Venkatesh Rao ☀️
@vgr
Tough but necessary moves, even though it’s affected summer of protocols/protocol institute
I think the part I’m not yet convinced of is lean-roadmap-and-done. I’m increasingly convinced even the simplest infrastructure doesn’t work this way and ossification is a misframe of the underlying dynamics. At best what you g...
This year, the EF is decreasing its budget by roughly 40%, which entails some difficult decisions. The goal of the decreases was set out in the Treasury Management Policy last year: the EF is transitioning into being a long-term-oriented endowment-based organization, shifting from its pre-2026 average of spending ~15%
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Clear framing of the challenges.
Reminds me of Reagan-Thatcher deregulation. Seems impossible to believe now, but industry leaders at the time were reluctant then to face the full force of a market economy sans corporatist protections. Within a decade the Jack Welch generation of leadership and established a more agg...
My latest article on Ethereum institutions (past, present, and future) and their political economy. Topics include:
- Subtraction and Legitimacy
- The Funding Crisis
- Succession Planning
I believe this is a critical time to establish the institutions that will carry Ethereum through its next decade.
https://paragra
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Last day to propose talks and workshops for the Protocol Symposium. the theme is New Nature, with particular focus on the artificial laws of our emerging built environment, at the intersection of AI and protocols.
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There’s this old heuristic in SV-flavored startup land that I got from pmarca that it doesn’t matter if a startup gets a lot of stuff wrong by normal business playbooks, so long as it gets one thing really really right. Unspecified in there is what that “one thing” is, but the presumption is that it’s whatever the uniq...
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Excited for our third annual protocol symposium in September, and the first under the aegis of the Protocol Institute. Talk and workshop abstracts due June 14th. Fully online, and this is the first time we’re doing an open call too (previous editions had all the programming out of the summer of protocols cohorts; this ...
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Starting in 3 minutes on our discord — the third session in our series on stigmergy in the formal protocol theory interest group. HT Patrick Nast for introducing this thread into our deliberations. Turning out to be a really useful lens on the evolution of not just AI, but all technology in the near future, what we’re ...
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