Month: March 2021

Categories
Startups

What it does, not what it is

There’s much to like about this post by entrepreneur David Sacks. Titled ‘Your startup is a movement’, draws comparisons between successful startups and successful political campaigns – having been written around the time of the 2020 USA presidential election campaign.

One section that’s stayed with me, though, is articulating the problem. This part hit home:

Many founders are like bad politicians — they are “policy wonks.” They just want to talk about their features. I’ve got news for you: Nobody cares about your features. At least not yet. First people need to understand the problem you’re solving. Then they need to understand your solution. Only then will they be interested in your features. 

I’ve been guilty of this more often than not – and not always in the context of startups. Because I’ve understood the problem landscape, I think that merely describing a solution will make its merits and demerits self-evident to someone who’s given this a lot less mindspace – which is all my prospective customers.

Finally, my rational mind rebels against this even as my common sense knows this to be true:

As marketing guru Christopher Lochhead has pointed out, if you speak more articulately about the problem than anyone else, people will assume you have the solution. 

(Featured Image Photo Credit: Daniel Frank/Unsplash)

Categories
Real-World Crypto RG.org Writing

Crypto dot rahulgaitonde dot org

The Whatsapp group I started on bitcoin, cryptocurrency and decentralised finance now has over 200 subscribers across 14 countries.

Now, all of the past posts from the group are now available at Crypto.RahulGaitonde.Org. I will continue to add new posts here as they are published on the Whatsapp group.

Unlike the group, I have left comments open here – if there are ever discussions on posts, WordPress has moderation tools; Whatsapp does not.

Categories
Investing Personal Finance Real-World Crypto

How India could regulate crypto investments – Part 2

In Part 1, we discussed three ways in which the Indian government could apply existing regulation to cryptocurrencies instead of simply banning them outright:

One, cap the amount that people can invest in cryptocurrency. Two, set a high minimum to invest in cryptocurrency to place it out of reach of new, vulnerable investors. Three, limit access to only accredited investors who have a certain minimum income or net worth.

Each of these three are discriminatory in some way. One caps the amount of upside. The second and third limit investment and potential upside to those who already hold significant capital. Far from democratising access, each of them perpetuates the gap in investment opportunities.

I’d rather that investing in crypto, and alternative assets in general, require taking a test. After all, the question is whether or not the investor understands the investment and its risks well enough to make an investment decision.

This is not unlike a drivers’ license, which requires you to take a test to prove you can be responsible for not just your own safety (as is the case with investments) but that of others too.

Drivers’ license tests also show that India is capable of administering tests at scale, nationwide, throughout the year.

You don’t need to rely on the transport police infrastructure, though. The capital markets regulator’s National Institute of Securities Markets, or NISM, administers a range of tests for mutual fund distributors, PMS distributors, investment advisors, registrars, valuers, among others at centers nationwide in a number of languages. The government could require the capital markets regulator to expand this infrastructure to prospective investors too. The marginal costs are a lot lower than setting one up from scratch.

Education democratises access to opportunities. Capital requirements restrict it. To me it’s clear which path the government should take.

(ends)

(Featured Image Photo Credit: maxime niyomwungeri/Unsplash)

Categories
Investing Personal Finance Real-World Crypto

How India could regulate crypto investments – Part 1

The government in India is expected to table a bill that, among other things, bans “private cryptocurrency”, making it “one of the world’s strictest policies against cryptocurrencies“.

One of the companies I advise, a tech-enabled wealth management service, has offered alternative assets for a few years now. Those include securitised debt, digital gold, P2P lending, settlement financing, portfolio management services, among others. I’ve gotten to see how they have been regulated – or not.

And I wonder if India’s government, central bank and capital markets regulator could apply some variation of these existing regulations to cryptocurrency, especially when held or traded as an asset.

The government could cap the amount of Indian rupees invested in cryptocurrency across all crypto exchanges. This is like P2P lending, which was initially capped at INR ten lakh, and expanded to INR fifty lakh subject to a few net worth criteria. The RBI controls the toll gates to crypto – the on ramps to transfer money from a bank account to a crypto exchange to buy crypto. That makes it possible to enforce these limits.

