Hey everyone, so great to kick off this week with a ton of energy. The industry as a whole seems to be firing on all cylinders, and it feels like here at XMTP we're ready to do the same. This week we'll close our $20M Series A (whoa), which will set us on a whole new trajectory to knock this project out of the park.
Raising this much capital early on is both a big benefit, and also a big responsibility. We must invest that capital wisely in our future, and much of that today is in the form of the highest quality talent that we can bring on. Our focus over the next few weeks and months will all be about that. How do we recruit amazing team members to go and build towards this future with us? We'll need to put together a comprehensive plan of attack over the coming days and week and it will be great if we can all contribute there.
Note: As a heads up, I'm going to be taking my son to Illinois to visit his family back home (for the first time since he was 3 months old). We're going to be traveling by RV so I'll have a few longer stretches where I'll be driving and unavailable but will otherwise be working remotely for a bit. I'll be back full time in the saddle next Thursday and ready to crush it.
Cheers all, here's to a good week! 🙌
News this week
- After a new requirement to get a crap ton of signatures in place for the round, our close for the Series A had gotten delayed a bit, but we're on track to finish things up today or tomorrow! 🎉
- Had an awesome discussion last week on company operational security that culminated in a pretty solid plan for moving forward
- I began investigating Duo as an option for us to help secure our accounts and found some promising early results
- @petermdenton crushed it with a couple of great posts on the Growth topic:
What we are reading / listening to
- @shanemacgithub shared a podcast with me this week that is some of the backstory on a16z, which is a pretty awesome listen
- It's pretty incredible to think that they're just now only 12 years old and as of right now actively managing $18B in assets ($2.2B of which is now a dedicated crypto fund)
- So much of their strategy is in building a huge business, which creates network effects, and allows them to service their companies in ways that others have a hard time competing with (more capital for cheaper, services, etc.)
- Haven't read it just yet but Vitalik just published this piece on token voting-based governance. Since it will directly related and affect how we do governance in the future I'm gonna give it a deep read.
A week in the life with @mg
Ok I'm a little bit late to this "week" but I wanted to share anyways. My son Nash and I went to Cape May, NJ for a short little beach getaway for a few days. He's a huge fan of the water, and it's a spot that I'd never been to before, so thought it might be fun to go check out! As soon as we got down there he was already in beach mode, sporting his killer new hat and "taco cat" shirt.
First stop was to get dinner, so naturally went to go check out some seafood. After a bit of searching I came across a waterfront "shack" selling all kinds of freshly caught stuff. Nash was particularly fascinated by the crabs in the case, so he was pretty insistent that's what we'd need to get for dinner. And for the record, he's never had crab before!
I'm not exaggerating when I say that he took down three crabs on his own! He was a beast with his hammer, expertly breaking those things apart like he's done it before. I was a proud papa :slight_smile:
The next day was a little bit cloudy, so we went to the big lighthouse at the tip of NJ and walked around the grounds for a little bit. He loved the hike, and found all kinds of goodies along the way.
One of the big highlights of the trip though was going to the National Air Station Wildwoods. It was an operational base during the WWII era, but now it's an aviation museum. He got to climb around in all kinds of equipment.
And here's him checking out a Bell AH-1 Cobra 😆
Before leaving the beach, I was happy to do a little shoreside sunrise walk. Need to do more of these.
