This week was a bit of a light one as it was just me in the saddle. @shanemacgithub was on vacation for the whole week, which is awesome.
https://twitter.com/ShaneMac/status/1415753518309203968
The thing that I wanted to share this week was some of my experience in attending an event that was put on by Atelier Ventures and Variant. They'd gathered a whole bunch of great folks working in crypto, as well as some from the art world who are now crossing over. Here's a shot:
As we stay relatively quiet in the public about what we're up to, I'm relying on these private gatherings to talk a little bit more about what we're doing, and see the reactions that some might have. The most common reaction from those that have been in the space for some time is "THANK YOU. I'm glad someone's doing this finally!" which is really fun to hear.
But it's what comes next that is always so invigorating. It's usually one right after another, in rapid succession. Questions around specific implementation, use cases, does this work cross-chain, etc. Always so many. But they're digging deep and trying to learn more quickly, which is exciting.
The thing that I love about these interactions is it always leads to the countless use cases that XMTP could be good for. While a number of them come up commonly, each discussion seems to uncover yet another one that we hadn't really considered before. That's what gets me really excited about releasing this to the public—what are they going to build?
News this week
- Had a number of great discussions with some investors that are interested in joining our Series A. Here's a snippet from an email I received from one of those potentials that really caught me by surprise:
Not only are we obsessed with your vision for XMTP, we also think you're the perfect founder to bring an incentivized, decentralized messaging layer to life. We'd love to participate in this round and join forces to scale XMTP to web3 and beyond. I'm personally incredibly excited about this and I'd really love the opportunity to work with you. I typically refrain from pitches like this but I do want to share a little bit more about us because I'm sure you've gotten a lot of interest:
- Made good progress on and shared our most recent deck
- Got a few more things added to the Handbook that should be useful
- One of our competitors, EPNS, launched an integration with Snapshot
What we are reading / listening to
- This week I listened to Episode 186 of the Zero-Knowledge Podcast, where some team members from Status.im shared some of their recent work
A week in the life with @mg
Last Friday (7/16) was my birthday 🥳 so I mostly spent time with Nash.
There's a winery near where we live called Tolino that opens its grounds on Fridays for families to go and hang out, so we went there for the evening. Nash loved the wood fired pizza so much that he asked them for their business card. He's lately been into learning brand names (that's not a genetic trait, right?) so he learned their name was "Buenos Aires" and pronounced it perfectly!
Saturday we went to an antique steam engine and farm equipment show. He loves all kinds of machinery and tractors (runs in the family).
His favorite stand was one where the guy had all these cool pneumatic powered widgets. Nash asked extremely thorough questions and seemed to have it all figured out in no time!
On Sunday we went to the science center where they've got an exhibit on dinosaurs. Here's a photo of a rare Nashasaurus Rex:
We closed out the weekend with a little bit of lawn care back at daddy's house.
