Progressive Entropy

I, currently, only use two applications where I am directly interaction with an AI for my day to day activities, Midjourney and ChatGPT

Midjourney is a pretty simple use case. I'm a visual person, and also enjoying describing things in a visual way. I use Midjourney to add color and some nice visuals to random parts of my job to make it more interesting.

[Me sitting in front of a computer generating art through AI]

The other one that I use daily is ChatGPT, both through the web application and the brand new iOS app. 

On web, I'm mostly using it for any form of writing software... it has tremendously changed the way I write programs. I ask it for a framework of which to think about the software to write, and sometimes get it to write the software myself and then I copy it over after poring through to see if the logic actually follows my intent. If not, I fix any bugs and then add it in. This is an absolute game changer for the productivity of developers, you can get so much more done! Though, sometimes it feels like you are moving too fast and leaving potential surface area for bugs, this is the current stage of the learning curve for me.

On mobile it's a totally different use case for me: studying history and getting book summaries. I have an ever expanding book list that I have not been getting through, and I've learned that many non-fictions books can be compressed into a smaller, concise lesson. So, why not get AI to provide that lesson for me? What about Roman history? Or the rise of China through it's different leaders? How about Abraham Lincoln's political journey towards becoming President? Anything that your mind is curious for, ChatGPT can give you an answer, and very simply allows for follow up questions so you can go deeper. All on your phone. And now, I am focusing on enjoying reading fiction :)

There are probably so many other reasons to use AI, but it's here and if you use it everyday it could be as transformative as Google was when it was finally able to index the world's information and provide you key answers.

I wanted to share what I'm seeing from a market perspective and what I'm seeing from many other founders around me. Caveat, my perspective is skewed towards high-tech startups and specifically the world of Web3/Crypto. 

For the past 12 months, funding markets have drastically dried out for a few reasons. Investors are seeking money in safer places especially as the options are available (~4% gov bonds). Primarily, the action has slowed down in the Series A/B rounds where right now many firms are struggling to identify which startups are going to be able to raise the next set of rounds based on their ability to generate sufficient yield and growth. Both of which have been slow for many businesses outside of Meta, Microsoft, and Alphabet. I expect that the big will get bigger over the course of the next few years, as they are all incredibly well-managed, now much-leaner (due to layoffs) with plenty of cash & strong revenue streams. 

[Seeking safety]

On the complete other side a different phenomenon is taking place, and that is AI. Anyone who is paying attention is recognizing the swift and powerful force AI is and will become. Starting a business, launching a product, and generating revenue is trending towards infinitely easier. A 1-2 person team can launch a product for an audience and immediately start charging, but this also means a LOT of competition on the ground floor. If your team can create a product, so can multiple teams around the world. The pace of competition for very early stage startups is heating up. This is good and bad, because we will likely have 10,000s of software startups being created solving problems everywhere, but the ability to capture value and create long-term durability as a business has become much much harder. 

[From Packy McCormick's Small Apps, Growing Protocols]

It is the graduation from small application that generates enough revenue for a few founders and maybe an employee or so to a growing business that is going to become the most difficult challenge in today's market. Additionally, with many companies using AI as their feature to attract users, many of these applications will get copied by others or get adopted by larger companies who recognize it's value. See all the ChatGPT iOS apps that got killed when OpenAI released their own app. Or how many open source Image Generation models have come out since the beginning of the year. Or how Lensa was copied by other apps and basically resulted in a 90% decrease in revenue for them in a few short weeks. 

Many people will need to rethink what they believe is possible as a startup and what their goals are. Do you really want to raise funding to try and become a Unicorn in a unique market or does it make more sense to bootstrap a reasonable business and become a studio that can create many such applications. I, also, recommend reading Packy's article that I linked above that might be a solution.

[Navigating choppy waters as a team in the dark]

So, how does this play out? I'm not sure. Typically, in bear markets we see quite a bit of consolidation as cash-rich companies buy up talent and technology to continue their lead. I suspect a good bit of this will happen in the next 12 months before things start to turn around. I see plenty of founders struggling and grappling on how to navigate through this. 

As to what am I doing? The same thing, trying to navigate the waters trying to identify the best way to survive and thrive as a business.

What do you see?

I am just now getting back into the flow for the New Year, as I was out of the country until Jan 7th, and was immediately sick for the following week. I meant to do quite a bit of reflection of 2022 and some planning for the year ahead, and finally found a chance to do both.

I'm sharing my 2022 more as an exercise to myself, but also to share what the journey of an entrepreneur looks like (I think it's mostly over-glorified) and share some of my specific learnings. This will likely be one of my lengthier posts.

