This week at a kickoff, there was a post-it asking: "Actually, what are blockchains useful for?" I haven't been to ETHcc, but judging from afar, we're getting a fair amount of discussion about where the users and the promised applications are. Honestly, we’re kind of stuck discussing theoretical white papers about near-future kitchen gadgets in a restaurant without customers, without an idea of what to even eat. We’re all about breaking the system “in theory.”
I love how the space is evolving. As a designer, I’ve faced many frustrations and over the years we are getting workarounds: account abstraction, intents, reputation computation, cheaper transaction costs, domain name services, social primitives like messaging standards and social graphs, bots and agents for automation—all massive improvements from when I entered this space. But sometimes I feel each of us is locked into thinking about on-chain issues as single-issue experts. We are a decentralized collective of terminally online subject experts in dire need of a more generalist perspective.
Spread Sheet Maximalists
If we’re brutally honest, I sometimes feel our debate is stuck on whether Google Sheets or Excel is superior, without asking what we should use them for.
I went down the spreadsheet memory lane. One of my theses is that whenever in human history we developed new marketplaces—be it a bazaar, a souk, or a street food cart on the corner—culture formed and evolved around them. Spreadsheets, even the analog ones on paper, made markets more efficient and therefore amplified culture. Culture is what we crave and build for.
Starting with VisiCalc, one of the first digital spreadsheets, we saw a demonstration of what personal computing could be used for and a fundamental mindset shift in how data and finances could be handled with a computer.
Lotus 1-2-3, introduced later, had a more user-friendly interface, making it accessible to a wider audience and setting early standards and expectations for functions.
Microsoft then leveraged accessibility by adding more graphical cues because visuals are intuitive and appealing. Thus, it’s no surprise spreadsheets run the world.
Google added the missing link: collaboration. Despite being social animals, spreadsheets were lonely experiences. The power of collaboration, version history, and synchronization profoundly shifted our ways of working.
Today, more than ever, spreadsheets run the world. You can run entire businesses through a real-time, multiplayer graphical interface from almost any device, anywhere.
The history of spreadsheets is a history of deliberate design choices to improve accessibility. Accessibility is inclusive design, lowering the bar to entry and allowing for more participation. But beyond that, accessibility breeds creativity.
Thoughtless Hacks
One of my favorite design books is Jane Fulton Suri’s "Thoughtless Acts?" It explores how we use things differently than intended, often without thinking about it. Chairs weren’t designed to be clothes racks, but we all have a chair like that at home. People use spreadsheets for the wildest things. Some design games, some design businesses, some made real fucked up weird things inside of it. We hack the tools around us to meet our current needs because of the low accessibility bar it just works.
Throughout my career, I’ve been obsessed with tools—building tools. That’s why I got stuck for a moment in our obsession with infrastructure, thinking a good workshop needs the right plumbing instead of just starting to using the workshop first.
The last two years as a designer have been transformative. Generative AI has completely changed my approach to design. Sometimes, it’s for the worse—improved productivity not always translates to more reflection and exploration. But it’s also changed how I build prototypes. One transformative tool for me was Replit, an online integrated development environment. Not needing to set up localhost was a game-changer. With Ghostwriter, their AI copilot, I went from a pixel pusher to a beginner design engineer. A little accessibility bred a lot of creativity. I have suddenly built a lot of simple dumb things for me, often just out of pure joy.
Why write this on a web3 platform? I’ve been in this industry far too long but never wrote a single smart contract. It was daunting—the idea I could mess up or not understanding the syntax.
Supreme Spreadsheets with Extra Septs
But overall onchain is just our fancy way of saying, "Why aren’t you using our open, almost real-time, immutable multiplayer spreadsheet for your business needs?" But hey it’s built on a stack gatekept by complexity, that makes you slow to launch, evolve, pivot, and explore what could be built so its only accessible for the 10x engineers.
Lotus 1-2-3, Microsoft Excel, Google Spreadsheets succeeded through accessibility by design. We’ve lowered the bar to come on-chain but haven’t made it easy to use.
We need new tools to build on top of it. I hated Canva at first because others on the team could do my job. But it freed me to do more needed and fun design work—surprise Pikachu face.
As we discuss the need for new applications, we must remember that thoughtless hacks and playful exploration often lead to new verticals. I don’t want to need to learn about chain abstractions or intents; I want to create outcomes. I don’t want to take a masterclass to explore a napkin idea. As long as our environment is built around complexity, we can’t test ideas with simplicity.
As we talk about building, we need to invest in accessible ways to build. I want to build prototypes and products, not get stuck reading white papers in the morning.
The primitives and provocations of an immutable, always-online, multiplayer open spreadsheet ready for business are here; the ways to build are not. We need to build for builders, nurture new ones, celebrate new approaches, and obsess less over which spreadsheet is better, faster, or more secure. For hacking a prototype that opens up our collective imagination, it simply doesn’t matter.
I want tools to make reals things so easy I can pivot fast.