The government could set a minimum amount to hold in cryptocurrency. That puts it out of reach of the most vulnerable small investors who the government ostensibly wants to protect. This is like portfolio management services, whose investment minimum was recently doubled from INR 25 lakh to INR 50 lakh.

It could restrict investment in cryptocurrency to accredited investors, a qualification that’s well known in the USA but which the capital markets regulator has only just proposed. So instead of investment minimums or caps, the investor needs to have a certain minimum net worth or annual income. As of this writing, the qualifications are so strict, only a few tens of thousands or very low hundreds of thousands will quality.

(Part 2 – while each of these three are workable, I describe what I’d rather do)

(Featured Image Photo Credit: naraa .in.ub/Unsplash)

Categories
Data Custody Investing Products and Design Real-World Crypto

Virtual real estate NFTs

(Also posted earlier this week on my crypto/DeFi Whatsapp channel).

We have discussed NFTs or non-fungible tokens before, mostly in the form of digital art and collectibles. Not only do some of them sell for millions of dollars, they can also be re-sold on secondary marketplaces for gains.

The Wall Street Journal reported on Monday that we’re now seeing pieces of virtual land inside games being sold as NFTs.

In some games, players can buy digital deeds for real estate in the form of an NFT, which proves the authenticity of a certain plot in a specific game.

The real estate will appreciate as more players join the game and scarce land is sold to other players who require the plots for certain tasks and missions.

It’s not just buy-and-hold. Those ‘assets’ are being put to ‘productive use’:

Players can then rent out their land to other gamers, charge others for using it or even sell it—either within the game or on a third-party exchange such as OpenSea.

that real estate, too, can be sold for large sums:

A group of people last month paid $1.6 million for Citadel of the Stars, a large kingdom in the unreleased fantasy role-playing game Mirandus

virtual world The Sandbox sold about $2.8 million worth of land in a pair of well-received sales that now have the company valuing its digital properties at about $37 million.

The sale of properties in games that are not even released reminds me of Bollywood/other Indian movies, which start making money through sale of music weeks before the movie’s release.

that real estate, too, can be sold for large sums:

A group of people last month paid $1.6 million for Citadel of the Stars, a large kingdom in the unreleased fantasy role-playing game Mirandus

virtual world The Sandbox sold about $2.8 million worth of land in a pair of well-received sales that now have the company valuing its digital properties at about $37 million.

The sale of properties in games that are not even released reminds me of Bollywood/other Indian movies, which start making money through sale of music weeks before the movie’s release.

We’ve heard news for years from governments who have wanted to tokenise parcels of land, even apartments. The current Indian government’s think tank also recognises real estate as a major area for the adoption of blockchain (Blockchain: the India Strategy, January 2020).

Innovation in virtual worlds made from scratch will always be faster because they have fewer messy problems. That said, there’s a lot for governments to learn from them about distribution and market mechanisms – if they choose to. For instance, governments could require new real estate projects to list on their real estate blockchain, just like the unreleased games that sold plots of ‘land’ as NFTs.

The smart contract could abstract the chain of ownership from the actual chain of transactions on the blockchain. That is, as the government understands the ownership history of the plot of land on which the new project is being built, the on-chain record history can grow ‘backwards’.

At the same time, the chain of ownership of that plot could also grow ‘forward’ as it is sold repeatedly.

Both the backwards and forwards additions to ownership are immutably recorded on the real estate blockchain. The abstraction means you don’t need to wait for the definitive ownership history of each plot of land to be determined before you list them on-chain.

Categories
Product Management Products and Design Startups The Dark Forest of the Internet Wellness when Always-On

Failure to empathise

On a new feature in Slack via which anyone on Slack can message any other Slack user, across companies:

When Slack introduced the feature today, it hadn’t implemented any features that can help someone who gets harassed. There is no block button or built in mechanism to report the message to Slack or your company’s Slack administrator.

https://twitter.com/44/status/1374737695444901891

Slack reacted:

… “we received valuable feedback from our users about how email invitations to use the feature could potentially be used to send abusive or harassing messages. We are taking immediate steps to prevent this kind of abuse”

– Slack Says Letting Anyone Message Anyone With Few Limits Was ‘a Mistake’

This is a failure to empathise, a rather basic failure when designing products. Gmail took off in its early days in large part because it decimated spam. That is a fifteen year old lesson. Twitter’s issues with harassment and spam are an ongoing lesson.