Context

I've mentioned this before in a previous post, but I'm deeply passionate about helping create economic progress all around the world. I had been searching for opportunities that would do this, but I really didn't come along anything exciting until I I found Crypto.

In 2020, I'm locked at home like the rest of the world and I start watching the A16Z Crypto Startup School series, which really unlocked many ideas in my head. Primarily, I became obsessed with the idea of user-owned networks. What that means is "could the benefits of a networked business mostly accrue to the users who contribute to the network, and not solely to the central entity itself"? Many of the most powerful businesses, especially on the internet based marketplaces, are network based businesses like Airbnb, Uber, Etsy, Amazon, and many more.

As someone who cares deeply about shared economic progress, I would like to see a world in which this value is pushed to the users itself. I am still actively working on this mission, but I can tell you that it's much more difficult than I originally anticipated.

Let's start with January 2022

I officially quit my job in the first week of the year to pursue something I called World Address Book. The basic premise was: could we use smartphones to help map the 50% of the world that lacked addresses and build this on blockchains so that the contributors primarily captured most of the economic value. Though, my higher priority making sure I found a cofounder that matched my ambitions, had the same sense of mission, and had a complimentary set of skills and energy. I even wrote an in-depth personal statement as well as a process I wanted to follow. This bat signal helped me a lot by letting people know what I was about up front.

I pored through my existing network and through a community I had joined, On Deck, taking somewhere around 6-7 calls a day talking to various people to see if there was a match. Long story short, I finally met Tricia, my now cofounder. We followed the process mostly, and it became pretty apparent that it was a good fit and we are still operating together. After meeting up in person, it became pretty apparent to me that I wanted to be the CTO of the business, I enjoy being technical and focusing on the build side of the house. And Tricia has the energy and fight to make a powerful CEO. 

This took a few months to actually happen and really feel comfortable about the decision.

April 2022 - Ideas, Ideas, Ideas

Tricia's major focus was on how to provide more ownership to people who work in alternate work forces such as gig workers. This aligned with my obsession with user-owned networks. We went through a systematic approach on how to evaluate ideas, and honestly spent a ton of time reaching out to prospective customers, learning pain points, but mostly learning the flaws in the ideas then going back to the drawing board. 

Something that came up over and over again was that all marketplaces face a similar challenge, recruiting and retaining talent! We thought with our mission of ownership and this challenge we could build a loyalty service built on top of crypto rails that would reward supply-side operators in a marketplace with direct ownership over the platform. Here is a short demo of a working prototype that I had built showing you how you could distribute crypto token rewards to your users even if they didn't have a wallet. 

In parallel of me building out the product, Tricia kicked off our fundraising process as we were both running on personal funds and realized it was probably a good time to go out in the market and raise some funds. I'm a previous YC founder with years of startup experience, and Tricia was a 2x founder in the FinTech space, so we both felt confident. Additional to that, we realized that to give out ownership we would also need to get better at understanding the regulatory implications of distributing tokens as a centralized marketplace, so I was reading everything I could and talking to as many lawyers as I could before they would charge me :)

May 2022 - Buhbye Free Money

I'm not a markets expert, and I've definitely learned a lot through this year, unfortunately the hard way. Around May 2022, Ethereum had fallen more than 50% from its peak, inflation worries were peaking, and the Fed decided to hike interest rates. We were either already in or heading towards a bear market. This spooked almost every investor because the economic outlook of the future became uncertain, but the era of zero interest rates and unlimited money was over. Not simply from my experience but from other founder friends we discovered that investors were taking much less meetings than they were almost 6 months ago. 

This made fundraising impossible, and after collecting a number of angel checks decided to move on and get back to building. Though, we were still just running on personal funds. (Note: I did find out I was going to receive money from an acquisition of startup I was previously at which made things much easier on me.) 

July 2022 - Sufficient Decentralization, uh what's that?

Building product and getting customer demand were both going fairly well, we had a good set of early adopters and people using the beta product, but regulatory/legal became the biggest question mark, and inevitably the killer.

Let me explain... distributing ownership of your company is generally considered a really good thing for early contributors and startups because as the business grows in value, so does that person's ownership in it. This is classically how early stage startups incentivize employees with smaller salaries but future upside, it's a win-win for both parties. This is usually a pretty regulated industry by the SEC under Securities Law, and I believe it should be.

