrepreneurs I know never throw in the towel. That’s it. Now it’s time to go out there and create your own story. The original version of this article can be found here

Busting the ‘Overnight Success’ Myth in Startups

Bend your mind around decentralized publishing with these success stories Web 3 is offering a tsunami of change for artists and writers. And we just got started. Ever thought of putting your book out there as an NFT? It's already been done by some and it's changing the world of publishing, even as I finish writing this line. I'll explain what stunning success some of these pioneer writers had. We've already entered the stage where it's fairly easy to sell your tweet as an NFT. From an earning perspective, this only makes sense when your name is Jack Dorsey, but still, it's possible for you too. I have my most popular tweet on BitClout floating around in digital space as NFT. I'm still the intellectual owner. Or what about writing a book together with peers all over the world and publishing together on a transparent ledger? And the final frontier; what if we let A.I write the next Dan Brown? It's already happening. It's a great idea to dive into NFT's when it's real value you bring to your tribe. Ever thought of publishing your tweets, poems, book, or separate pages as NFTs? Here is how this can change your writer's career overnight. Putting your book on a blockchain can change your career overnight When your passion is to write books, this is where you need to be. Or maybe you only just started and procrastination is your devil. Maybe you only wrote the first page. Or just a rough sketch in a notebook. Hold on, that's great! Become like writer Rex Shannon. Release each page of your novel as an NFT, and once it's sold, make it available for the public on a blockchain. Imagine the electric circuits in your head go bonanza when you sell page 1 of your future novel. Or just your very promising blurb. You only need to start and write page 1. Really. The first sale will be an overload of motivation, I'm sure. The book will be finished, and sold, in no time and forever owned by 280 pages = 280 owners on WEB3. There is more. What if you've written a book and dragged it to 154 publishers and they all laughed you in the face? Become like . He made his book into a GIF strolling the pages, and sold it for 5 ETHEREUM, now close to $25K. Blake Butler He doesn't work for MacDonalds anymore, doing his side hustle writing in the evenings. Putting the first page of your book, the blurp, or the complete work as NFT for sale in a creative way can completely turn around your life. It will disturb the market, for good. Bye, Bye publishers? Maybe. I guess we still need the quality filter from people in dusty offices reading 21 manuscripts a day and rejecting thousands with sloppy blurbs. When you produce quality, your online reputation is high and you can create your own network momentum, go for it. Peer-to-peer publishing will explode soon. You're still one of the first 1000 to ever publish a book as NFT. DO-IT-…YESTERDAY. The decentralized peer-to-peer written book To really take things next level; What if everybody can participate in writing one book, decentralized, on the Ethereum Blockchain, presented as NFT? It's already done. The very first book written and published decentralized is claimed by Sole 24 Ore. A decentralized book about global leadership in the age of web3 and NFT's. The book is "tokenized", that is, transformed into a digital representation that effectively transforms each reader into a node of a transparent and open network of "distributed registers". Every single node, that is to say, each reader, will be able to provide its own contribution on the subject which, once examined by the editorial staff, will be fully included in the work - www.disruptorleague.com The editorial staff they included is, again, the much-needed quality filter. The centralized element that will remain until humanity has developed through gene modification into humans that equal Leonardo DaVinci. (how boring) The contributions of all participants were collected in a final NFT, a collage co-created by authors and readers. It got auctioned last Christmas. The proceeds went to charity. Apparently, the founders of this project didn't mint thousands of Sole 24 Ore NFT's to be sold. A missed chance? Mind you, this project is from last year. The world of NFT's only exploded last February 2021. Exploring the waters of decentralized content creation for bloggers Platforms like BitClout or Mirror.xyz are a playground for bloggers and content creators that like to tip their toes in decentralized waters and get paid in tokens. Let's make a comparison between Facebook and BitClout. Both are social media pioneers. One that became massive in web 1 and 2 and managed to get half of the world addicted to screens, and a newcomer that has the potential to become huge in web 3 and beyond. The comparison gives a good vision of how the web is developing. Personally, I believe that not everything should be about capitalizing value in web3. There is an inherent danger to connecting a person's internet identity to capital or tokens only. This can be a potential Black Mirror scenario where people get blind chasing value. Will the value-less people disappear in a black hole? We are more than bits and bytes and money. In my view, in a transparent world, the function of ownership can in fact even gradually disappear when we move of any pyramid model. Not owned by one centralized entity like a global Borg-alike totalitarian ruler. Hell no. Decentralized means owned by all, and nobody at the same time. Rap your mind around that one. The blockchain can support this just the same. This route might actually set us free from the chains of possession. I know, it's quite an out-there 2052 vision, but still. Last words Technology, people, and the Zeitgeist are literally expanding the core concept of writing and books and art as we speak. At this pace, will we become the Michelangelo of a new cultural digital renaissance soon? I doubt it when I look at the dumb pixelated Simpson heads on BitClout. Is our current meme culture even comparable with the ? David by Michelangelo In a way, yes, since it expresses the collective wormhole humanity has found itself pushing itself towards the 4th industrial revolution. The David represented a mirror for humanity that for the first time in history dared to put itself in the middle of the universe. From a purely aesthetical point of view, I'll hate the moment A.I will write better novels than Dan Brown, and I think it's not possible. There is something about our creative process that needs a soul and suffering. Period. Writers can feel that between the lines. For me, a more important question to leave you with it; When will we leave publishers and finally (o sigh) centralized platforms like Facebook behind? NFT and web 3 allows writers and in fact all creative producers to cut out work in a digital landscape that is new, fresh, and changing the horizon of humanity's creative efforts forever. There is huge potential out there. Be a pioneer. Lucien Lecarme Also published on: https://vocal.media/futurism/your-book-on-a-blockchain-the-future-of-publishing

