Yesterday, in the process of cleaning out my closet and donating a bunch of old clothes, I did something I've wanted to do for a long time: got going creating a t-shirt quilt for my old "sentimental" t-shirts.  I'm a bit of a t-shirt hoarder, especially when it comes to shirts that memorialize some special place or time in my life.  I've got shirts from basketball tournaments in high school, the video rental store where I worked in high school (long gone), the restaurant I worked one summer during college (also out of business now), bachelor parties, Clarence's 40th birthday, from the "Free Bieber" campaign during the SOPA/PIPA protests, etc.  Lots and lots of shirts.  I can't bring myself to get rid of them, and I also never wear almost all of them.

Step in Project Repat -- as the name suggests their mission is to re-patriate textile jobs.  And the way they do it is by recycling people's old t-shirts into quilts.  They've got two factories in the US (one in VA and one in MA), where they employ full-time factory workers who convert sentimental (but useless) piles of old shirts into useful and even more sentimental and actually useful quilts.  The quilts are the output, but the mission is really about creating high quality textile jobs here in the US. Of course, this is a relatively niche business and a niche product, but they've scaled nicely, and according their website, have made over 175,000 quilts since 2012:

Project Repat co-founder Nathan Rothstein lays out some of their philosophy of building a successful online business -- that's appealing to consumers, competitive in the midst of Amazon, and fair to workers -- in this post. Clearly, t-shirt quilts are not the complete answer to bringing quality labor back to the US, but Project Repat seems to be doing a great job finding a niche where they can offer something unique and really excel.

In the world of startups and investing and ideas, things are always chaotic and fluid, and as such a key skill is to somehow cut through the noise and find focus.  That's on a micro level, like what do I do for the next five minutes, and on the macro level, like am I (or are we) heading in the right direction? This may be true in other fields, but I find it to be especially true on the investing side, where situations are undefined, and there are infinity ideas and directions to explore.  On the operating side, things are slightly more bounded, but there are always large questions about direction and focus. So I find myself spending a lot of personal time working on my own mindstate, and trying to find ways to help with this challenge.  One thing I have tried this year is to use a Volt Planner, which helps you structure goals on a weekly, monthly and yearly basis.  I have found this to be incredibly useful, and I can write more that later.  One immediate observation from using the Volt Planner is that I emerge from each session (on Monday each week) feeling a rush of energy, paired with an increased sense of focus.  It's really nice. And that energy is really the important thing.  It's the foundation for all of the moments and decisions that happen, all day every day.  The more of it you have, the better.  It's foundational. So a little more broadly, I've been thinking about how important it is to optimize for energy in life.  I think that is some combination of exercise, diet, sleep, and writing.  Maybe that's obvious, and the first three are things that anyone would tell you are good for your health.  But "health", while obviously good and positive (especially compared to major injury or illness) is a little abstract, and for me at least, a little hard to motivate around on an everyday basis.  I suspect that will change as I get older. Energy is the foundation of doing anything, and it feels like there are compounding / exponential results to having more.  I am not saying I have figured out how to really rally myself behind this idea on a consistent basis (which is why I'm writing this), but I think it's worth figuring out which activities give you more energy and which suck it away.  Worth figuring out.

I was emailing with a friend recently, who asked:

"On the web, in order to build a platform you first need a hit app. Do you think this dynamic is different in blockchain?"

It's a great question, and one I have been thinking about a lot lately.  First, let's unpack the idea that the way to make a "platform" on the web is by starting with a hit app.  This has certainly been the case with Amazon, Google, Twitter, Facebook, Salesforce and others -- where a very successful application enabled either the consumer scale (FB and Twitter), enterprise scale (Salesforce) or infrastructure scale (Google and Amazon) for others to build on. Identity is a particularly interesting example.  To the extent that Google, Facebook and Twitter are the identity standards on the web today, those were obviously a second-order results from hit applications.   So you essentially have the infrastructure or platform layer "falling out" of, or layering-under, the application layer. But there are counter-examples, most of which are lower-level services and developer tools: Stripe, Twilio, MongoDB, etc.  These are platforms first, by their nature -- they exist only to have things built on top of them, and were able to achieve scale with that approach. And thinking back to the creation of the web itself, I think it's fair to say it was platform-first.  The Internet protocol stack (TCP/IP, HTTP, SMTP, etc) is horizontal infrastructure, designed in a layered model that anticipated continued development by others (though perhaps you could argue that email was the app that drove development of that platform). So, looking at the blockchain, what does it mean to build a platform?  How will the important infrastructure features (e.g., identity, reputation, personal data, payments, etc) come to be?  Will they be achieved platform-first, or will they be a second order result from something at the application layer? In other words, will platforms on the blockchain be built bottom-up (like the original web protocols), or top-down (like the commercial web)? In a lot of ways, the blockchain is like the original web: protocol-based and open source.  Implemented by a group of collaborating peers.  Dueling protocol design, white papers, and RFCs.  Layered. In other ways, the blockchain is like the commercial web: hyper growth fueled by powerful economic incentives.  Economies of scale and network effects. I don't have a clear answer, and maybe it will be a combination of both. But it's really interesting to think about.

