Week in Clubhouse – 1.29.21
Twitter suspension, Naval + Coinbase co-founders on crypto, the CEO of Figma, the future of fintech, and the CEO of Reddit on WSB
Editor’s Note
As you may have noticed, Twitter suspended our account this week and reduced our followers to 0.
There was no reason or email update provided as to why we had been suspended. For three days straight we emailed Twitter support asking why we were suspended given that we hadn’t violated their Rules or ToS from what we could tell. Today we finally received access back to our account.
We put a ton of effort into capturing the amazing conversations and learnings happening on Clubhouse for you all every day and this suspension was shocking. The fact that a party can arbitrarily take your hard work away (sometimes by mistake as it seems to be the case with us) is immensely frustrating. In light of recent events, the need to own your own content and audience through decentralized means is more obvious than ever before. While we’ll have to do with Twitter for now, we’ll leave you with this quote from Naval of a future we hope to see one day soon:
Okay, back to our regularly scheduled programming.
In this week’s edition, we’ll include summaries and highlights from:
Virtual Dinner Party on crypto hosted by Felicia Horowitz ft Naval Ravikant, Brian Armstrong, Fred Ehrsam, Chris Dixon, Katie Haun and Kevin Chou
Good Time hosted by Sriram Krishnan and Aarthi Ramamurthy featuring Dylan Field, the CEO of Figma
Future of Fintech featuring Patrick Mrozowski (CEO of Point.app), Zach Bruhnke (CEO of HMBradley), Shamir Karkal (Co-founder of Simple), Immad Akhund (CEO of Mercury) and more
[Full transcript] of Good Time hosted by Sriram Krishnan and Aarthi Ramamurthy featuring Steve Huffman (CEO of Reddit).
Virtual Dinner Party on crypto
Highlights:
Fred Ehrsam: Most people don't get to encounter a new type of money in their lifetime. Buying and holding Bitcoin is probably enough for most people. But there’s also an entire frontier of innovation happening in DeFi – it’s the future financial system being built on top of crypto.
Naval Ravikant: Bitcoin is better than gold in almost every single way. If BTC were to reach gold's market cap, each coin will be worth $500k. The reason why it's worth less is because the user's capability to hold these funds securely is still not there.
Naval Ravikant: Bitcoin is not just about making money or hedging inflation. We have figured out how to govern networks without human rulers (trustlessly). This means we can solve any human coordination problem from social networks to energy grids.
Terry Crews: I was first convinced when I was at a convention in Milan and I had fees I needed to pay, more than I could withdraw from an ATM. I had a bank wire me funds and showed up with all my paperwork and the bank manager turned me down because I was black. Bitcoin doesn’t know I’m black.
Fred Ehrsam: for people riding the frontier of crypto, people are asking what's the next big thing in crypto? Initially, it was bitcoin, a few years ago it was DeFi, and I think for 2021 it's NFTs which is a fancy way of saying artists and creators selling their work on crypto.
Kevin Chou: The vision behind Rally.io is how do we make crypto unbelievably easy for anyone to get into crypto in a no-code way. Just like how WordPress made it incredibly easy for anyone to make a website, Rally.io will enable anyone to create their own cryptocurrency.
Naval Ravikant: Money is the bubble that never pops. We have all these things trying to be money but once we agree that something is money, it never pops. It's impossible to create that money without the bubble coming along the way.
Naval Ravikant: Bitcoin enables permissionless property. Ethereum enables permissionless programmability. Bitcoin is a crazy idea: because we can't agree on who owns what money, let's each keep a copy of that ledger that we sync, and now we all know who owns what money. Ethereum is the even crazier idea that we can't agree upon which computation was run properly, and you need to run computations to solve hard problems.
Good Time ft Dylan Field (CEO of Figma)
Highlights:
Dylan Field: The “Why now?” for Figma was WebGL. It took us 9 months to figure that out.
Dylan Field: The "contrarian" part about starting Figma was whether the market of interface designers was big enough. The consensus at the time was that Adobe had saturated the entire market. What changed is that design became more important and many more people interested in design.
Dylan Field: Everyone is involved with design today in some way. Eventually having Figma on your resume will be like having Microsoft Word on your resume.
Dylan Field: When electing to work at a Figma hub (instead of being fully remote), the expectation is to come into the office 2 days every week. Importantly, it's the same 2 days at each hub for everybody so there are more opportunities for serendipity.