There is a conversation in the Crypto Legal world whether tokens are considered Securities. Well, it turns out that the SEC has a pretty well established way to evaluating whether something is a Security known as the Howey Test. I won't get into the nitty gritty, you can read into it yourself. This law is primarily designed to protect consumers from harm, but there are arguments that it also prevents a lot of people from accessing potentially valuable investments and simply makes the rich richer.

Now, in order for a crypto token to not be considered a security the token issuing entity/project must be sufficiently decentralized. To summarize a Web3 project must be decentralized from an economic, technical, and legal perspective. Which often translates to open source software, shared ownership/economic benefit, and a decentralized legal entity. 

This meant in order for our token incentives product to work our customers would have to decentralize by open sourcing all of their software, giving away most of their ownership in the business, and reincorporating in a completely different structure. We realized that this became less of a repeatable software business and more of a fully-handholding McKinsey style consulting and implementation. This was both a tall ask of us and our customers who wanted these benefits but were lean teams trying to focus on their core value propositions.

We had to pivot.

Obviously!

We are somewhere into the early August at this point. We realize that because convincing centralized entities to decentralize and THEN use our product was not a viable business plan, the obvious path is to try and sell this solution to already decentralized entities like DAOs. We went back to doing cold/warm outreach to talk to as many active and aspiring DAOs as we could. Unfortunately, we realized a few things:

1. There were more people trying to sell to DAOs than their were actual well functioning DAOs. And the ones that were well organized had this solved because this was one of the core functions of their operations. Most commonly known as Tokenomics.
2. There were many DAOs that were starting off but they weren't exactly sure how to operate as a DAO. The playbook wasn't exactly clear and regulatory environment wasn't the easiest to navigate.

So... of course this lead us to our next obvious conclusion. If there were more DAO tools than DAOs, and DAOs still didn't have a well known playbook, Casama needed to BE the DAO. By going through the hard learnings of having to actually build a network/community as DAO and the software to go alongside it, we would both be achieving the mission we set out and also learning the very important lessons necessary to teach others the playbook in the future.

But you can't just start a DAO you need something to have people to come together for and that kicked off the next evolution of our journey.

Finding our niche 

After going through a painful fundraising experience, our first failed attempt at PMF, and countless hours of conversations we were tired, yet still determined. We decided to spend some in person time together again back in NYC to get some energy back, do some networking, and continue to ideate and explore our new direction. 

We would show up every day and work through various concepts over a whiteboard while trying to nail down which niche to tackle first, then network with people we had scheduled some time with, and recap / be humans while having dinner at the end of the day (it's one of the things I miss about being in person, breaking bread with the people you work with everyday). We even spent some time doing an escape room together to get some team juices flowing!

There were two pictures one with my eyes closed, and one with Tricia's arms flapping. I decided to take the personal L and post the one where I'm embarrassing myself :)

Ultimately, we landed on creating a decentralized marketplace for UX research. Everyone knows that crypto has a severe UX problem, it's one of the key things to unlock mass adoption. We knew plenty of builders in the space who we believed would benefit from UX research, and it was a good way to launch a product and learn the details of what it would take to build a decentralized marketplace. We, also, wanted to move fast because there was one more fundraising window coming up before the infamous VC holiday season kicked in.

Tricia went immediately towards lining up some customers, and I started building out a prototype that would present UX research opportunities for people to sign up. We got some quick traction of people who wanted to do UX research and we started to feel good about it. At the same time, we were crafting a narrative together on how we could take this to VCs and raise a pre-seed round. (If you want to see the deck we raised, feel free to reach out to me for it). 

Dubious three letter acronyms

In October, Tricia, again being the hustler she is, started to line up meetings, getting intros, working on the deck. This time around meetings came quicker. It wasn't like the summer where it was very quiet from VCs. We started to get some traction with VCs with second, third, fourth meetings. It wasn't as fast as we would have loved, but compared to the summer we were satisfied. And now for those dubious three letter acronyms...

SBF & FTX, I won't pester on this for too long. But, again came another big crypto crash. I'm not a VC so I can't tell you exactly what is in there mind, but I'm certain that a major negative incident in crypto put them back on their heels about how much and where they wanted to invest. Psychologically, I understand it there is a huge blow to the market and it's time to be cautious. We likely also deserve blame for potentially not having a great pitch, narrative, etc. But, it wasn't a winning combo. 

We failed to raise again.

Luckily, we had some gracious angel investors who put money into our startup. And we were making money with our UX research product, and I was able to ship software on a weekly basis. All wasn't too bad. 

