Here are my notes from Week 2 of a16z Crypto's CSX. This week, which focused on infrastructure, included an infra expo and multiple talks from top infra founders.
Talk: Mo Shaikh (Aptos)
Why crypto?
Financial freedom for all is important because of childhood.
Grew up as an Immigrant with hard-working parents, first in Abu Dhabi and then in Brighton Beach, NYC.
Founder journey
Learned to hustle selling iPods to NBA players
Learned financial system from RBC → Blackrock
Learned frameworks for thinking about GTM from consulting
Joined Consensys to help scale Ethereum, and then to Facebook to found Novi.
Spinning Novi out of Facebook
Why another L1? The existing systems were not designed to scale—3.5 years of pursuing ... didn’t see anything evolve.
Spinouts are rare because either because part of a product line or the internal knives kill it.
Brought a lot of Novi team despite being hard to convince “we like it at FB”
The mindset of “just figure out how to continue on this mission” allowed Mo to recruit a talented founding team.
GTM
Aptos works with two worlds
Innovators
Startups = disrupt existing business
Disrupt existing systems so there is more efficiency
Old guard
Large companies = not going anywhere
Pros: Still retain massive distribution
Cons: Large companies on a timeline, Partner risk is very real
Example: Google earns APT tokens by running a validator
Web3 is the hardest place to be an entrepreneur
The market is “neck-whipping” fast
You get to “be really close to the customer”
Everything is open (Twitter, Discord, Telegram)
You get market feedback immediately, faster than anywhere else. You can get feedback without having a product.
Dealing with haters
If not 7 new haters a week, not doing our job
Always a major move forward in the wake of hatred
Respond with marketing jujutsu
Use the moment
Embrace the discussion
Pre-plan attack vectors — “If you had to talk shit, what would you say?”
Positioning Web2 vs. Web3
Can startups go after both? “double down on web3 but operate with web2 principles.”
Why?
Faster adopt
Higher velocity
Variety of use-cases
If you had tried to partner with Blackrock seven years ago, you would have gone out of business. Eventually, Blackrock will come around.
Competition
A crowded market in web3 doesn't matter
There are barely 1m users. 5B users are not using your product.
Flex your advantage
Google: “Search completed in x seconds” = reminding you that its the best tech
What Mo respects about other chains
Community building
Founder-led personality
Status of web3 today
Crypto’s PMF today is obvious — just go on Twitter and see what people are doing.
What’s going to onboard the next 1B?
NFTs? Don’t see it yet.
Stablecoin for moving money? Would move (money) faster than anything.
Aptos thinks: finance → game → media
Book recommendations
Where to find Mo?
Talk: Jinglan Wanga and Karl Floersch (Optimsim)
Founding Optimism
Dropped out of college to become a Bitcoiner
Attracted to Ethereum
Humans trying to build something together
Vitalik on why unicorn shirts “keep out a particular type of toxicity “
Karl’s project “Jing write the book, and Hayden go build Uniswap”
Fighting for Karl: work on this thing with signs of PMF, or take a risk and change the internet
Optimistic Ethereum was the original name
“Ethereum is not a particular thing — You are ethereum” - Karl
Moving on from Plasma
Why move on?
No one was using it.
Shocked because had thousands of likes on social.
Discovered user interviews
Users cared about cost and latency
What's an MVP?
“The skateboard pic” - It’s iterative
"What is the skateboard, though?" - Where debate occurs
What does it mean to do things that don’t scale?
Taking a step back
What is the common objective we’re trying to achieve?
For all these objectives, what are we trying to achieve?
Seeking out advice
Jing is “a Jedi Master at seeking out networks and getting advice” - Jason
How? Ask a lot of questions. Over time, develop a sense of who’s high vs. low signal and on what topics
Teamwork/building
Communication can be a challenge - opinion and language can be different on things like volume, scope, and timelines
Invest in each other and how you communicate
cofounder coaching
business coaching
Everyone should be in a high-leverage role.
Be generous with comp
If not, they shouldn't be on the team.
Why have the stress of trying to balance equity?
Pushing without discomfort
If something doesn’t make sense, push on it.
Know that pushing creates discomfort.
How to overcome:
Learn how to push without creating discomfort
Have the conviction to endure other people's discomfort
Making tough decisions
The worst part is the “anxiety of uncertainty” … “I try to avoid that” - Karl
How to overcome?
Write it down and/or go for a walk
Make the tough decision
Save energy and live a “life without conflict”
Vibes
How does Optimism have such a great community?
“We genuinely give a fuck” - Jing
What are vibes?
People are having fun.
“Life is meaningless, we’re mostly water, life should be fun” - Jing
Vibes are the outcome of a bunch of early decisions
Decentralization
Protocol:
Build modularly so we can punt
Governance:
“This Governance Will Self Destruct.”
We hadnt seen teams build it right, we knew we would get it wrong on the first try.
Decentralization should serve a purpose.
Superchain
Ethereum + L2s vs. World of L1s
There are definitely network effects around standards - Karl
“Interoperability is cool”
Chains are different threads
Horizontal scalability
Now, getting into the nitty-gritty of the Superchain vision!
The Superchain SDK
MVP = non-protocol
Future = protocol-level message-passing
Shipping
We didn’t ship anything to production for 1 year, then 6 months, and now 1x month.
"Shipping sub-optimal on a regular basis beats not shipping for a year" 👏
Waive magic wand and fix anything?
Scale Ethereum - Optimism already working on that 🙂
User onboarding - You should not know you’re using crypto. We have to replicate Web2 if there's any chance of surpassing it.
“Wish more people knew about jobs.optimism.io” - Jing
Where to find Jing and Karl?
Links that came up
Bountycaster is a tool for creating bounties and services on Farcasers. I recommended it several times for recruiting and feedback.
How to run a good Bountycaster? My flow:
Get inspiration from completed bounties
Use the Create a Post tool on Bountycaster
Cast to the channel that makes the most sense for your use case (i.e. jobs)
OnceUpon is the best block explorer for the Superchain. I recommended to a couple of founders for user research.
A couple of founders asked about our GIF game. Screen Studio is the best tool I’ve found for creating simple product videos and gifs. H/t Jonny Mack for the rec.
TYB is crushing with adopting non-cryptonative brands and consumers.
Emmanuel reminded me their mobile app has a great onboarding experience: “Crypto is in the background”
Crowdmuse and IYK came up a couple of times for doing cool things and having a great user experience.
Launcher Labs Progress
We shipped 🚢
Curate to Frameboard browser extension - Farcaster / Twitter
New UI ✨
We launched a bounty to curate hometown food in celebration of collaborative boards.
Launchcaster upvotes are up 944% from frames!
👋 See you next week - Jayme