Yesterday, in the process of cleaning out my closet and donating a bunch of old clothes, I did something I've wanted to do for a long time: got going creating a t-shirt quilt for my old "sentimental" t-shirts.  I'm a bit of a t-shirt hoarder, especially when it comes to shirts that memorialize some special place or time in my life.  I've got shirts from basketball tournaments in high school, the video rental store where I worked in high school (long gone), the restaurant I worked one summer during college (also out of business now), bachelor parties, Clarence's 40th birthday, from the "Free Bieber" campaign during the SOPA/PIPA protests, etc.  Lots and lots of shirts.  I can't bring myself to get rid of them, and I also never wear almost all of them.

Step in Project Repat -- as the name suggests their mission is to re-patriate textile jobs.  And the way they do it is by recycling people's old t-shirts into quilts.  They've got two factories in the US (one in VA and one in MA), where they employ full-time factory workers who convert sentimental (but useless) piles of old shirts into useful and even more sentimental and actually useful quilts.  The quilts are the output, but the mission is really about creating high quality textile jobs here in the US. Of course, this is a relatively niche business and a niche product, but they've scaled nicely, and according their website, have made over 175,000 quilts since 2012:

Project Repat co-founder Nathan Rothstein lays out some of their philosophy of building a successful online business -- that's appealing to consumers, competitive in the midst of Amazon, and fair to workers -- in this post. Clearly, t-shirt quilts are not the complete answer to bringing quality labor back to the US, but Project Repat seems to be doing a great job finding a niche where they can offer something unique and really excel.

In the world of startups and investing and ideas, things are always chaotic and fluid, and as such a key skill is to somehow cut through the noise and find focus.  That's on a micro level, like what do I do for the next five minutes, and on the macro level, like am I (or are we) heading in the right direction? This may be true in other fields, but I find it to be especially true on the investing side, where situations are undefined, and there are infinity ideas and directions to explore.  On the operating side, things are slightly more bounded, but there are always large questions about direction and focus. So I find myself spending a lot of personal time working on my own mindstate, and trying to find ways to help with this challenge.  One thing I have tried this year is to use a Volt Planner, which helps you structure goals on a weekly, monthly and yearly basis.  I have found this to be incredibly useful, and I can write more that later.  One immediate observation from using the Volt Planner is that I emerge from each session (on Monday each week) feeling a rush of energy, paired with an increased sense of focus.  It's really nice. And that energy is really the important thing.  It's the foundation for all of the moments and decisions that happen, all day every day.  The more of it you have, the better.  It's foundational. So a little more broadly, I've been thinking about how important it is to optimize for energy in life.  I think that is some combination of exercise, diet, sleep, and writing.  Maybe that's obvious, and the first three are things that anyone would tell you are good for your health.  But "health", while obviously good and positive (especially compared to major injury or illness) is a little abstract, and for me at least, a little hard to motivate around on an everyday basis.  I suspect that will change as I get older. Energy is the foundation of doing anything, and it feels like there are compounding / exponential results to having more.  I am not saying I have figured out how to really rally myself behind this idea on a consistent basis (which is why I'm writing this), but I think it's worth figuring out which activities give you more energy and which suck it away.  Worth figuring out.

I was emailing with a friend recently, who asked:

"On the web, in order to build a platform you first need a hit app. Do you think this dynamic is different in blockchain?"

It's a great question, and one I have been thinking about a lot lately.  First, let's unpack the idea that the way to make a "platform" on the web is by starting with a hit app.  This has certainly been the case with Amazon, Google, Twitter, Facebook, Salesforce and others -- where a very successful application enabled either the consumer scale (FB and Twitter), enterprise scale (Salesforce) or infrastructure scale (Google and Amazon) for others to build on. Identity is a particularly interesting example.  To the extent that Google, Facebook and Twitter are the identity standards on the web today, those were obviously a second-order results from hit applications.   So you essentially have the infrastructure or platform layer "falling out" of, or layering-under, the application layer. But there are counter-examples, most of which are lower-level services and developer tools: Stripe, Twilio, MongoDB, etc.  These are platforms first, by their nature -- they exist only to have things built on top of them, and were able to achieve scale with that approach. And thinking back to the creation of the web itself, I think it's fair to say it was platform-first.  The Internet protocol stack (TCP/IP, HTTP, SMTP, etc) is horizontal infrastructure, designed in a layered model that anticipated continued development by others (though perhaps you could argue that email was the app that drove development of that platform). So, looking at the blockchain, what does it mean to build a platform?  How will the important infrastructure features (e.g., identity, reputation, personal data, payments, etc) come to be?  Will they be achieved platform-first, or will they be a second order result from something at the application layer? In other words, will platforms on the blockchain be built bottom-up (like the original web protocols), or top-down (like the commercial web)? In a lot of ways, the blockchain is like the original web: protocol-based and open source.  Implemented by a group of collaborating peers.  Dueling protocol design, white papers, and RFCs.  Layered. In other ways, the blockchain is like the commercial web: hyper growth fueled by powerful economic incentives.  Economies of scale and network effects. I don't have a clear answer, and maybe it will be a combination of both. But it's really interesting to think about.