How Putting your Book on a Blockchain can Change your Career Overnight

Zoom has been in news a lot lately. It has gone from being an enterprise solution to a household name pretty fast. Its daily users have risen from 10mn to 300mn in the last 4 months. Its stock price has also risen significantly up. While Zoom is growing exponentially (much like the number of corona cases), let’s dig a little bit deeper into what laid the foundation of such an overnight success. I am ignoring all the security issues Zoom has been bomb blasted with here. Zoom and the Red Ocean Strategy Zoom was founded in 2011 when Eric Yuan decided to quit WebEx after working there for 14 years. 10 years he spent at WebEx and subsequent 4 years at Cisco WebEx (after $3.2bn acquisition of WebEx by Cisco). WebEx was, in fact, one of the first SaaS (Software as a Service) companies ever. They had the SaaS model even before Salesforce, which many consider as the first SaaS company. WebEx was a videoconferencing solutions company and Eric was one of its earliest employees (9th engineer). After working so long at the company, he wanted to build a new video conferencing solution for Cisco. He felt that there were a lot of legacy issues with the current solution and new-age customers had different needs. Even though he was VP Engineering he could not build it inside the company. The Cisco leadership then felt that “it would cannibalize the existing market.” Wow! Talk about missing out on an amazing opportunity. Eric went on to quit the company and raise a bunch of money. He decided to build a new video conferencing app in a market full of big incumbents. The list included big companies like Skype, GoToMeeting, WebEx as well as well-funded startups like BlueJeans. This goes against a lot of startup advise. Conventional wisdom states that one should try to find a market with lesser incumbents or have a very differentiated/unique value proposition. Zoom did none of that. Let’s try to understand why would he not adhere to conventional wisdom: He had managed to raise $3mn from people who were willing to invest in him (as opposed to the business). A lot of the investors did not even know what Eric was working on. This would definitely have provided him with enough confidence/firepower to power through When you look top-down on the video conferencing market, you do see a lot of competition. But whenever Eric talked to his customers, none of them were happy with their videoconferencing solution. Customers were deeply dissatisfied in spite of so many solutions. I can attest to that as well. Video conferencing never used to work seamlessly. But just because users are unhappy, does that mean a new startup can be built on top of that problem? What if it’s technically not feasible? If Google/Cisco of the world, with all their technical might, can’t solve this problem perfectly, how can a small startup do that? That’s what most of us would think. I believe what made Eric think otherwise would be the fact that he had already done that for 14 years. That too for one of the top companies in the space and from scratch. I think another example of the same approach would be . Almost everyone I know hates email but can’t do away with it (in spite of Slack). Even though there were a bunch of email clients already, both by big companies as well as startups, Superhuman founders thought they could solve this problem better than them. Superhuman Lesson here. Sometimes it’s a good idea to not be too bothered by competition. If the users still feel the problem, and you have the belief that you can solve it. It’s probably a better idea than most others (given it’s already validated that a problem exists). A lot of times, we try to solve problems that don’t even exist for a large userbase. Zoom and its MVP When Eric left WebEx and raised $3mn before even starting with Zoom, he also hired 40 of his ex-colleagues. All of them engineers. Basically, from Day 0 he had a huge team of engineers. A lot of Silicon Valley products are built with “Move fast and iterate” philosophy, just like Reddit (which we covered in ). Eric was from a different school of thought entirely. our last edition of Product Stories He was in a building phase for about 2 years. He launched Zoom in 2013. Towards the end of these 2 years, he also had an engineering team of 130. That is a lot of engineers and a lot of time, especially in the startup world. According to Eric, if you are building a completely innovative product like Uber or Airbnb, then the “move fast and iterate” model of building products makes sense. But if you are building a product that competes with a bunch of other products, you need to make sure that your product works (and is better than everything else out there). A corollary of this (although it implies that one should build products with a more unique value proposition; the exact opposite of what Zoom did): 2 years is a large amount of time working on a product with no validation from outside. Eric himself agrees that he has had the urge to launch early many times but he had to fight that urge, to make sure that the product was right. Few of the finer product features they wanted to nail before launching: Maximum latency of 150ms even in choppy internet connections (150 milliseconds is the maximum latency before conversations feel unnatural) Even in cases of up to 40% packet loss, Zoom should seem to work fine. They prioritize audio over video in order to do that. In a meeting, choppy video is fine but intermittent audio makes the meeting intolerable No password and cross-device joining of the meeting (this was a big pain