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This week was spent IRL at FarCon, where I was not only an attendee and a participant for Base, but also a vendor. Noun, the passion project born out of Prop 450 in NounsDAO, was finally unveiled to the world. Our coffee pop-up, in partnership with Base and powered by Slice and Coinbase Wallet, was a huge success. With ‘all our powers combined’ we were able to do something really fun. Many bottles of Noun espresso were served, and many onchain payments were taken.

Collect NFT

As I watched people line up to get a coffee, paying right from their onchain wallets, I was struck by how surreal it felt. For months, Noun has existed only as an idea, and now it was a reality, being poured from bottles emblazoned with the Noun logo into paper cups that said Base Cafe.

It's funny how powerful it is to see an idea cross the chasm from abstract to concrete. To hold something in your hands that had previously lived only in your head and your heart.

Beyond coffee, my highlight of FarCon was the serendipitous collisions and meandering conversations that only happen when you manage to gather a thoughtful, multidisciplinary group in one place. There's a special alchemy to those moments, a sense of mutual resonance and inspiration that's hard to capture in words but impossible to forget once you've experienced it.

In many ways, FarCon felt like a physical manifestation of the ethos behind the best parts of the onchain ecosystem. The sense of being in community, of building together, of imagining new possibilities. Of having a shared stake, not just in a project, but in the future writ large.

I left feeling immensely grateful to have found a tribe of brilliant, passionate people to build alongside. Grateful for the opportunity to pour my energy into work that feels meaningful and impactful.

If I talked to you in person, thanks for spending a little bit of your limited time with me, and thanks for building something you love ♡

This week, amidst the fun of FarCon, I found my thoughts often drifting back to Luna. Sorry to all those who were stuck in conversation with me as I talked about being a dad!

Her steady evolution from infant into a toddler is moving at warp speed, so that even a short time away makes me realize how much comes and goes with quickness. In just the last few days, Luna started doing a lot of stuff. She’s doing a stomping dance when she gets excited. She's climbing up onto couches and chairs, though she hasn't yet figured out how to climb back down. When I come into her room in the morning, she looks at me and says a bright, insistent "Up!" And curiously, she seems to have tired of our "What does the animal say?" call-and-response game, bored of telling me what sound a sheep makes.

There's no pause button to savor a particularly cute quirk or funny mispronunciation before it disappears, replaced by some new developmental milestone. As soon as I grow accustomed to something she does, it’s gone. It's a cliché that kids grow up fast, but clichés exist for a reason. Part of the ache of parenthood is accepting the impermanence - that you can't freeze time, can't capture and keep all these incredible little stages and phases. The best you can do is be present for as much of it as you can. To really see it, soak it in, commit it to a corner of your memory.

This entry is short, because I’m going to be spending my Sunday with Luna.

Tony Fadell’s Build could have easily been a phoned in (pun intended) memoir, cranking out 200 pages of breezy anecdotes and aphorisms about his time building the iPod, iPhone, and Nest thermostat.

Instead, with a frankness that feels almost subversive, Fadell recounts the agonies of his time at both Apple and Google, mostly revolving around trying to do ambitious things within organizations that resist change. He distills hard-earned lessons about what it takes to lead people and keep pushing forward when plans shift and companies get acquired.

Fadell's unadorned account of the actual, often unglamorous work of invention is bracingly honest. This is not the typical highlight reel from someone who went out on top, but rather the reflections of someone who was repeatedly pushed out and knows it. That lends the book an introspective authenticity often lacking in leadership memoirs.

While many books by prominent tech leaders paint a rosy picture focused only on their biggest wins, Build stands out for Fadell's willingness to explore his lows as well as his highs. The behind-the-scenes accounts of turmoil at Google and Apple have a rare candor, and the inside story of Google's rocky transition to Alphabet is worth the price of admission alone.

More than just a collection of war stories, the book weaves together Fadell's experiences into a practical philosophy for leading people to build new things. He shares frameworks for setting vision, making decisions, dealing with setbacks, and maintaining motivation. Aspiring leaders struggling to drive change in entrenched organizations will find much to reflect on here.

I finished the Dollars trilogy by watching The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. Interestingly, it was by far my least favorite film of the three. A Fistful of Dollars was charming in its scrappiness, a low budget film that was accentuated by the grime of its production quality. A Few Dollars More was that same concept, given more room to breathe and a slightly larger budget. This film, while good, felt like it lost something by growing too large. The plot felt more forgettable, the villain less intimidating, Eastwood’s character less iconic and more fallible.

That being said, the score gave the film an operatic grandeur that perfectly complemented its epic scope, and the Civil War setting provided a fascinating backdrop, lending the characters' personal greed and ruthlessness an even starker moral contrast against the carnage and destruction of the conflict raging around them. The scorched, barren landscapes and crumbling ghost towns served as a stark visual metaphor for the corrosive effects of violence and avarice.

While the film may have lost some of the raw vitality and concision of its predecessors, it still bangs. The deliberate pacing, punctuated by explosive bursts of action, creates an atmosphere of simmering tension that gradually builds to an almost unbearable intensity. It may not be the leanest or meanest of the Dollars films, but it’s unquestionably the most ambitious and operatic.

That’s all for now,

From the present moment,