Today

It's January of 2023, we've got roughly 6 months of runway and some revenue coming in. But, we are starting to realize the pain point of UX research may not be a strong enough one. Of course talking to users is important, but people usually just chat with people in their discords or email their customers that they already know. The pain is very strong for UX researchers, but unfortunately there aren't enough of them in crypto for us to make a sustainable business out of it just yet.

So, again we are at a crossroads of a pivot. This time we've got a 6 month ticking time clock. 2022 was wild ride, I expect 2023 to be an even crazier one. And yet, the only way out is up and forward. Our only option is to be tougher than the obstacles in front of us. 

Lessons Learned

• It's a long journey and even if you ALREADY know that it was going to be long journey, it's still a longer journey.
• There is actually a benefit to echo chambers, meaning often times your buyer is someone who is already convinced that they need a solution and it needs to exist. You just have to convince them to get it from you. Same thing with investors, you don't want to pitch an investor who doesn't fundamentally even believe in the market you are operating in, you want an aligned partner who believes in you.
• Network-building is hard, but it might be one of the only moats left in today's business environment. Software is easy to write because everyone just uses open source code. Brands, networks, and physical products (few want to do it, and its a hard skill) are likely the only moats I believe in at this point.
• Something I'm learning right now. Go faster. Most of our ideas will fail, but you need to churn through them and see some level of traction before conceiving of grand plans. We made this mistake, and are likely still making this mistake.
• Outside of many developing nations, the world does not have a free financial system or even a censorship free internet. Capital controls are strong in developing nations because of years of mismanagement leading to short-term solutions. And most countries want to control your information flow to ensure their narrative is still your North Star.

One of the reason I chose to be an entrepreneur was that my ability to learn is limited only by me. I'm regularly learning new things on a very broad range of topics from entrepreneurship itself, cryptography, distributed systems, marketplace building, people management, sales, marketing, economics, and many more. But, here is the thing... I don't feel like I'm making progress towards complete knowledge. 

No, actually the very opposite is occurring. I, often, feel as if I have newer questions I didn't even think to ask myself when I receive new information. The process goes something like this: "Oh, looks like I need to solve this problem. Let me look for a solution", "Wait, why did they choose to solve the problem in this way?" "Okay that makes sense, but there are still some gaps. Can I do something different that may solve this problem differently?" "Does this solution actually accomplish what I set out to achieve?" "What else can I do to make this better? What's good enough for today?"... and the cycle goes on and on.

If you are someone who likes clear cut answers to things than maybe you should stick to mathematics or physics, because outside of those fields almost every answer has a trade-off and can be questioned to infinity. But, see that's actually great! If most things can be questioned, it means that there is room for improvement or a different set of tradeoffs can be made to make a unique solution. If you find yourself in a place of more questions than answers after serious efforts, it means you are operating in the frontier and that's an exciting place to be.

If you are grappling with something and you feel as if the answers are not coming to you. Just step back for a second and identify whether you are even asking the right question(s). Often times people have tried answering these questions in the past with some degree of success and the answer may exist out there but you may have to reframe yourself first. And sometimes... destiny dictates that you must be the one to answer this question for the rest of the world.

Also, when pitching investors I don't know whether they want me to pretend that I have all the answers to all the questions in the world, but I feel like the intellectually honest response would be to say "I don't know, but here are the three most important questions that I'm facing right now around this problem" I've come to realize that I become skeptical of people who believe that they have the sure-fire answer to most things. 

If you ask my mom, I wouldn't let her sleep through the nights because I always had "one more question." But, I'm sure every parent feels this way... maybe my parents just never killed that curious kids appetite for knowledge. 

Now, that the crypto prices has tanked again pessimism and cynicism are back as the mainstream narrative. Honestly, that's alright it's always good for an industry to be critiqued and questioned, otherwise we build in a vacuum that never gets tested by society. We truly are in a battlefield of ideas, every concept we all grapple with or take for granted other than the laws of physics are socially contested ideas that are agreed upon to varying degrees by people around the world.

Casama is an attempt to fix the broken model of marketplaces. 

Marketplaces have traditionally been a place to aggregate supply and demand in a way that benefits all participants involved. For example, in most developing nations you buy your groceries or clothing from a local marketplace that is located in a specific place and has numerous vendors to shop from. This creates open-competition among the vendors to keep prices at a reasonable rate, allows people to buy all of their different needs in a single shopping spree, and discover new items outside of their immediate needs. For vendors, they get to benefit from larger foot traffic allowing everyone to get an increase in sales, allow them to provide a unique good to avoid competition, or sell non-essential goods to the people passing by. This model is everywhere! Local food halls, all types of malls, Disneyland, Walmart, Amazon, Uber, Airbnb are all examples of various types of marketplaces. They are generally great for commerce.