point with the current solutions of the time. Almost everyone required the new joinees to join via a password) Security features built-in to set them up for going to enterprise customers later on This worked fantastically for Eric but I am not sure if this is a lesson that is translatable to most other founders. Eric could do this because he had whole-heartedly believed in the problem and was playing the long-game. “Move fast and iterate” model is for times when you are not 100% sure whether you are working on “something people want”. In case you are not, it helps you to cut your losses and spend your time building something which people actually want. During these 2 years’ time, he also planned a lot around the business model and the go-to-market which I will cover in the next edition of this mail. But one example of extreme meticulousness would be the freemium limit in Zoom. Zoom one-to-one meeting are always free but for group meetings, it is limited to 40 minutes. 40 minutes is not just a random number. According to Eric and his WebEx experience, 45 minutes is the duration of most effective meetings and hence wanted to keep the free limit below that. Note that he did have to waste time doing A/B tests to figure out if this limit is the best for conversion or not. This enabled him to focus more on new features for the customers rather than optimizing this conversion funnel. If you look at Zoom’s growth post-2013, it is nothing short of a dream. It’s not just because of the fact that they are customer-obsessed. A lot of founders are customer-obsessed but they don’t see the kind of dream success that Zoom sees. What you work on is sometimes much more important than who you are. Also, a lot of the foundation of that hypergrowth was built in those 2 years. Lesson here. There is no one correct way of building products. It all depends. On the founder’s individual constraints as well as the market constraints. SMB vs Enterprise While Zoom did do some things that didn’t scale, a lot of things it did in its initial 2-year “product building phase” did end up scaling. One example of that would be their go-to-market strategy. While Zoom (like most of their contemporaries) wanted to serve the enterprise market, Eric knew it would be a difficult battle to begin with (especially in a market filled with biggies). As a result, he started with a heavier focus on the freemium model, which is generally meant for SMB customers. He figured he would start with the SMB market and simultaneously, keep on getting enterprise customers (where the sales cycles were much longer). Note that he never wanted to go to the consumer market as then he would have to rely on advertising as a business model; which according to him doesn’t make sense for a video call application. His freemium model (of keeping one-on-one chat completely free and a 40 max cap on group calls) provided him with enough leads to grow sustainably; while he kept going after the enterprise customers. In fact, his first paying customer was an enterprise customer (Stanford Continuing Studies) even though he started with more focus on SMB first. Zoom also did a bunch of billboards and NBA ads later on when his focus shifted on the enterprise more. that brand advertising is expensive but something one needs to do in order to shorten the sales cycle. If your company is something one has never heard of, it is very difficult to convince all the stakeholders involved in an enterprise sales deal. Eric believes This is the same strategy Slack followed. Provide a free product that works seamlessly, thereby providing with enough leads to you to build for the SMB market organically while you inorganically try and close enterprise deals. But there are very few problems that hit SMBs and enterprises alike. Zoom as well as Slack were lucky enough to find those. Early Metrics Talking about early metrics of Zoom might be a moot point because they were so good from the start that it’s practically of no viable learning for others (at least the numbers disclosed publicly). Metrics actively tracked by Eric during the initial days: NPS Score Daily number of meeting participants Number of minutes While 2 (or 3) are what can be constituted as North Star Metric, is a good check metric to ensure growth doesn’t come at the cost of existing users. NPS score essentially is a measure of how much your existing users like your product. NPS Score After couple of years of launching the product, Zoom’s NPS was 68 (30 is the average SaaS NPS score and 40 is a good score). Major video conferencing products were at 20 at that time. Zoom’s growth has always been fantastic. Probably one of the reasons why Eric does not pay much attention to it. They launched their product via a Wall Street Journal article and got 60k users in 1 day (this is even more than Instagram which got 25k users in a day on its launch). Cumulative user growth since inception: 0.5 years: 500,000 1 year: 3,000,000 1.5 years: 6,000,000 2 years: 10,000,000 2.5 years: 40,000,000 Their total users grew 40% month on month since their inception. This is a phenomenal feat to achieve. While there is very little visibility of Zoom’s revenue early on, it has grown from $61m to $331m in annual revenue in the past three years. 11% MoM growth rate in revenue in the last 3 years. One negative data point we do have is that a few VCs passed on Zoom early on because they felt that it had higher than normal churn. Eric explains that it was because customers were changing their individual plans to company-wide plans but we would never know. P.S. ICYMI Below's a video endorsed by . Product Stories

