And the stories I tell about them
Sometime in grade school, I had an epiphany.
I discovered that my memory for numbers, dates, and equations was average at best, but my memory for images and stories was fantastic. If I found a way to represent something visually there was a pretty good chance I would remember it forever. If not, 🤷.
What started as a study hack quickly became my default way to absorb and retain knowledge. Whether it’s machine learning algorithms, statistical concepts, or organizational design, visualizations are a huge part of how I interpret and internalize the world.
For the past couple of years, I’ve…
Four mental models to help you think about crypto’s building blocks and what conclusions you should draw from each.
The way we describe the world around us shapes the way we act and, most importantly for crypto, the mistakes we’re likely to make.
Here are the four mental models that I use to describe crypto’s building blocks and what you can learn from each.
The decentralized trading platforms that are changing the face of financial markets
Part 1: Market creation and exchange rate mechanics
In traditional markets, “market makers” are people who help make trades possible. They do this by maintaining an “order book” where they match buyers and sellers together when their preferred prices match.
In exchange for keeping this book, market makers take a small fee. Market making like this has been around basically forever.
But it may not last much longer.
DeFi has spawned a new generation of Automated Market Makers (AMMs) like Uniswap, Curve, Balancer, and Kyber.
Unlike traditional market makers, these AMMs don’t operate by maintaining an order book. Instead, they use a mathematical approach called the ‘constant product’…
A visual guide to the lending protocol that’s putting banks out of business
Quick aside on how banks make money:
Banks take the funds they hold and loan them out to others at an interest rate. When the loan is repaid, some of the interest goes to the bank’s depositors (the people who provided the money to lend). And some of the interest goes to the bank. This compensates them for arranging and managing the loan.
In a world of paper and offices this manual matching is a good system. But in a world of automation and algorithms we can do better.
Compound is a two-sided marketplace for lending and borrowing money.¹
Functionally…
50+ questions that are essential to remember but painfully easy to forget — for individual contributors to CPOs
Product management tends to attract people who are high ownership, who like to help, and who have a strong bias towards action. In many ways this personality cocktail is great. People with those this are fantastic at moving things forward.
But that set of personality traits also can make it hard to step back and see what you’re missing.
“I have two kinds of problems, the urgent and the important. The urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent.” — Eisenhower
This list of questions helps me make sure I’m giving attention to the important, not just the…
What we’re focusing on at Unstoppable Domains this year
Dear Unstoppable Community,
What a year! Since we started on this journey in 2019 we’ve registered over 450,000 domains, helped launch nearly 30,000 decentralized websites, and signed partnerships with some of the biggest names in crypto. 2020 saw Coinbase, MEW, Gemini, Opera and many others join the Unstoppable community. We’re proud of what this community is becoming and we couldn’t have done it without you. Before anything else — thank you for your support!
As we look towards 2021, we’re more committed than ever to the decentralized web and we’re excited for the announcements we have planned this year. At…
Just before sitting down to write this I stumbled across a brand new post by one of my favorite internet thinkers, Chris Dixon. In this post he says:
“The most common mistake people make when evaluating new technologies is to focus too much on the “doing old things better” category. For example, when evaluating the potential of blockchains, people sometimes focus on things like cheaper and faster global payments, which are important and necessary but only the beginning. What’s even more exciting are the new things you simply couldn’t create before…”
Unstoppable Domains is a decentralized domain registry and registrar.
…
Go from zero to recurring revenue in less time than it takes to do your laundry (Stripe + Webflow)
When I started to build my latest project — a platform for personalized job alerts — I found myself in a predicament.
I was planning to manage the delivery and support of the product over email so I didn’t need a very heavy app. All I needed was a landing page to explain the product and a subscription page where my customers could sign up. Sounds like a great match for nocode tools, right?
Unfortunately, no!
Shopify, Webflow, Squarespace, etc. are fantastic tools for selling physical goods like t-shirts and subscription boxes. They’re also great at selling digital goods where…
Navigating the first stumbling block to writing great OKRs.
“How long should they last?” is one of the first questions that comes up when a team starts writing their OKRs. It’s not a hard question to answer, but it will take some thought (and maybe some experimentation) to get it right.
There are two things you need to balance when picking an OKR time frame.
Give your OKRs enough time that you can make real progress, but not so long that the world will change under your feet.
For a small and nimble startup:
You can certainly make a lot of progress in a year or a quarter. But if you’re learning quickly (and you…
World War II Salvage, Ponies, and the birth of a new financial system.
Bitcoin
In 1952, a North Carolina man named Malcom McLean took out a $22 million dollar loan that would change the face of international commerce.
With that loan, he bought a pair of WWII-era oil tankers.
Over the coming months and years, Malcom gutted them. He ripped out baffles, braces, and tanks. He reduced the ships to shells. And in their cavernous darkness he started welding something new. He added braces, clamps, chains, and hooks. Four years later, he was done.
In April of 1956, Malcom McLean launched the world’s first container ship.
It set sail from Newark, New Jersey with…
Michael Williams
Product manager. I write about systems, organizational design, and occasionally crypto. https://twitter.com/mvwi