But marketplaces require some initial capital, land, investment, and/or effort made by a single party to get things off the ground. This party will charge a fixed or variable rate for access to this marketplace to recoup the investment, and ongoing service and maintenance costs. This is also fair. They play a critical role in creating a positive sum situation for a whole host of people and increasing economic output in the locale or service industry. But, over time the incentive of this party gets corrupted because they realize that the marketplace has network effects and/or serious platform lock-in and it's difficult or virtually impossible for someone to leave.

I'm not here to bash marketplace operators, this is simply a result of the current model that marketplaces operate on.

Casama believes there is a better way to do this. That's where Web3 comes in. Web3 allows us to incentivize participants to join and engage in a network through direct ownership of that network. They become valuable participants through their efforts, but also have a control/say in the direction of the network over time. Additionally, the network being built on blockchains means that the network can get forked if it is becoming overly extractive as an economic coordinator. These checks and balances create a much better model for building and managing marketplaces in the long run. Marketplaces should be owned, operated, and improved by its participants, and through fair and reasonable incentives or compensation.

Casama intends to build a decentralized marketplace servicing the Crypto User Research problem. Crypto has a well-known, oft-discussed UX issue, and that is to be expected from such a new industry that is establishing new patterns. We want to help crypto builders of today  improve their products by creating a marketplace of user research opportunities. A marketplace where builders can permissionlessly create user testing opportunities with a specific type of user and have quick facilitation of the process. Today, we are focused on providing value to builders all over the world compensate these users for valuable feedback while building the infrastructure necessary for a fully autonomous decentralized marketplace.

Check us out at: https://app.casama.xyz 

There is likely a lengthier discussion to be had on the role of ownership in our society, but I'll try to convince you of a specific version of the future I hope to see and am actively working on building.

Let's start with the why: 

Economic inequity in itself is not the core culprit around the quality of life for most people, absolute poverty and lack of access to basic goods is. Inequity plays out in other sinister ways: 1) it creates a psychological barrier in peoples minds that they can't be happy unless they were higher up the food chain, 2) wealth compounds and if you don't have it you will get left behind, 3) inflation hurts the bottom percentile of wealth holders the most, the same basic goods that were barely accessible are now completely inaccessible now. Inequity is a problem that is less about a specific point in time, but about long-term projections of where ones future may lie if current trends hold.

Wealth is not a zero-sum metric, else we would all still be fighting over the same stone-based hammers and wood huts. New wealth is constantly generated, and yes sometimes destroyed, the challenge is where that wealth gets distributed. Most people get wealth distributed to them through wages and salaries, and this wealth is then spent on basic necessities, life expenses, comfort goods, and luxury items which gets distributed again through wages and salaries and the cycle goes on. BUT, there are a few who earn their wealth differently, these are your land owners, equity holders, investors, bond purchasers, and so on. They get their wealth in the form of ownership, which turns out to be better at wealth preservation than wages and salaries. Take a look at an oft-told story about wealth preservation and growth: 

(Credit: https://www.notboring.co/p/ownership-and-the-american-dream)

Okay, let's simplify. Wealth is distributed on a spectrum of wages, salaries, and various forms of ownership. Wealth is preserved through cash savings and ownership of assets. But, history has clearly shown us that assets hold their value much better than cash savings. 

Let's take a look at the two most well known assets most people hold: stocks and homes. Roughly, 44% of US residents do not own any form of stock and about 35% don't own a home. And often the distribution of how much each person owns is very concentrated as shown below:

Yes, we can make many arguments as to why this is the case. I believe there are three key components that have resulted in this situation: historical, structural, and educational; yet, only two of these are properly actionable. Again, let's do a quick break down of each.

Historical: For generations specific people were not even allowed to own anything. Women were not allowed to own property in various civilizations, and white women have only been able to really own property in the US over the last 100 or so years. People of color have had an even shorter time frame to accumulate wealth in Western nations (where most wealth is concentrated).

Structural: There are legitimate barriers that prevent easy distribution of wealth. Ownership is often accounted in paper documents in a legal registry somewhere and has to get updated through an expensive process through lawyers. Some asset types aren't even available to specific people unless they can prove they already ARE RICH?! 

Educational: There is some level of agency we must give to the individual around their understanding of the world around them, but also we can blame an educational system that does not prioritize this information. Many people are not educated on how wealth is preserved and grown by the rich and very rich throughout the world and how this educational gap results in a missed opportunity for them. For most people in developing countries, wealth is primarily preserved in cash savings (which has proven to actually LOSE value due to inflation) and real estate/land. 