Zoom's Nine Year Path to Overnight Success 

Just before bedtime, I did what no sane human should do. I checked Twitter. , one of my #Bitcoin follows, had posted an oblique-but-positive meme-tweet about Bitcoin’s price doing… . Marty Bent something I checked Coindesk and saw BTC’s price climbing a wall — and then spent the next 30 minutes meth-addict toggling between Twitter and the crypto-charts, watching numbers spike up from 8% to 13% to almost 20%. I felt that sweet glumness of simultaneously being happy the market was turning wishing I’d bought more Bitcoin during the doldrums. and Luckily for my dependents, I know nothing about except that I’m far too emotional for it. So — rather than late night FOMO-buying — I scrolled through a sufficient number of OMG-gifs on twitter, then went to bed. trading By morning, the dust had (semi) settled... There had been a giant price-spike, followed by a slight retreat as opportunistic sellers collected gains, and a (temporarily) reset price about 14% higher than the same time yesterday. More importantly, the new plateau represented a dramatic shift from the smallish, inconclusive price moves Bitcoin has seen over the past few months. But with this big one-hour jump, I had the opportunity to scratch a curiosity-itch that has been with me for a while: How does the liquidity of Bitcoin’s market affect its price? In other words — and there is probably more market-savvy terminology to express this idea — how much of Bitcoin’s price movement is a function of the number of people willing to buy or sell it, rather than ? long-term-hodl* The Bitcoin term “ ” is said by some to stand for “ old n for ear ife” — which is incorrect. It was actually a drunken typo. By the Roman playwright Tacitus. But I digress. But regardless of ’s origins, it expresses a common sentiment among hardcore Bitcoiners: Except in dire circumstances (war, famine, poker losses), one simply does not sell. hodl h o d l hodl Bitcoin’s overall market capitalization was, prior to yesterday’s spike, around $71 billion USD. Now that’s up to $83 billion and change. Bitcoin is famously ruled by supply and demand — even more so than other commodities—because it has a fixed, scheduled, merciless supply schedule. Eventually this will culminate in 21 million bitcoins; today it is about 17.6 million, ticking up block-by-block. (The way this works is fascinating, but and I won’t do so here.) it’s well-explained elsewhere Let’s do some napkin-math. Over the course of the hour where this action took place, five or so “blocks” were added to the Bitcoin blockchain, so 62.5 new bitcoins entered the world. Against a 17-million supply, that’s inconsequential. The price rise — equating to $12 billion in market cap — took place because of the sale of existing bitcoins. (I know, “duh,” right? But stay with me.) bitcoins had to sell in order to drive up the price like this? According to BCB Group’s Oliver von Landsberg-Sadie ( ), the impetus was three 7,000-bitcoin buy orders spread across three trading exchanges. How many quoted here by CNBC The reasons for this mass purchase are subject to speculation, but many suspect a “short squeeze” — a big trader who had previously been betting Bitcoin changing his mind and buying the requisite coin to “cover” his financial exposure. Without enough willing sellers, he this anonymous buyer was forced to bid up prices in order to close out his “short” position. against As in any market, when you need to buy a lot of something in a hurry, people notice…and it’s tempting to give you a crappy deal. In the amoral world of currency trading, such temptations always win. Let’s assume that von Landsberg-Sadie’s numbers are correct and it was 21,000 bitcoins purchased that drove BTC’s price from $4,170 to $4,885. This implies “only” $95 million of purchasing. Think — how weird is that? $95 million of equated to $12 billion in . money actually spent perceived increase in market value If you, like me, don’t work in finance, this sort of thing makes you pause, blink, check your numbers, blink again, etc. Because those numbers show 125x leverage on compared to what . what actually happened seems to have happened The market, over the course of an hour, got $0.034 greedier as this big buyer revealed his intentions. per bitcoin sold This price jump was possible only because of the “thin liquidity” of the Bitcoin market. There are currently 17.6 million bitcoin in the world. It’s been estimated that 3–4 million of them are lost forever, due to early users who weren’t careful with their digital wallets’ “keys.” That means, in practice, there are only 14 million bitcoin available to buy today. And means that this whale-sized buyer, with a 21,000 BTC appetite, was trying to buy up 0.15% of In one hour.* that all the bitcoin in existence. It’s cool that this is even possible. In no other commodity, ever, has this been technically feasible. If some Chinese emperor had wanted to buy up 0.15% of the world’s rice supply — despite having the money and the soldiers to do so — he couldn’t make that decision, negotiate a price, take physical custody, and be assured he’d succeeded, inside of an hour. The technology just wasn’t there. Let’s think about a financial market’s liquidity for a sec. Bitcoin’s price went up because there were willing sellers — and these sellers realized they could charge a premium and get away with it. But most people who own Bitcoin don’t keep their digital assets stored on the exchanges where the buying happened. The actual available for this whale to buy from was only a small subset: , where… people A x B x C number of people who own Bitcoin A = percent of who were keeping their Bitcoin on trading exchanges during the hour when the whale got hungry B = A percent of who had established prices at which they’d sell C = B How many such people were there, and how many bitcoin did they represent? We don’t know those answers — except that there were at least 21,000 BTC they could pony up, and that the incremental cost of getting them to do so was 3.4 cents for each and every BTC_._ over the previous market price Let’s extrapolate. What follows is loose, back-of-the-napkin math, but the point is important. Last night’s price move implies that if a whale entered the Bitcoin market looking to buy 445,000 BTC —an amount which is only 2.5% of the world’s final, circulating supply* — . today this would drive up Bitcoin’s price past its $20,000 all-time high * Current coins, minus presumed-lost coins, plus all future to-be-mined coins. Now, back to reality: no one will be surprised if over the next few days, some bitcoin owners take profits from this sudden price-jump, and Bitcoin’s market cap sinks back down a bit. But the larger lesson should give us pause for reflection… If some vastly wealthy entity — a nation-state, a sovereign wealth fund, etc.— decides that the market is undervaluing a commodity, and wants to buy up a mere 2.5% of the global Bitcoin supply…today’s price quadruples. provably scarce, un-inflatable, digitally-deliverable Then consider: what happens when rich entity FOMOs and decides to buy up one percent? another another

