twenty projects made it to demo day at the Solar Mini Hacker House in Singapore 🇸🇬 over two days, teams built in the room and online, worked with mentors, and sharpened their projects ahead of the @colosseum Crypto World’s Fair submission deadline. built with @Solana_zh @solana @SafePal and @QuickNode. 1/2

do we do priority approval for our special creator passes at 👀 The Payments Night in Mumbai 🇮🇳 the best event in town for founders, creators, agency owners, lawyers and CAs click polaroids, chat with people, eat good food and enjoy the night with some fun activities 🥂

MAYBE I WAS WRONG ABOUT BLOCKCHAIN TECHNOLOGY I wrote about how I always used to make fun of the guys who said things like "Bitcoin is speculative, but the underlying blockchain technology is interesting." And now I think maybe they kinda had a point.

I'd never done marketing before @ThalerFinance. I've been doing it for 4 months now. > ~150 → 760 followers > 158K impressions, with 71K in a single week from our @solanamobile announcement, which @toly quoted > Weekly impressions went from ~2.2K to ~6.4K (~3x) after September > Round 1 filled 148 SOL at a fixed 2 SOL per deposit > Round 2 grew to 178 SOL with a 6 SOL minimum, earning users ~10% What I stopped doing: > Vibe one-liners, because they did nothing > Relying on long weekly write-ups to carry the account > Posting when I didn't have enough detail to tell the story properly What worked: > Short "sound on" videos for launches, recaps and events > Weekly articles for anyone who wants the details > Posting 6–8 times a week instead of once, while we were at @magicblock Founders Camp in Bangkok and building for @colosseum Going quiet cost us almost two months of growth, and I'd make the same call again. Every video was made by @ashuleee_, and he made all of this a lot easier to pull off. Distribution isn't posting more. It's knowing when to stay quiet, and making every post worth stopping for. If you're building and want help with distribution or GTM, my DMs are open. Request access → thaler.finance

In 2021 a handful of us had already built Solflare and Solana Beach, and we took second place at Solana’s global hackathon, out of more than 3,000 people. The next morning my LinkedIn was full of strangers who wanted to invest. I had no idea what to do with that. So I called Filip. We’d worked on things together before, and he was deep in an idea of his own. He looked at what we had, parked his idea, and came to build this one with me. A lot of what Solflare is today has his fingerprints on it: the brand, how we show up for the community, and how we kept going through the FTX winter when plenty of people told us to stop. Now he’s going back to the idea he parked, outside crypto. The most Filip thing he could do. The team who run Solflare day to day have been building it with us for years. The mission is the one we picked back then: one place to trade anything, anytime, built from Belgrade and Zagreb instead of London or New York. Thank you, Filip. Go build it. March 2022, our first ever team building, Dominican Republic, right after we climbed out of the mud buggies. He’s the one smiling.

Founders: Are you on text with your business customers? Met with a startup founder who had just been texting his largest customer (which informed him over text that they were rolling out the product more broadly). Texting with your best accounts is a sign of strong, trusted relationships. In fact, if you're NOT texting, it means that the relationship is not strong enough. Get on text!

"The Man from the Future: The Visionary Life of John Von Neumann" was published almost exactly five years ago! Over 100,000 copies and a dozen translations later, it is still wonderful to receive praise and endorsements like this one, from Stéphane Dalbera, physicist, computer scientist and founder of the trailblazing MoCap & 3D CGI firm Atopos. These words from the introduction feel more pertinent today than when I wrote them eight years ago! "The mathematical contributions von Neumann made in the mid- twentieth century now appear more eerily prescient with every passing year. To fully understand the intellectual currents running through our century – from politics to economics, technology to psychology – one has to understand von Neumann’s life and work in the last. His thinking is so pertinent to the challenges we face today that it is tempting to wonder if he was a time traveller, quietly seeding ideas that he knew would be needed to shape the Earth’s future... ...His views and ideas, taken up by scientists, inventors, intellectuals and politicians, now inform how we think about who we are as a species, our social and economic interactions with each other and the machines that could elevate us to unimaginable heights or destroy us completely. Look around you and you will see Johnny’s fingerprints everywhere."