Is there a way out of this?

I'm an entrepreneur, not a politician, so I can't in my position build scalable solutions for reparations. It is also a very divisive topic and I lean towards bringing people together. But, we can restructure society to make distribution of wealth easier and educate people on why they should own more assets and how. 

I will pose more questions for you to think about before I try and attempt an answer in Part 2:

1. Is it even possible to manage distribution of ownership to billions of people, doesn't that get really complicated?

2. Does ownership create entitlement to various perks that rich people have? Do I get to have a voice in the direction of what I own? Do I WANT to have a voice over this or just financial upside?

3. How easy is it for me to exchange one form of ownership versus a different kind?

4. What can even be owned? 

5. Financial literacy is at the root of this issue, what are the building blocks for people to understand wealth generation/preservation? But, also how is this drastically changing in the century ahead?

Obvious challenge

If you can't make enough money to meet your basic needs, then obviously you can't save your capital for long-term thinking. This is the right of the privileged, but we must also fight for more people to get ownership in conjunction to their wages... not in replacement of it. 

I'm actively working on solving this problem as the CTO of a company called Casama, if you'd love to learn more... feel free to reach out!

Appendix:

https://news.gallup.com/poll/266807/percentage-americans-owns-stock.aspx

https://www.theguardian.com/money/us-money-blog/2014/aug/11/women-rights-money-timeline-history

To be able to overcome any task, accomplish any mission, achieve self-defined success one must begin with belief. Without belief, one does not think it is possible to achieve what they are imagining in their minds. If you do not think something is possible, or that you are not capable of such a feat, well... you have already been defeated.

Having belief in oneself does not guarantee success, but without it it does guarantee you failure. Belief is the ground where the stairway to success begins, without it the stairs have no foundation and you cannot muster the energy for the journey.

Belief is not a binary trait that you do or don't have, it is a state that is constantly in flux and must be regularly nurtured. If you're searching for motivation today, instead cultivate self-belief and let the energy come from within you. 

Believe in yourself today.

For the past several years, I've been really interested in understanding economic freedom, opportunity, mobility, and inequality. I tend to usually put the "why" together later on these things, and I had a moment yesterday that began to tie everything together in a single narrative for me. It was like a rush of mental clarity that came all of a sudden, but was really a culmination of searching for quite some time. Why was I so naturally gravitated towards this problem and why had my curiosity not faded out like it usually does with other topics?

Allow me to give you a personal story, a "100 years of Solitude" moment in my own life that has led me to pursue the path I am on.

---------------------

My family origins are from a small village, Gaggar Kalan, in the State of Punjab in Pakistan where my ancestors have resided for 100s of years. Gaggar, as we mostly refer to it, has a few hundred citizens mostly living in concrete homes in a tightly packed orientation. There are multiple mosques, where local committees meet to discuss various topics that pertain to the daily challenges of the village. The village is surrounded by arable land and used to be the bedrock of the economy of surrounding communities for generations.

But, there is only so much opportunity in a small agrarian village to support an ever-growing family, and rising standards of living. It is not uncommon for men to reach a certain age and emigrate to a nearby city like Rawalpindi, Lahore, or even as far as Delhi to find opportunities for income to support the family; that is precisely what my grandfather did. He was able to land a job as a chauffeur for a parliamentary figure in pre-partition India; that money was used to raise 7 children, the youngest of them being my father. 

Continuing the trend of emigration, my father immigrated to the United States in the late 70s for precisely the same reason as his father had...in search of better opportunities that weren't available to him in his local area. There wasn't much family here, but he found a home in Jackson Heights, New York and frankly, if you ask him those were the best years of his life! He did odd jobs in NY like bussing tables at a restaurant, working at a VHS store, and ultimately ended up in the taxi business, the holy grail of immigrant NYC jobs, for over a decade. This allowed him to find stable income, marry my mother back home, have children, and immigrate his family to the United States over a course of almost 14 years.

This series of events allowed for my sister and I to grow up in the United States, and get a quality education without the burden of having to support the family financially at a young age, which is all too common in developing nations. That quality education led to both my sister and I to pursue careers we are both passionate about, but most importantly explore life outside of productive labor. We had higher social freedoms than my parents did.