The Hidden Implications of Bitcoin’s Overnight Price-Jump

The Only Weapon You Need to Fight Negative Thoughts Five minutes before starting this article, I hated every aspect of sitting down to write. But you know what beats procrastination and makes you a better creative? Work ethic. It’s all you need. Want to write a book? Want to write a play, a song, a symphony? Want to code an app or create a company? Work ethic. That’s all you need. You may need a whole pot of coffee to get you going, but if the engine of work requires it, fill up the fucking tank. Do the Work One of my favorite books is . Do the Work by Steven Pressfield It reminds me of my father. Not because my father writes screenplays and is a famous inspiration for creatives all over the world. No, it’s because the book teaches you that to get anything done, you have to actually go out and do it. You have to get up every morning and go to work, regardless of what kind of work you want to do. My father lays tiles like a stoic monk. Throughout my childhood he’d get up every day, put on a flannel shirt and groutcolored jeans and go to work. No procrastination. No nothing. Just doing the job he had to do, like clockwork. Millions of people have walked on his tiles. But the only way those millions would’ve had the privilege to walk on my father’s work is because he got up, every day, and… Did. The. Work. Now, don’t get me wrong. My mother has the same work ethic and raised it in me just as well. But for this analogy, creating a gruff blue collar worker in the theater of your mind is more fitting. There Aren’t Any Shortcuts Overnight success is a beautiful thing to dream about, but that’s the only thing it is. It’s a pipe dream. An unattainable fantasy that never happens. You might think that some writer’s book became an overnight success because it hit the best-seller list out of nowhere. Or you might be jealous because some shitty shitty musician you’ve never heard of hit the charts while you’re still scraping by playing coffee shops. Overnight success takes years to achieve. What those “overnight success stories” don’t tell you is all the stuff that doesn’t fit into the definition of “success.” Self doubt. Procrastination. Paranoia. Failure. Rejection. Boredom. Burn out. If a creative said to me that they’ve never tackled these things on their road to “success” (whatever that means), then I’d tell them they’re lying. And to get the hell out of my house. Those “negative” aspects of success are the very things that make you a stronger creative. Think of them like the Robot Master bosses in the old NES game Megaman. Remember that you’re here to do the work and to move over any speed bumps on the way. Whenever you would beat a boss in Megaman, you’d gain their special weapons to make you stronger. Whenever you encounter roadblocks on the way to success, just collect the feelings of failure like weapons and use them to make you stronger. The Only Weapon You Need to Fight Negative Thoughts As I looked out the kitchen window, over the smell of freshly brewing coffee I thought, “this day is going to suck.” But then I stopped myself. Why? Why does it have to suck. The day hasn’t done anything to deserve its suckiness yet. It may have just been the lack of caffeine in my veins, but there was no real reason yet for the day to turn bad. So I squinted my eyes and took another look out the window. The sun was shining. I had a good night’s sleep. The coffee smelled good. I out of spinach for my smoothie, but that’s hardly a negative. Spinach is more of a means to an end. Not an enjoyment in and of itself. Overall, there was was nothing to feel shitty about. But the split second weapon I used to turn my entire day around was a simple one. Awareness. Realizing that can change your paradigm. All these noises in your brain are only your own stupid thoughts trying to make the day shitty. “hey, all this negativity is pointless” There’s no reason for it to be shitty. Fuck your thoughts. Replace them with sunshine. If your life is a movie, then meditation allows you to slow down the movie just long enough to realize that you can see the cue marks. A cue mark signals that the movie reel is going to end. At that point it’s up to you to replace the reel to further the story. Do you want the next reel to be shitty, or sunshine? Those are the moments that I realize that meditation works. Don’t Be a Hard Luck Story Like Rudy Be a hard working story instead. Don’t scam your way to success through shortcuts that don’t pan out. Put in the work and amass your arsenal to fight your way through failure, rejection and self-doubt. I know there’s a person inside each of us that doesn’t want to hear any of it. They just want to do as little as possible for the most amount of reward. They’ll try to scam their way to the top, taking as many shortcuts as possible. His song, Rudy Got Caught Again is a cautionary tale about all the things that happen when you don’t put in the work to try to be a better person. Rudy let his inner person take control, and he’s the character we talk about in the next episode of Tales From the Homestead. Take a listen to it here.

