Hi team,
I'm so excited for everyone to start joining on August 1st. This past week made me realize how big and important of a problem it is that we are all going after. It wasn't because I talked to a bunch of "crypto" folks, it was because I told my partner's best friend Cate about what we are up to.
Cate is a teacher in South Carolina. Crypto was a foreign language to her. We stayed with them over the 4th of July and like most good friends, she wanted to know more about what we are working on. I tried to tell her in as simple of language as possible, "it's like email/messaging but for crypto." It's what we've been saying and it feels pretty easy to communicate.
Like many others have asked, she quickly replied with "why don't we just use regular email and talk about crypto?"
It's a fair question. I shared a little story about her kids and how in the future their activity can be what allows people to contact them not just their identity.
In web2 world today, identity comes before messaging. In the web3 world, activity comes before messaging. People get to choose and control and protect their identity while being discovered by their activity. If everyone can be discovered because of what they do instead of who they are, it could unlock opportunities for so many people around the world.
She got it. Completely. She also realized that this puts the power back into the hands of the people, not the companies in the middle.
If there's one thing that gets me excited about new technology, it's when people outside of our little bubble start to understand it. That's our job here, helping the world understand why this matters, how to get started, and how to use it effectively.
To test this concept further, Matt and I met with an amazing investor this week named Li Jin. Li was at a16z and she also thinks about community unlike anyone I've ever met. When we met with her, I said this idea that web2 identity came first and in web3 activity comes first. That's why messaging and disclosing identity is fundamentally different.
It clicked. She repeated it about 5 other times.
I share this story because it really started to help me understand what will help others understand why this is both different and critical to the next internet. We are just getting started but its clear people are starting to understand why this is such an important piece of the future of communication.
Here's a little video from an interview I did this week which explains a little more about why I think what we are doing is so important for the future of the internet.
I hope everyone has a great week, Shane Mac
News this week
- The Series A is moving forward with legal. a16z has been out on vacation.
- Peter Denton signed to join and lead growth at XMTP!
- Conversations with Mailchain team are going well, spent 2 hours on Friday getting to know the founders Rob & Tim better
- The meeting with Veefriends team went really well. They really need a messaging solution to communicate with NFT holders, we are working on a deeper relationship + trying to get them to invest
- Posted a bunch of new job roles, share away! https://twitter.com/XMTPdotcom/status/1413190444574547973
- Matt Szaro decided to stop the interview process. He wants to stay involved and help us find engineers but he just isn't personally that excited about crypto right now. He said that might change and he really enjoyed the process of getting to know us
- We met with tcg.co partner, Jarrod, about investing in the Series A and he's really excited about what we are doing.
- Met with Li Jin about investing. She doesn't see a lot of strong communities being built yet in Crypto, she said most are driven by the price of token not a bigger power. She said something about building communities that really stuck with me. She said "A community's strength is based on these 2 things: The Affinityandthe Mutual Concern people have for each other." This really made me think.
- We had another great brand session with our investors Form Capital to design our logo and mark and color palette. More to share soon.
What we are listening to / reading
- Matt shared this amazing podcast with Kevin Rose and Sam Williams, the founder of Arweave. It's a great view into incentivizing a community to invest in a protocol and why long term storage is critical to thriving communities and value
A week in the life
This section is just sharing the personal side of our team members
This week I'll go first: Meet: Shane Mac
Monday I arrived in NYC after driving from Nashville, TN. My partner Katie needed to be back in NYC for work and there's a ton of crypto stuff happening in the city too. I'm going to be splitting time between NYC and Nashville.
Our dog Fleetwood traveled here with us and he was so excited to get out of the car but still adjusting to the new city life and no grass.
We got our new place set up and had some meetings in the city. It felt amazing to be back seeing people again. I got to spend the entire Wednesday with Matt running around Manhattan.
The week ended with a really special experience that Katie got me, a private sushi lesson where we learned how to make 4 different kinds of sushi rolls. It was so cool.
Now I'm off to Lake Tahoe and Salt Lake City for a wedding and taking the week off this week. It's been a busy couple of months and I'm super excited to check out and take a vacay. I packed my baboon to the moon bag with pickleball paddles for the trip, catch y'all when I get back!