At Slack’s scale, one should expect product managers to consider the potential for harassment. For information overload. For ambiguity. For bias.

If Slack – or any other company – consciously builds and promotes its products to be used by organisations of all sizes, across all industries, globally, they cannot also dismiss or discount these as incovenient or unnecessary.

These considerations will slow down design and development, they will make the product somewhat less agile and they will increase monetary costs.

That’s the price of making a product that widely available.

You expect that with the increase revenue from this scale, you hire the best product, design and engineering talent to build efficiently while also considering everything above.

(ends)

Categories
Privacy and Anonymity Products and Design

Firefox’s assertive privacy intervention

We saw how Firefox implemented measures to block so-called supercookies that misuse how browsers cache images. These caching is to improve performance, but supercookies encode tracking information in images to track people across websites even when cookies themselves are blocked.

It’s a war all right

Today, I learnt that Firefox is taking another, more assertive step to blocking tracking through removing specific parts of the information that sites add to the link when pointing visitors to other websites:

referrer URLs can expose an extensive array of other sensitive info, including but not limited to Internal hostnames for government and enterprise entities that most likely should not be public.

Malicious actors could then pull sensitive info like internal names from their web servers’ access logs or their analytics software if they can trick a target into visiting a site hosted on servers under their control.

– Mozilla Firefox adopts new privacy-enhancing Referrer Policy

Now,

Mozilla has announced that it will introduce a more privacy-focused default Referrer Policy to protect Firefox users’ privacy, starting with the web browser’s next version.

The new user privacy protection feature against accidental leaking of sensitive user data will be introduced in Firefox 87.

With that update, Firefox will apply the new default Referrer Policy to all navigational requests, redirected requests, and subresource (image, style, script) requests, thereby providing a significantly more private browsing experience.

The new Referrer Policy simply drops specific parts of the referrer URL. This sounds simple, but this is the fist time that I’ve seen a browser actually intervene and edit a URL to remove information – not add it.

The Supercookies update was defensive in nature. This is a lot more assertive.

In my view, the time for debating whether a browser should be a neutral application or not is long past. Trackers on the web are widely used and aggressively collect browsing metadata to build visitor profiles. Websites push ads, videos, subscription popups and popunders to the point where they drain your attention. The act of simply browsing the web is an experience akin to harassment and surveillance.

Everyone needs technology that’s on their side, works to protect their privacy and attention. We should start with the web browser. That is what Firefox is doing,

(via Michael Tsai)

Update: I just came across this. The same release also includes “Smart Block”, which

takes an additional step to improve the rendering on pages that embed third-party trackers—instead of just pulling the script and leaving a “hole” where it used to be, Smart Block replaces it with what Mozilla describes as “stand-in” scripts. These stand-in scripts function just enough like the original trackers to restore the intended page-rendering sequence and results without actually leaking data to third parties.

– Firefox 87 is out today, adds Smart Block for improved private browsing
Categories
Real-World Crypto

Not That Fiat

Last week, a friend sent me a link that claimed the car company Fiat would reward buyers of its upcoming 500e electric vehicle with cryptocurrency for every mile they drove.

It sounded strange, so I looked into it. There were many articles in tech and auto publications saying the same thing:

The press release from Fiat’s parent company Stellantis also made a reference to the cryptocurrency, Kiricoin:

The partnership with Kiri enables Stellantis to achieve three world firsts in the automotive industry. First, the ability to collect a cryptocurrency simply by driving; second, giving access to an exclusive marketplace; finally, providing extra rewards for the highest eco:Scores.

Driving data, such as distance and speed, is uploaded to the Kiri cloud and automatically converted into KiriCoins, using an algorithm devised by Kiri. The result is downloaded directly to the user’s smartphone and the KiriCoins can then be used to purchase products and services in the Kiri marketplace.”

– Stellantis press release

That sounds highly limiting.

Now I couldn’t find Kiricoin on any major crypto exchange.