What Megaman Can Teach You About Achieving Overnight Success

No. not really. Sorry. I’ve just finished reading TLDR..new research shows that Twitter’s platform is crawling with bots, bots that have potentially influenced the U.S. election. In its critique of Twitter on the matter, . this. it’s not alone Now here’s the thing. This in itself is not news. Twitter has, and always has - been crawling with bots. For us technical folks that understand how these things work, they have this magic thing called an API which has given Joe Schmo developers like me the ability to create bots in the first place. This is what makes Twitter’s ecosystem what it is today. It’s also provides some of the secret quirky sauce that makes it appealing to me as a user versus their . Bots are an integral part of Twitter’s appeal. arch nemesis Delightful bots, that tell us when someone in or for us Limey’s across the water. There’s , or of articles on the web extolling their virtues. Oh, did I mention, there’s even a . Meta. U.S. congress edits a Wikipedia page Parliament Edits GIFs from Wikipedia Dear Assistant any number bot for finding bots When I read that pretty much everyone is pointing the finger at Twitter for this whole Russia-rigged-the-presidential-election thing, I can do nothing but feel sorry for them. The problem isn’t bots per se; instead, it’s when bots go rogue, impersonate human interaction and trick the masses. Is that Twitter’s fault? With machine learning and NLP technology becoming more and more advanced that problem is going to get more difficult, not less. Twitter for all their faults, are caught between the proverbial rock and a hard space. On one hand, they’ve tried to be than just another.social.network. A fight they don’t want to go head to head with Facebook on. Focus instead on the strengths of the platform and the things that make it unique. With the return of Jack Dorsey to CEO who you have something of a tale of two wives. The bots go hand in hand with the whole opening up an API thing and being developer friendly. On the other, they are being hauled across the coals for not doing more to bad bots. If they turned off API access tomorrow, the same journos that are currently beating them over the head for the whole election debacle would be taking them to task for no longer being able to see their . Ho hum. more promised to try and bring more developers back into the fold prevent favourite instagram pics turned into paintings Blocking the bad bots. Almost ever article I read on this subject cracks me up. ‘ ’ we hear them cry! ‘ ’, or Usually followed up with ‘ ’ or similar rhetoric. Au contraire mon ami — this only highlights the complexity of the problem. Block the bad bots Just block all the Russian bots ‘Block bots from IP range’. The smartest minds in the business work at Twitter, they musn’t care Just blocking bots is one of those things that sounds like the right answer. The answer readers want to hear. Good old common sense - a simple solution to a complicated problem. Now I don’t work at Twitter, but I’m pretty fucking sure for every article that is written that suggest to ‘ ’ or ‘ ’ there’s some poor engineer at Twitter headquarters punching a pinata of a non technical Journo that doesn’t understand exactly what it takes to achieve that goal. Block the bad bots Block bots from Russian IP addresses Sorry, my pedigree chum. This isn’t a simple problem that can be solved overnight, and every time you write about you are showing a distinct lack of understanding of the problem. Even I, who doesn’t have half a clue on Twitter’s current internal infrastructure knows the following: I don’t know what the real technical challenges look like, so me suggesting a solution is idiotic. Blocking IP addresses is fruitless. Lots of the bots don’t originate in Russian IP space to begin with, secondly. Proxies and botnets around the web make IP solutions something of a digital wack a mole. Detecting bots is easy. Determining good bots from bad bots that are already an engrained part of the Twitter ecosystem is practical impossibility. You are asking someone to perform a across millions of users and get it right 100% of the time and not throw the baby out with the bathwater. turing test So, if you are planning on writing about this topic, please, stop. Talk to someone on the Twitter team. Hell, find some sort of knowledgable source that will at least half explain to you what the challenges are before you start. This is not your average tech challenge please stop writing as if it is.

I’ve just solved Twitter’s fake news and bad bot problem overnight.