Dylan Field: As you learn more about financial history and the way hyperinflation can create economic ruin, the idea of a trustless currency becomes appealing. I think Ethereum is super exciting, as well as NFT, which is where Figma and crypto could potentially meet.
Future of Fintech
The first Future of Fintech focused on the path forward for challenger banks, and what building a new payments network might look like. Full coverage here.
Highlights:
Good Time ft Steve Huffman (CEO of Reddit)
Our account was suspended for this so we’ve included our full coverage below:
Steve: WallStreetBets is chaotic, but it also has lots of personality. There's a tradition to posture as an idiot on WSB that actually masks the charming intelligence.
Steve: It's similar to how when you hang out with your friends from college, you sorta revert back to your 18-year old selves.
Steve: It's not about escapism, it's about removing the burden of always appearing polished and smart. The currency in WSB is actually posturing as an idiot, it actually makes the entire community more genuine
Sriram: Same thing in crypto; lots of op-eds about how dumb crypto people are, but many extremely intelligent.
Steve: Communities don't exist without boundaries; if anyone can feel at home, then it's not a community, it's an interesting group. The fact that there's a sub-culture on WSB that requires some friction to join makes being in it more real, e.g. learning the lingo of WSB.
Steve: Hanging out on WSB is one of my guilty pleasures, so I've seen a lot over the years.
Steve: $GME didn't just appear this week, has been recurring for ~a month. I learned about the craziness at the same time as everyone else; because I'm on Reddit all the time, I lose perspective of when something on Reddit crosses over into the mainstream.
Steve: They were taking it personally that while they were buying GameStop, people were telling them it was a bad investment; started to develop a collective sense of ownership of it; then turned into impromptu short squeeze; now escalated into a culture war of Wall Street vs everyone.
Steve: The wildest part is how WSB is now the glue tying most of America together right now.
Steve: "DeepFuckingValue" called this about a year ago.
Steve: Discord took them down, which was a surprise to us since we weren't planning on doing so; we were trying to keep them online during traffic surge (exposed a strain in our infrastructure when one particular post/subreddit becomes a hotspot for traffic vs spread out across the site).
Steve: The mods of WSB took it private; they were starting to hit our rate limits which was getting tripped by genuine traffic; they took it private to catch their breath.
Steve: We've had to take other parts of the site down to give WSB more infrastructure capacity.
Steve: WSB is well within the bounds of our content policy; we are trying to help them as much as we can since we care about Reddit communities
Steve: Centralized moderation is the brute force solution; the saying in computer science is that brute force is the second-best solution to every problem.
Steve: Reddit has 3 tiers of mods: centralized, subreddits, and users. When the centralized mod has to take action (usually to take down an entire community), it's always tough and it means we haven't given enough tools to the subreddit mods.
Steve: r/The_Donald is a "complex" community; they spend a lot of time testing our boundaries, just like Trump himself. Taking down r/The_Donald was difficult because of the political weight around it, but it was the right call
Steve: Internally, we've had a lot of tough conversations around politics. It’s actually been good since it teaches us to disagree respectfully. We don't tolerate attacking someone's credibility or character.
Steve: I tell my team that we intentionally spend a lot of time on tough decisions; the easy decisions take care of themselves. We have to be really careful around how we set precedents.
Steve: There's a benefit to the whole world going haywire; when we're in the eye of a hurricane, it's actually easier to just ignore the world and depend on each other.
Steve: 2020 was lots of difficult conversations, but 2015 was even harder since we didn't have the internal trust that we developed over the past couple of years.
Steve: Because Reddit's been through dark days, everything that could be said about Reddit has already been said, and we've come out of the other side. This gives us confidence in our instincts and thinking.
Steve: Donald Trump really tested us; not just our company, but the entire world.
Steve: I think people look at decentralization as a cop-out that removes responsibility; as a human being I don't like that direction. I prefer decentralization with empowerment.
Steve: Difficult decisions still need to be made, but we won't be relying on a single team in a single city to make all of them.
Steve: My biggest ask is that if you still think of WSB as a bunch of idiots, you should spend more time there and learn about the community.
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Have a great weekend!
I'm working on an adjacent CH-related project which might interest you. Seems like the main challenge here is how to keep up with the firehose of CH-events, many of which aren't easily discoverable.