What brought it all together for me yesterday, and may seem like a really simple thing to many who may not have been in these circumstances. I went skiing for the first time ever at the age of 28 last weekend, and yesterday, my niece went skiing for the first time ever at the age of 4. Skiing wasn't a possibility in my life at the age of 4, I'm not claiming that my family was dirt poor and we couldn't afford basic necessities, but honestly, it was most of what we could afford. My parents worked extremely hard to be able to put my sister and I in the position we are in today, but we didn't always have excess money to take expensive holidays or pick up expensive hobbies. Heck, I don't even know how to swim for this exact same reason! But, this is NOT true for my niece who because of the efforts and sacrifices of those before her, she is able to experience certain things that were unimaginable to me at a young age. She has certain social freedoms that I never did, and that is truly a beautiful multi-generational story.

My grandfather and father recognized the value of economic opportunities and how it would provide a better life for the successive generations. And I have personally been a beneficiary of their sacrifice. Though this story isn't just limited to me! I have over 60 family members who have gone or are going through this exact same scenario today. Starting from a simple position but, working hard in an environment that most of the time provides just compensation for those working to improve their conditions. But, more importantly, have opportunities of upwards mobility, if they so choose. I've witnessed my family also struggled to shift from a scarcity mindset to an abundance mindset because the financial conditions changed so rapidly. For immigrant children this seems like a commonplace story, but we are in the minority here.

This same situation that my family was able to leverage is not true for everyone in the world. Not everyone has the means or the luck to immigrate to a nation that provides opportunity. My life would be very different if my father remained in Pakistan. And I don't want to take away from those that work hard in developing nations to provide for their family, but the opportunity gap between the two nations is very large. Economic Freedom is not only about higher wages, better jobs, but it is also about being able to maximize your personal capabilities, for a writer to be able to write and not be stuck laying bricks because of lack of economic choices.

This recognition that I am a product of luck, hard work, and geographic circumstance led me to explore why opportunities are available to some and not to others. I won't go into depth today on why this happens, or what we can do about it, that will likely come in the future. Though, I'm strongly convinced that there is an incredible shift happening where opportunities will be a lot more globalized and more but, not completely independent of one's location.

Want to learn more about Economic Freedom and why it is so important to understand and improve, learn more here.

I'm hoping this turns out to be a more ongoing dump of links that may help you learn about Crypto/Blockchains/Web3.

**Additionally, if you are interested in adding to this, please send over a categorized list or link with a brief description to help me grow this. If this gains enough traction, I will likely turn this into a Github Repo where others can contribute freely and openly.**

None of this is financial advise.

If you want to start anywhere, start here. It covers the basics, and builds very well on to each subject: https://nakamoto.com/introduction-to-cryptocurrency/

More in depth learning below... this is not in exact order. If something seems to go over your head, go to a different link and revisit later. I am fairly technical and have designed this with a specific bias for other builders.

Start with Cryptography

It's crucial to understand what Cryptography is in order to understand why ANY of the things after this work. 

• - Crash Course is a gem, if you aren't already an avid watcher. This CS course changed my life. The most important part begins at 8:26, pay attention to asymmetric encryption. It's at the root of all Crypto 
• - An explanation on RSA. "RSA creates the ability to generate unforgeable signatures" which allows crypto users to be the ONLY ones that can send THEIR cryptocurrencies or tokens that they own and no one else.
  
• - Eddie Woo with the best mathematical explanation of RSA, for you geeks who care.
  
• - Hash functions. These are at the core of what a Blockchain does, it uses a mathematical property of uniqueness to allow collaborators (miners) to cryptographically agree on the contents of the "block"
  
• - Khan Academy talking about "HashCash" the main Proof of Work Algorithm that makes Bitcoin tick. It puts all of the previous lessons into work. It will make more sense if you read the Bitcoin Whitepaper below
  

Distributed System and P2P Networking

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajjOEltiZm4 - Distributed Systems 101
• - P2P Networking. Remember Napsters, Kazaa, LimeWire, BitTorrent... they all worked on the principles of P2P networking. No Centralized database, just a bunch of people sharing between one another directly.
  
• Advanced note: P2P networking is WAY slower than centralized systems as messages only need to go to a single point in centralized systems, and coordination is a lot easier. In P2P networking messages have to go to the vast majority of the network and therefore a single "event" will take much longer to propagate through the system. Solana (https://solana.com) claims there is a way to reach the theoretical limit of centralized system (710K transactions per second) in Blockchain systems through a consensus mechanism known as Proof of History.

