justin

Then it’s somewhat intellectually dishonest to single out Burning Man vs any other kind of vacation travel.

He is part of a camp called Playground (alongside other people). The camp collectively brings the speakers, AV, fire effects, generators and structures, sets all of it up, and Carl and other artists perform. He’s probably not setting up the gear himself but he is part of the collective that puts the show on. I do know that he plays Playground fundraisers during the year to raise the money to pay for the costs of the camp, which is a forum of contribution / volunteering.

What I love about Burning Man is that it is an event where all the programming is created by the attendees. All the art, sound stages, art cars, experiences.. if you want something to exist in Black Rock City, then it is up to you to just go figure out how to bring it, solely for the benefit and joy of those who get to experience it. It is a tremendous amount of work, but the rewarding feeling of seeing your creation manifested into reality is worth it.

So much of our daily lives in society is consuming experiences that other people create: the jobs we work are defined by other people, we buy products created by other people, we eat food made by other people. For me, Burning Man is a reminder for the rest of the year to be the creator of my own experience in the world.

Who hurt you?

Prediction markets serve as a hedge against real world events, which enables risk taking.

Why don’t they deserve to see the light of day? Maybe the market gets to decide what “sucks” or doesn’t. More ideas in the marketplace gives users more choice.

CRISPR, Yamanaka factors, computational biology, brain computer interfaces, Starship, LLMs... we are nowhere near the top of the tech S curve.

Guide to add end-to-end shopping experience to any social platform you're building

Guide to order any Amazon products from your terminal with 3 API requests

1) Games will move from closed economies to open economies, just as they transitioned to free-to-play 15 years ago. Blockchain is just the technology through which this will happen.

2) This transition will take 10 years - we are building for that timeline

3) We raised a ton of money and have a lean team, and can exist for >5 years without revenue. We are keeping our team lean to maintain that level of runway.

4) For whatever reason, people are still buying gaming NFTs right now (as of this week). Of course, that may change quickly.

We are still hiring at Fractal (NFT marketplace for gaming assets). We're a revenue generating company with fewer than 15 team members that just raised $35m in new funding. Founded by experienced founders. https://jobs.lever.co/fractal-is/

Even startups not aiming to be the next FAANG company have trouble estimating revenue, product development time, etc. It's just extremely hard to know all the unknowns when you are starting a new business, especially since it is likely that you are only an expert in one of the required fields (eng, product, marketing, sales) to bring your product to market and will have to learn everything else on the fly. Most business plans for startups are useless.

Fractal | Many Eng Roles | Remote | Fulltime

I'm Justin, cofounder of Twitch, former YC partner, and founder of many more startups. I am cofounder of a new company, Fractal, an NFT marketplace for gamers to discover, buy and sell gaming NFTs. We just closed a $35M seed round from Paradigm and Multicoin today. The company is fully remote and we are having a lot of fun building in the crypto space. Culturally, we optimize to reduce the time between talking to customers, coming up with product ideas, and execution. This is a product and engineering-led, customer-focused company.

We are hiring many eng roles. No previous crypto experience required. The team is mostly from Google and Stripe.

Fundraising post: https://fractal.medium.com/fractal-raises-35-million-dollar-... Job roles: https://jobs.lever.co/fractal-is

Operator | Fully Remote | Full Stack & Backend Engineer | Full-time

Operator Protocol is an open and decentralized protocol for e-commerce. Anyone can participate as a buyer or seller, and the network will be governed by the marketplace participants. Instead of a giant, monopolistic rent-seeker owning the customer and taking a large toll on every transaction, OP is an alternative for buyers and sellers to diversify off Amazon and other centralized marketplaces.

Our founding team consists of veteran founders: Justin Kan co-founded Twitch and Fractal, has been investing in crypto since 2013, and has been an advisor to decentralized projects like Theta and Audius; Jamie Quint comes from an e-commerce background but has also led Growth @Notion and monetization @Reddit; Robin Chan co-founded Fractal and Operator v1, founded and sold a mobile gaming company, XPD Media, to Zynga, and was previously head of Zynga Asia; and Tikhon Bernstam founded and sold the cloud application platform, Parse, to Facebook, and also founded Scribd. Our CEO, Arjun Bhargava, led Growth Engineering at Reddit and was previously at Goldman Sachs.

We’re looking for strong, motivated, and talented full stack and backend engineers to build out the future of e-commerce with us. Previous experience in web 3.0/crypto tech is not required but is a plus.

If interested, apply on our job board:

https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/operator/f4c81ed8-2169-480c-a276-1b...

See our Medium article introducing Operator:

https://medium.com/@Operator/introducing-operator-3e66cba9a1...

Visit us at https://www.operator.com

I made a video of these toys, which were hilarious to play with: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PhJye7Xfmys

Great feedback. Definitely hoping to bring more people from outside of tech into the pod.

I've cancelled my NY Times subscription and encourage everyone here to do the same.