Before I worked in venture capital, I worked at a firm called Boston Consulting Group. It’s full of great talent (in particular, high-slope young professionals), interesting work, and luxurious perks. Yet top consulting firms still experience really high rates of churn. I’ve spent a good part of the past few years thinking about why that is. More specifically, how to avoid the pitfalls that lead to high churn.

I recently wrote about the importance of writing down the non-obvious.

Whenever you realize something non-obvious, you should write it down.

Two years ago, app developers faced a fairly simple choice when determining where they wanted to deploy their application: Ethereum, Solana, Cosmos, or maybe a few additional layer-1 chains. Rollups weren’t yet operational, and few had ever heard the phrase “modular stack.” The differences between the L1s (throughput, fees, etc.) were stark and relatively easy to grasp.

Recently, I started building a habit of reading at least one Wikipedia page a day. It’s been a great way to learn about many random things — from bodegas, to Visa, to Wimbledon, to Dunkin Donuts, to where the term “chair” comes from, and much much more.

One of my new favorite products is from a company called Blackbird, a next-gen loyalty and payments platform for the hospitality industry aiming to enhance the connectivity between restaurants and their guests. Admittedly, I’m somewhat biased here, since Blackbird is one of Variant’s portfolio companies. But the thesis is that restaurants should have the tools to better understand their customers, while the most loyal guests should be rewarded as such - and to me, that makes a lot of sense.

This piece was originally published on Frontier Tech.

I’m a big fan of the idea that cities have several, distinct versions of themselves throughout the day, and that a city at 8am may feel completely different than one at 5pm. My favorite is the 1am-6am city, which I call the “secret city.”

In 2022, crypto infrastructure advanced significantly. Blockspace is now cheaper, more abundant, and more connected than ever. Zero knowledge technology continues to improve scalability, transaction security, and user privacy. The Ethereum Merge exemplified how strong economic incentives can successfully coordinate major technical upgrades, conducted mid-flight without any negative impact to the end user experience.