3 months ago, I tested for low testosterone. My reading for Free T was 105 ng/dl, where a “normal reading” for a guy my age would be in the range of 300-1000 ng/dl. It stood up to repeated testing, and I started replacement therapy about a month later. The decisions I’ve made since then (including dropping out of school) have been riskier, more direct, and more self-assured. Almost every single one has failed in some way, but nonetheless:
I’ve built.
My plan on dropping out was to build a demo for De-rez, a decentralized residency protocol. Leveraging Ethereum for convenience and governance, a community of people could coordinate to connect entrepreneurs with empty rooms so that a good entrepreneur could be funded to live in a tech hub for a while and be mentored. I gave myself a month to build a demo, it took 3 weeks. Keep in mind that I have no web dev experience and recorded said demo in a closet at 1 AM.
It’s not pretty, but it’s a finished prototype. Development is tabled for now.
I’ve written:
I spent my off time writing a 2000-word economics essay arguing that cultural assumptions make valuations worse.
This precocious and freewheeling essay included references to 19th century train architecture, silicon chip cycles, and a Nassim Nicholas Talib book I haven’t read.
After publishing, I sent it to my favorite author, and he told me this:
I trashed the whole thing.
Lesson learned: don’t write magnificent debuts, write things people want to read. Look out for Quant-Fi Redux next month.
I’ve “made money”:
I “earned” 800 dollars in ETH, because Austin Griffith of buidlguidl funded me to buy an ENS name and develop a trial project.
The project I worked on was an on-chain Smart Contract annotation standard. Think “fermat’s library mixed with internet archive but for smart contracts”.
BuidlGuidl were more into open-source funding than supporting entrepreneurship, which meant less mentorship or collaboration than I had hoped for.
Nonetheless, netted 300 bucks and 2 years of owning renesaenz.eth
I’ve changed my mind about Ethereum.
When I decided to drop out in November, it was because I thought I saw something that no one else did.
I thought that in two decades, “smart contract” would be seen in the same light as “brainstorming session”, an incredibly complex and modern coordination task reduced to the mundane of a small and well-compensated elite.
Since no one else “saw” this, I thought that Ethereum would crash within a couple months, as investors would realize that they couldn’t actually imagine a use-case for crypto.
My prediction of a crash came true, but I was wrong about what was actually missing in crypto: Ethereum isn’t failing because people can’t imagine a world running on the blockchain, Ethereum is failing because crypto (unlike legacy institutions) has no working model for supporting experimentation.
Here’s how two innovative minds could conspire to succeed in crypto: they realize something that would be supported by one of many funding tools and organizations, then they build a proposal and get money to build said thing.
This is the “software is eating the world” model of funding ported to (essentially) a highly experimental management/econ research initiative, in the form of blockchains.
Coincidentally, the smartest people in crypto are working in scientific funding models. Worth Considering.
I’ve [etcetera]’d
I modded my nintendo switch. I baked pumpkin cookies with soft-serve ice cream and cactus sprinkles. I improved my breaststroke. I finished the first 7 chapters of fraleigh’s “a first course in abstract algebra”. Read a few chapters from Mitsui and Francis Chichester (both excellent). Watched Stage: A Culinary Internship. Played Hot Wheels.
I also did many top-secret, enterprising, fruitful things. Check back next month.
Expectations:
I will have the bones of a successful direct-to-consumer business by late December. (bones meaning a validated product, website, early adopters, amazon integration, good SEO).
I will win a hackathon within a year, conservatively speaking (1/24/2022).
I will truly prove an important principle within the Ethereum ecosystem within 18 months. This is conservative, but recognition for this is de-facto dependent on market conditions.
I will be at 12% body-fat by the end of the year (currently 15%). Goal is a steady six by 2030.
In six months, I will read fewer books, but very consistently. From there, I will aim to ramp up to reading many consistently.
How I will fail [bonus]
Staying with my parents, I am incentivized to basically do nothing except lower my burn rate and make pasta. If I can’t organically find a group of aligned peers, I will probably experience diminishing returns to experimentation and end up volunteering at a soup kitchen or library. I need a true step change to avoid this fate.
If I were giving myself advice, I’d tell myself to “make my own luck”. See you next month.