My guest today is Dan Romero (https://twitter.com/dwr ), CEO and Cofounder of Farcaster (https://twitter.com/farcaster_xyz ), a decentralized social media protocol. Dan was an early employee in 2014 at Coinbase where he lead business development that laid the groundwork for Coinbases fiat rails. He started Farcaster after becoming obsessed with the idea that RSS, the protocol upon which this show and all other podcasts are broadcasted, could be used to compete with twitter. We go deep on how better thinking can result from creating a permissionless protocol that is optimizing feed algorithms for quality of conversation. Also we discuss Dan’s contrarian take on why filter bubbles are actually a good thing. One of the core beliefs for myself and this show is that if we facilitate open and honest discourse it will lead to better decisions and therefore better outcomes for the entire world. After speaking with Dan, I can see how the success of Farcaster could contribute directly to this.
We Discuss:
Read the Bitcoin Whitepaper (https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf ) and you will begin to wonder what could be possible
A journey at Coinbase that started with banks - direct access to payment rails requires the customer of the bank to sell the bank
Taking 1.5 year sabbatical to learn and landing on RSS with now cofounder Varun
What can you do with RSS to make it competitive with Twitter?
Startup vs Scaled Company - selling your product versus selling yourself
The most underrated thing in Silicon Valley - SALES
Taking Paul Graham’s advice on doing things that won’t scale by onboarding the first 400 users himself over zoom then DM to get invite
Stated vs Revealed Preferences as a tactic to build new technology
Twitter’s time algorithm vs Farcaster’s conversation algorithm
Filter Bubbles are OK if done in public
https://www.eugenewei.com/blog/2019/2/19/status-as-a-service
Empowering editorial freedom of choice - nightly news versus newspapers
Chapters
0:00 Dan Romero’s Founding Story
8:17 Startup vs Scaled Companies
16:24 Farcaster 0 to 10,000 to 100,000 Users
27:03 Encouraging High Quality Conversations
40:04 Moderating Extremes
51:52 Subcultures: Choice as an Identity
59:31 Closing Questions
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