CSX: Week 2 Notes

Here are my notes from Week 2 of a16z Crypto's CSX. This week, which focused on infrastructure, included an infra expo and multiple talks from top infra founders.

Talk: Mo Shaikh (Aptos)

Why crypto?
- Financial freedom for all is important because of childhood.
- Grew up as an Immigrant with hard-working parents, first in Abu Dhabi and then in Brighton Beach, NYC.
Founder journey
- Learned to hustle selling iPods to NBA players
- Learned financial system from RBC → Blackrock
- Learned frameworks for thinking about GTM from consulting
- Joined Consensys to help scale Ethereum, and then to Facebook to found Novi.
Spinning Novi out of Facebook
- Why another L1? The existing systems were not designed to scale—3.5 years of pursuing ... didn’t see anything evolve.
- Spinouts are rare because either because part of a product line or the internal knives kill it.
- Brought a lot of Novi team despite being hard to convince “we like it at FB”
- The mindset of “just figure out how to continue on this mission” allowed Mo to recruit a talented founding team.
GTM
- Aptos works with two worlds
- Innovators
  - Startups = disrupt existing business
  - Disrupt existing systems so there is more efficiency
- Old guard
  - Large companies = not going anywhere
  - Pros: Still retain massive distribution
  - Cons: Large companies on a timeline, Partner risk is very real
  - Example: Google earns APT tokens by running a validator
Web3 is the hardest place to be an entrepreneur
- The market is “neck-whipping” fast
- You get to “be really close to the customer”
- Everything is open (Twitter, Discord, Telegram)
- You get market feedback immediately, faster than anywhere else. You can get feedback without having a product.
Dealing with haters
- If not 7 new haters a week, not doing our job
- Always a major move forward in the wake of hatred
- Respond with marketing jujutsu
  - Use the moment
  - Embrace the discussion
  - Pre-plan attack vectors — “If you had to talk shit, what would you say?”
Positioning Web2 vs. Web3
- Can startups go after both? “double down on web3 but operate with web2 principles.”
- Why?
  - Faster adopt
  - Higher velocity
  - Variety of use-cases
  - If you had tried to partner with Blackrock seven years ago, you would have gone out of business. Eventually, Blackrock will come around.
Competition
- A crowded market in web3 doesn't matter
  - There are barely 1m users. 5B users are not using your product.
- Flex your advantage
  - Google: “Search completed in x seconds” = reminding you that its the best tech
- What Mo respects about other chains
  - Community building
  - Founder-led personality
Status of web3 today
- Crypto’s PMF today is obvious — just go on Twitter and see what people are doing.
- What’s going to onboard the next 1B?
  - NFTs? Don’t see it yet.
  - Stablecoin for moving money? Would move (money) faster than anything.
  - Aptos thinks: finance → game → media
Book recommendations
- Hard think about hard things by Ben Horotiz
- Scaling People by Claire Hughes Johnson
Where to find Mo?
- Twitter
- Aptos Labs

Talk: Jinglan Wanga and Karl Floersch (Optimsim)

Founding Optimism
- Dropped out of college to become a Bitcoiner
- Attracted to Ethereum
  - Humans trying to build something together
  - Vitalik on why unicorn shirts “keep out a particular type of toxicity “
- Karl’s project “Jing write the book, and Hayden go build Uniswap”
- Fighting for Karl: work on this thing with signs of PMF, or take a risk and change the internet
- Optimistic Ethereum was the original name
- “Ethereum is not a particular thing — You are ethereum” - Karl
Moving on from Plasma
- Why move on?
  - No one was using it.
  - Shocked because had thousands of likes on social.
- Discovered user interviews
  - Users cared about cost and latency
- What's an MVP?
  - “The skateboard pic” - It’s iterative
  - "What is the skateboard, though?" - Where debate occurs
  - What does it mean to do things that don’t scale?
- Taking a step back
  - What is the common objective we’re trying to achieve?
  - For all these objectives, what are we trying to achieve?
Seeking out advice
- Jing is “a Jedi Master at seeking out networks and getting advice” - Jason
- How? Ask a lot of questions. Over time, develop a sense of who’s high vs. low signal and on what topics
Teamwork/building
- Communication can be a challenge - opinion and language can be different on things like volume, scope, and timelines
- Invest in each other and how you communicate
  - cofounder coaching
  - business coaching
- Everyone should be in a high-leverage role.
- Be generous with comp
  - If not, they shouldn't be on the team.
  - Why have the stress of trying to balance equity?
Pushing without discomfort
- If something doesn’t make sense, push on it.
- Know that pushing creates discomfort.
- How to overcome:
  - Learn how to push without creating discomfort
  - Have the conviction to endure other people's discomfort
Making tough decisions
- The worst part is the “anxiety of uncertainty” … “I try to avoid that” - Karl
- How to overcome?
  - Write it down and/or go for a walk
  - Make the tough decision
  - Save energy and live a “life without conflict”
Vibes
- How does Optimism have such a great community?
  - “We genuinely give a fuck” - Jing
- What are vibes?
  - People are having fun.
  - “Life is meaningless, we’re mostly water, life should be fun” - Jing
  - Vibes are the outcome of a bunch of early decisions
Decentralization
- Protocol:
  - Build modularly so we can punt
- Governance:
  - “This Governance Will Self Destruct.”
  - We hadnt seen teams build it right, we knew we would get it wrong on the first try.
- Decentralization should serve a purpose.
Superchain
- Ethereum + L2s vs. World of L1s
  - There are definitely network effects around standards - Karl
- “Interoperability is cool”
  - Chains are different threads
  - Horizontal scalability
  - Now, getting into the nitty-gritty of the Superchain vision!
- The Superchain SDK
  - MVP = non-protocol
  - Future = protocol-level message-passing
Shipping
- We didn’t ship anything to production for 1 year, then 6 months, and now 1x month.
- "Shipping sub-optimal on a regular basis beats not shipping for a year" 👏
Waive magic wand and fix anything?
1. Scale Ethereum - Optimism already working on that 🙂
2. User onboarding - You should not know you’re using crypto. We have to replicate Web2 if there's any chance of surpassing it.
3. “Wish more people knew about jobs.optimism.io” - Jing
Where to find Jing and Karl?
- Jing: Twitter / Farcaster
- Karl: Twitter / Farcaster

Links that came up

Bountycaster
- Bountycaster is a tool for creating bounties and services on Farcasers. I recommended it several times for recruiting and feedback.
- How to run a good Bountycaster? My flow:
  - Get inspiration from completed bounties
  - Use the Create a Post tool on Bountycaster
  - Cast to the channel that makes the most sense for your use case (i.e. jobs)
Once Upon
- OnceUpon is the best block explorer for the Superchain. I recommended to a couple of founders for user research.
Splits
- Splits are the easiest way to build payment splitting into your product. I think of it as marketplace rake as a service. The Splits team is working on several new things I’m excited about.
- Here’s a Splits protocol chart after the Titles (by Soren + Parker) launch.
  https://dune.com/splits/ecosystem
Screen Studio
- A couple of founders asked about our GIF game. Screen Studio is the best tool I’ve found for creating simple product videos and gifs. H/t Jonny Mack for the rec.
TYB
- TYB is crushing with adopting non-cryptonative brands and consumers.
- Emmanuel reminded me their mobile app has a great onboarding experience: “Crypto is in the background”
Crowdmuse + IYK
- Crowdmuse and IYK came up a couple of times for doing cool things and having a great user experience.