Twenty Years and Three Months to Create an Overnight Sensation

Maybe you missed it. I almost did — in fact despite carefully tracking ICOs this summer I almost let this sleeping giant slip through my fingers. Unlike some of my other posts, I can’t even tell you that it was my research that helped me uncover this find. Rather, I just happened to be awake at the right moment when a landed in my inbox. Kraken blog post Kraken isn’t my normal stomping ground for trades, but I follow their updates quite carefully. Unlike many exchanges Kraken has been selective in which trade pairs they add to the exchange — and as someone who was previously a director at a crypto exchange and had to make these decisions, I know how hard it can be to make the right picks. But, Kraken has always done a great job in including mostly winners (although I’m still skeptical about ). So when I saw they added an asset I hadn’t heard of I realized there was something I missed. Melon What is EOS? EOS is the latest project by experienced entrepreneur Dan Larimer. blockchain Dan was the creator of (+ The ) and three projects with a combined market cap of $886M and he is now the CTO of the company who is building the EOS platform. BitShares, STEEM SteemIt platform BitUSD block.one So what exactly is EOS? In their own words EOS “ ” is software that introduces a blockchain architecture designed to enable vertical and horizontal scaling of decentralized applications. What does that mean? Right now, there are hundreds of major companies, banks and governments looking to build enterprise level applications on the blockchain, and leverage the smart-contract technology of Ether. The problem is, as we’ve seen with the rise of ICOs this season, these technologies don’t scale well. The goal is to change that by creating a system designed for enterprise level adoption, that allows large corporations to build DAPPS (Decentralized Applications). Can’t Bitcoin and Ethereum handle enterprise DAPPS? Short answer: No. Longer answer: Not yet and not on the current infrastructure. On June 11th 2017, the Ethereum network was hammered with traffic and pumping out 5.2 transactions a second. Which seems like a huge success! However, taking into consideration that on June 20th during the status ICO the Ethereum network was bumping out 5.04 transactions per second and that some users were waiting hours for Ether to send, it turns out that in the grand scheme of things the network can handle a pretty small volume. While for cryptocurrency 5.2 transactions per second is a huge milestone, it fails in comparison to the number of transactions that someone would need to host an enterprise level solution on the blockchain. In Dan’s at Consensus 2017 he highlighted the number of transactions per second of a few consumer services. EOS presentation Before we even get to being able to run stable financial markets on the blockchain, we’d have to break through barriers to even be able to support the transaction volume of social networks. Facebook alone pumps out 52,000 likes per second. Not posts, not messages, likes. JUST That means in order for Facebook to run just one component of their system on blockchain technology would require a platform like Ethereum to be 10,000x more efficient than it currently is. Isn’t this just a node/miner problem? Can’t we solve this with more Engineers? The speed of the network isn’t simply a function of miners, nodes or hashing power. It comes back to the fundamental way in which a blockchain functions. The over simplified version is that on a current blockchain information is processed in a sequential fashion in the order of each block, and without implementations of modified structures like the the sending of this information doesn’t start until the full block is complete. Falcon Network Even modified implementations have their limits. Take for example, the Kik’s upcoming implementation of “ ” — despite being a $1bn unicorn startup with significant engineering resources, Kik announced that Kin would need to implement “ ” to keep up with the transaction volume. Kin a hybrid on-chain and off-chain solution A few years ago in the early planning stages of Kin, Kik launched an experiment called “Kik Points” allowing users to earn a traditional currency in the app. They monitored the number of transactions they were seeing and compared it to the blockchain: Bitcoin At their high-point they were seeing 7x the number of transactions that the Bitcoin network was, and Kik has only continued to grow over the past 3.5 years. So, What is the Solution? That brings us back to EOS. EOS has the goal of creating essentially a developer friendly operating system that allows both private and public blockchains to, among other things, process information in parallel across multiple cores rather than restricting it as a single thread. EOS also introduces a few other concepts to make blockchains more accessible to the enterprise client: Separation of read and write actions for sake of speed. The ability to communicate asynchronously between public and private blockchains. The ability to manage user accounts with different permission levels. Account names instead of long addresses. The ability to fix bugs and role back changes with super-majority consensus instead of needing a hard-fork. These features rely on a change of infrastructure referred to as “Delegated Proof of Stake” in which multiple “witness nodes” are nominated by the network as representatives who help to make certain high-level decisions more quickly without polling the entire network. Some cryptocurrency hardknocks argue that this ultimately makes a blockchain ‘less decentralized’ and while that’s true it’s important to realize that companies like VISA and IBM who are spending hundreds of millions of dollars on this technology were never going to adopt a fully public blockchain anyway. They are looking for ways to leverage blockchain technology internally to drive down costs while interacting with external blockchain networks. So is EOS the future? At this point it is hard to tell. EOS is only in the infancy stages of development and their initial coin offering (ICO) is scheduled to continue until July 3rd 2018. If the team can deliver the EOS project, it should be the biggest leap forward in blockchain technology since Ethereum, and it may be a platform that actually has the required components to result in mass adoption of the blockchain in mainstream enterprise. There are still huge risks on how it plays out, if the team can deliver, and if the feature set EOS provides will make it most accessible and cost effective to build out on the blockchain — however, it is no small undertaking to create such a system and it may face significant push back from those who deeply embrace the decentralized ideology of tradition blockchain ledgers. Personally, I’m bullish given the team’s track record, and based on the rapid growth EOS’ token has seen on exchanges I’m not the only one. EOS began trading at $0.68 against the USD and is currently sitting at about $3.5 giving the currently circulating currency a market cap of $560,000,000 USD. Disclaimer: Nothing in this post should be considered financial or investing advice, nor a solicitation of any asset, currency or service listed above. ICOs and cryptocurrencies may represent regulated offerings in your jurisdiction and you should consult with an attorney familiar with your local laws.

