Dan Romero (Farcaster, X, Website) is the CEO and co-founder of Farcaster, an open Twitter/X-like social network protocol built on blockchain rails.
Before co-founding Farcaster in 2020, Dan previously worked at Coinbase as a Vice President, among many other roles. He joined the company as the 20th employee in 2014 and left in 2019. He's thought about and used Twitter-like networks for nearly two decades and is passionate about open information flow, market-enabled progress, and individual freedom.
Timestamps:
- (01:39): We were promised flying cars and all we got was 140 characters
- (8:48): Bring Your Own Algorithm (BYOA), RSS, Elon, and The News Channel-ification of Social Networks
- (35:54): The Field of Dreams Fallacy: If You Build It, It Doesn't Mean They'll Come
[Farcaster & Crypto-Focused Section Begins]
- (44:25): Status as a Service and Building the Home for Crypto Status
- (55:03): What is Farcaster?
- (59:34): Why not counter-position against Elon?
- (01:03:42): Programmable social and “Open APIs”
- (1:14:22): The Future of Farcaster
- (1:18:01): Farcaster's Value Capture
- (1:25:01): Sufficient Decentralization
- (1:28:44): Why Dan has created NFTs but not tokens
[Farcaster & Crypto Focus Ends]
- (1:29:53): Product Market Fit, Focus, and The Idea Maze
- (1:37:01): Dan's career arc, contrarian paths, distributed systems, and creative destruction
- (01:44:09): Coinbase: pre-2017 learnings, hypergrowth, comparisons between building a culture and social network, and anti-lessons
- (1:49:20): Brian Armstrong and fostering repeatable innovation
- (1:52:24): What do you wish Balaji [Srinivasan] could work on?
- (1:53:20): Group Chats and the pendulum between private and public discourse
- (01:58:55): Power: Elon, Zuck, Trump?
- (2:00:24): Politics, Populism, Going Direct, and the Podcast Era
- (2:08:48): What have you changed your mind on this year?
- (2:10:22): Final Questions
Links & Resources
- RSS+ by Dan Romero
- The Rise and Demise of RSS by Sinclair Target
- Status as a Service (StaaS) by Eugene Wei
- The idea maze by Chris Dixon
- Balaji Srinivasan's paper on the idea maze
- The only thing that matters by Marc Andreessen
- v2 frames
- FC AI/zk trends
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