I'm not thinking about what went wrong last night, all that was lost. It's the tech business. Things go wrong. Yuga has said they'll refund gas and I believe them.
Instead, I'm making a gratitude list. I'm thinking about how exciting all this is. Thinking about the opportunities ahead, connecting some dots.
What last night showed me is that we've graduated, albeit abruptly, to the trillions dollar tech business - emphasis business. If you're an entrepreneur I think that means operating as a tech company. Which means having engineering talent as part of your team.
We can keeping calling them projects, but that's not how I look at them now. I think of them as tech startups. Successful tech startups have highly skilled software engineeers as part of their team, everyone has skin in the game.
Wen I was working as a waiter circa '88, figuring out how I could start a tech company someone told me something I never forgot - "outsource everything except your core competency". That said to me "spin, you gotta learn how to code".
So I did. I picked up the book in the featured image. I've held it dearly since.
Programming came relatively easy to me. Probably, because I was so in love with the adventure I was on.
What didn't come easily, such as pointers, I got help with. For example my bestie friend pictured here who invented PC based audio conferencing has helped me so many times. I love you brother, gracias. Oh. He'd be pissed if I didn't mention he graduated from M.I.T.
So I understood that I needed to own my code. I wrote all of our code up until 16 years ago wen young brother Ammo joined me. Ammo is part of me, he's familia.
Ammo isn't just a coder. He's a genius. He understands front end and back end equally well. He can connect to anything. He's dev extraordinaire, nonpareil. He's been with me so long, he understands the business as well as I do. Without him, well, I don't want to think about that. I'm so grateful I found him and he found me.
We've seen what happens wen projects outsource their tech or don't have tech in house - epic fail. I mean no disrespect to this project. They lost $34m of ETH, it had to have hurt like hell. I feel for them. But IMO minting a multi-million dollar project without testing, testing, testing, without doing Quality Assurance, or relying on outside dev for expertise amounts to professional malpractice.
Last night the Otherside mint was rough, poorly executed. Yuga Labs is now valued at $4 billion. Do they have a Chief Technology Officer on their team who's led the development at multi-million dollar tech corporations? If not, IMO they're guilty of professional malpractice as well.
I think the aforementioned mints also mark the next phase of NFT tech, similar to wen we went from static web pages to interactive websites in the early 90's. NFTs that don't do anything or that can't be used for anything are over. For example this interview with Tim Sweeney caught my attention and this quote in particular:
"I firmly believe there’s going to be a multi-trillion dollar economy around digital goods in the future. But I think so much of the crypto currency effort, especially touching the gaming space, doesn’t address that problem of utility. They’re showing you digital goods you can’t do anything with except to say that you own it. You can cryptographically prove that you own it, but who cares?"
Dynamic NFTs are now the MVP - minimum viable product. This too echoes what Mr. Sweeney said - if your NFT doesn't do anything, who cares?
So if I'm an entrepreneur in this crazy but loveable space we're in, I work backwards from the understanding that I'm a tech company. I'm in search of people who're great at C++ or C#. Because all these years later, the C Programming Language still stands above the rest.
Finding them is just the start. I want them to stay, so they'll understand the business we're in at least as well as I do. Giving them skin in the game is a given. Most don't want to work with people they don't enjoy being around, no matter how lucrative it is. So I'm also wanting to make sure they understand who I am, what I'm about. They need to know me, so they can be sure they're making the right choice too.
Here's to hoping projects now start to operate as tech startups. They form teams equally strong in creative and tech. They understand how important the right chemistry is, think of each other as family. Most important, they're in love with their work.
Because as Freewheelin' Frankin says,
“Dope will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no dope.”