A Primer on EOS, Ethereum’s newest competitor — and why it grew 3.2x overnight

Note: 4 Weeks to Launch is an ongoing series about building passive income across multiple startups — a new startup every 4 weeks. Read the first post on 4 Weeks to Launch to get started. Overnight success is awesome, right? Wake up in the morning to see thousands of dollars in your bank account? Ok, that’s enough daydreaming. Back to reality. We all have a vision of successful people. They are superhumans. Titans. Unlimited willpower, perfect problem-solving abilities, and the ability to work tirelessly. In truth successful people aren’t as as imagined. They’re a combination of systems, testing for quick results, and having the right team. super #1 Build systems, not willpower I’ve been struggling with blog posts because I’ve been trying to brute force my way into writing. Every Monday I begin by bashing my head against my keyboard for hours until I have a blog post. It hasn’t become easier. That’s because willpower is really tough to “tap into”. It’s a finite resource, and is only useful in spurts. If it was limitless, then sure, we could solve all problems by force but willpower is not on willcall. That’s where systems come in. Systems (and habits) are far more effective than willpower. Once a habit is in motion the amount of effort needed to sustain is reduced. It’s like going to the gym–going every week is more important than going for 5 hours once a month. To help with my blogging I’ve built a writing schedule to work on blog posts throughout the week instead of just one day. I also made a to help with getting started. blog post template document Simple systems like this may seem small but have power when put together. Don’t wait a “moment of inspiration” to get started. This isn’t sustainable and you will fizzle out. Instead, focus on your average speed. Pick a pace that is comfortable, and do it every single day. James Clear has a post about someone writing using this technique. 3 books in 9 months Get scrappy–big results, small effort I’ve also had trouble with gaining traction with in Week 2. Now that the product is finished (fun part), I need users (unfun part). And since I don’t enjoy , I’ve stalled. JFDI.ninja marketing A nice side effect of 4 Weeks to Launch is exposing my weaknesses to the world. Marketing is one of those weaknesses. I was supposed to focus on marketing this week and didn’t. How do I fix this? Focus on the right mindset. Don’t sulk and complain, but come up with solutions. Ask yourself, “If I knew nothing about X but I had to have results in 24 hours, what would I do?” This is a powerful question. As an open ended question, there are no wrong answers so you start focusing on solutions not blockers. My list of scrappy hacks to get users: Post on forums Post in comment sections on blogs Reach out to bloggers Get on indiehackers.com Post on Reddit DM friends Ask for people to share/refer Tell more people about it Redefine how to make it shareable and pitchable. It’s hard to describe Pitch to press Email people daily asking, “what’s 1 thing you’ve been putting off?” Adwords/fb Producthunt Add social proof to website Hand out fliers that say, “Get free time @ http://JFDI.ninja” Voila! Readymade marketing strategy. I pared the list down to actionable tasks: Find forums/blogs about productivity and post, offering my service Reach out to bloggers about productivity and see if they will endorse my site DM friends on social media and ask them to use JFDI.ninja or ask if they can refer busy friends Add customer testimonials on the website Post on Reddit This week I’ll try as many different tactics as I can and see what sticks. Seek professional free help Most of us try to do everything on our own. Who wants to ask for help? I’ve many had friends and strangers offer to help with 4 Weeks to Launch, but have been stubborn. But why not ask for help? Seriously, why not? You can’t build greatness on your own, so find others who are excited about what you’re doing. I’m starting to get people involved with 4 Weeks to Launch. The more I get others involved the more 4 Weeks to Launch will succeed. Metrics & goals See Metrics for JFDI.ninja See Metrics for 4 Weeks to Launch Week 2 Revenue: $8 This week’s plan/goals Focus: Get Users ( ) weekly goals link Revenue Goal: $50 or 25 orders by next post This week has been a big learning experience. Hitting the marketing wall forced me to work on solving the problem, even if the solution will take time. Marketing is a huge part of building a company and without users there is no business! What are you pissed at yourself for? What long term goal do you have but you can’t quite seem stick to? Let me know in a comment and hold yourself accountable! if you want to these weekly updates in your inbox. Promise, no spam, only posts. Sign up for mailing list

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