Nor could I find any reference to it being listed anywhere. So I read through Kiricoin’s own website:

It turns out that Kiri itself doesn’t make any reference to itself as a cryptocurrency.

It’s a simple, light website that describes a private currency for ‘ green merchants’ to provide ‘exclusive offers’ to the ‘Kiri community’ – in other words, a private currency closed wallet.

Kiri is being honest here.

It’s amusing, if a little disappointing to see how every reporter on single news article about Fiat and the 500e simply parroted the ‘cryptocurrency’ angle without actually verifying it.

Or questioned why a cryptocurrency’s even needed for something so centralised.

The next decade will be fun as we see more brands riding on the crypto wave in name only.

Categories
Audience as Capital Discovery and Curation Life Design Making Money Online Wellness when Always-On

When you pay attention to one thing, you ignore something else

A wonderful longform article by the New York Times writer Charlie Warzel about the perils of the attention economy. The article itself is centered on his conversation with the writer Michael Goldhaber, who predicted this over thirty years ago, before even the infancy of the web.

The need to reclaim our attention is a topic dear to me, and naturally so was this article.

It’s hard to quote one or two essential sentences by Goldhaber, so I’ve had to go beyond in order to do him justice. I think it’s worth your attention to read on:

Understanding attention scarcity

He was obsessed at the time [in the 1980s] with what he felt was an information glut — that there was simply more access to news, opinion and forms of entertainment than one could handle. His epiphany was this: One of the most finite resources in the world is human attention.

This is a zero-sum proposition, he realized. When you pay attention to one thing, you ignore something else.

Understanding attention hijacking

“When you have attention, you have power, and some people will try and succeed in getting huge amounts of attention, and they would not use it in equal or positive ways.”

[In 1997] He outlined the demands of living in an attention economy, describing an ennui that didn’t yet exist but now feels familiar to anyone who makes a living online. “The Net also ups the ante, increasing the relentless pressure to get some fraction of this limited resource,” he wrote. “At the same time, it generates ever greater demands on each of us to pay what scarce attention we can to others.”

“Our abilities to pay attention are limited. Not so our abilities to receive it,” he wrote in the journal First Monday. “The value of true modesty or humility is hard to sustain in an attention economy.”

Politics and Attention

Most obviously, he saw Mr. Trump — and the tweets, rallies and cable news dominance that defined his presidency — as a near-perfect product of an attention economy, a truth that disturbed him greatly…

Living in a rural area, he suggested, means being farther from cultural centers and may result in feeling alienated by the attention that cities generate in the news and in pop culture. He said that almost by accident, Mr. Trump tapped into this frustration by at least pretending to pay attention to them.

he was deeply concerned about whether the attention economy and a healthy democracy can coexist. Nuanced policy discussions, he said, will almost certainly get simplified into “meaningless slogans” in order to travel farther online,

“We struggle to attune ourselves to groups of people who feel they’re not getting the attention they deserve, and we ought to get better at sensing that feeling earlier,” he said. “Because it’s a powerful, dangerous feeling.”

Categories
Life Design Product Management Startups

Authenticity

Mundane as it sounds, that’s the most powerful motivator of all, not just in startups, but in most ambitious undertakings: to be genuinely interested in what you’re building. This is what really drives billionaires, or at least the ones who become billionaires from starting companies. The company is their project.

One thing few people realize about billionaires is that all of them could have stopped sooner. They could have gotten acquired, or found someone else to run the company. Many founders do. The ones who become really rich are the ones who keep working. And what makes them keep working is not just money. What keeps them working is the same thing that keeps anyone else working when they could stop if they wanted to: that there’s nothing else they’d rather do.

That, not exploiting people, is the defining quality of people who become billionaires from starting companies. So that’s what YC looks for in founders: authenticity. 

– Paul Graham, “Billionaires Build”

This is actually harder than it sounds. Authenticity is rare. If we could assume that everyone we met was authentic, navigating personal, professional and other spheres would be a lot less stressful for most of us.

But it is also because authenticity is so rare that it is such a powerful signalling mechanism with go-to-market, customer engagement, and especially hiring. I have seen each of these first-hand.