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I'm two weeks into readings from @phil's Silicon Valley Canon book course. It's great. Here are some select takeaways. --- The story of great v0s being built in a couple days is laughably common. - Gmail - "1 day" - Viaweb – "a couple days" - Ebay - "one long weekend" And they were simple too: Paul Graham's viaweb, an e-commerce platform, launched without the ability to process payments. You couldn't process a credit card transaction until 2 years after launch. eBay launched without the ability facilitate payments, it couldn’t even guarantee the buyers paid the sellers, just list and bid. Reviews were in a forum, separate from the bidding experience. https://jtgi.xyz/posts/sv-canon-i/

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Many founders in the dotcom era allowed professional CEOs to come in around IPO time. For example: netscape, yahoo, ebay, google to name a few. That's a big cultural difference given how essential the role of founder CEO is now.

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The Manhattan project was yet another example of how effective it is to get folks of different disciplines in a single space to collaborate when going zero to one. I've found the same repeatedly throughout my career that specialization and silos aren't optimal for innovation.

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Growing up there were AOL free trial discs in random drawers and piles all over my house. I knew it was a common shared experience of that era but I understand why now. There direct mail campaign was insanely successful: 10% of people received the disk, put it in their computer, signed up, and entered their credit card number. This is pre web too where I would have expected many to be cautious with their credit card information.

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“I can buy 2% of you. I can buy all of you. Or I can go into this business myself and bury you”. –Based Bill Gates to Steve Case of America Online Banger quote. Loosely related, a lot of CEOs have these aggressive streaks earlier in their careers. In my brief time at Microsoft, elders spoke of famous "bill reviews" where they'd get absolutely wrecked by a well prepared and sharp Gates. Jeff Lawson had the same reputation at early Twilio and so did Jobs (relatively speaking) but it seems those days are numbered. Maybe they get older and have less energy for conflict, maybe they find better strategies or whatever else but my median corporate experience mostly lacked high conviction, intelligent people willing to speak their mind directly without fear of hurting other's feelings. Instead it optimized more for consensus building, harmony, and not offending people.

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How Netscape making the Web easy to use and rich with images was controversial as it would let the non technical “riff raff” in and degrade discourse. The pattern of early adopters resisting expansion and change is old as time and reminded me much of the crypto space and some of the cultural tendency to cling to overly technical UIs and concepts like networks and bridging. "What got us here won't get us where we need to go."

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"The computer will never be as important to society as the copier.” Said by a Xerox higher up about Xerox PARC's revolutionary personal computer, the Alto. Both funny and bizarre to read now as a millennial. It's quaint to think that a company as large and successful as Xerox could thrive and depend so much on copying physical paper, imagining the quarterly earnings reports discussing the proliferation of business and paper and how Xerox was at the center of it all. The idea that all this would be digitized must have felt so far fetched and idealistic. Technology is unforgiving.

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Jorge Pablo Franetovic 🎩 pfp

Jorge Pablo Franetovic 🎩

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Jorge Pablo Franetovic 🎩 pfp

Jorge Pablo Franetovic 🎩

do you maintain your intention of building outside of farcaster now? who else is a modern day inspiration?

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Business - Elon - Marc Andreesen - Kalanick - Charlie Munger - Friends & Former Coworkers Belief System - Jordan Peterson (apolitical stuff) - Viktor Frankl - Richard Feynman - Naval - Family - Jocko

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And yep, I’d like to work on something non crypto and non social networking. What about you for modern inspiration?

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Jorge Pablo Franetovic 🎩

i have thought about this question since i read it yesterday. for me, it is about the set of practices that some people that i believe had a way that resonates with the way i see myself experiencing life. for example steve jobs. he is one of those persons. and when i was reading his biography, what most captured my attention was his relationship with the process of meditation, and self inquiry. that made me think that more than following "his ideas", what is more helpful is to dissect the process of /where do those ideas come from/. and that brought me to the practice of meditation. and there, my teacher dan schmidt, who created the youtube channel awaken the world, is a huge inspiration. and programming wise, my unofficial mentor was jeff atwood, who i decided to follow because of the impact that stack overflow had in the world. and nowadays, it is the primeagen. incredible wisdom and devotion towards the craft of programming coming from him, and that approach motivates me a lot. he brings joy to me

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ya its a good question worthy of much more comment than a short list. a lot of one off experiences end up forming a lot of my belief system and inspiration in practice.

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