Blockchain Technology

• https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf - The Crypto rabbit hole begins here. Period. This was the seminal white paper written by a pseudonymous internet actor named Satoshi Nakamato, it is elegantly written.
• https://andersbrownworth.com/blockchain/ - Best way to learn about blockchain. Play with a blockchain. Anders brown worth has created a beautiful and simple explanation of how a blockchain works. Click on the headers at the top in order from left to right and enjoy :)
  
• https://www.coursera.org/learn/blockchain-basics#syllabus - More blockchain basics
  
• https://github.com/yjjnls/awesome-blockchain - Go crazy! Seriously, build a blockchain... It's the only way to really learn the inner working, in my opinion.
  

Ethereum and other "chains"

• https://ethereum.org/en/what-is-ethereum/ - Bitcoin started everything, but Ethereum likely took Crypto much further towards main adoption by turning the Blockchain into a World Computer. A publicly accessible machine that everyone could verify.
• https://solana.com/ - Ask anyone the biggest challenge with Cryptocurrencies and they will like say "real-world use cases" and "high gas fees". Solana wants to tackle this second one to allow developers to solve the first one. Solana claims to be a highly efficient, very fast blockchain. 
  
• https://cosmos.network/ - Another strong but underrated player that has been used in a lot of interesting real world use cases.
  
• https://thedapplist.com/learn/what-is-the-blockchain-scalability-trilemma/ - As you learn about more blockchains, you'll be like OH well if this one is faster AND cheaper why would I use anything else? Well... there is no free lunch! Speed, and cheapness come at a cost of security.
• https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/scaling/layer-2-rollups/ - As important as it is to try and understand blockchains, it is critically important to understand other scaling solutions that are built on top of existing blockchains. These are known as Layer 2 Solutions and is definitely going to be a technical read if you are so inclined.
  

I could keep posting here but further Blockchains to Google are Avalanche, Polygon (Matic), Polkadot, NEAR, Terra, Algorand. And a special mention to Layer 2 technologies such as Optimism, Arbitrum, Starkware, zkSync, LoopRing, and Polygon Hermez.

Smart Contracts

• https://nakamotoinstitute.org/the-idea-of-smart-contracts/ - Nick Szabo proposed the idea of Smart Contracts in the 1997(!) and is really the most well known thinker in this space ahead of anyone else. This was the original idea behind it all.
• https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/smart-contracts/ - Ethereum really made Smart Contracts popular by creating a fully programmable blockchain and building a software language on top of it known as Solidity.
  
• https://cryptozombies.io/ - I'm a firm believer in hands on learning and really recommend playing with smart contracts to really understand why they are so important, powerful, but just as dangerous if not treated with care. CryptoZombies is by far the best Crypto tutorial of any kind I've seen to date.
  
• https://blog.althea.net/how-smart-contracts-on-blockchain-can-bring-broadband-to-all/ - A friend of mine wrote this post while working on figuring out how to increase internet access to all and discovered how Smart Contracts could help. Highly recommend this read as it explains a wonderful real-world use case of smart contracts.

dApps

In this section I want to avoid "shilling" any specific token or project, so I will stay higher level. PLEASE do your own research go WAY deeper than I am mentioning here because I am only giving you the tip of the iceberg and believe it is best if you dig into specific projects yourself.

• - This is the only specific project I will share because it is one of the best examples of how to understand what a decentralized protocol is, why it is important, and how is it "decentralized"
• - Protocols vs Products. This took me a while to understand myself. Protocols are open source systems that anyone can access and are unbiased and unopinionated about certain specifcs. While Products are usually opinionated (in a good way) where they believe there are best ways to interact with the underlying protocol. Like different browsers were for HTTP/TCP protocols.
  
• - Blockchains are worthless unless we build useful things on top of them. What are those new useful things?
  
• https://blog.coinbase.com/a-beginners-guide-to-decentralized-finance-defi-574c68ff43c4 - A key use case of blockchains is Decentralized Finance. Can you get the same benefits of a bank, without the bank? Crypto enthusiasts believe yes and more!
  
• https://wifpr.wharton.upenn.edu/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/DeFi-Beyond-the-Hype.pdf - Defi from a more traditional source.
  
• https://future.a16z.com/nft-canon/ - Everything NFT.
  

Security

It wouldn't be write to be in Crypto if you weren't understanding the security implications. Having all of the power of blockchains creates an incredible responsibility to manage your crypto safely. 

• https://www.gemini.com/cryptopedia/crypto-wallets-hot-cold - Probably the first thing I'd recommend if you want to hold a large amount of crypto is getting a hardware wallet.
• https://www.investopedia.com/articles/forex/042315/beware-these-five-bitcoin-scams.asp - Just like the early days of the Internet, it was ripe with e-mail scams that people fell for. Luckily, we know this pattern was going to emerge and can fight it way faster through education and UX.
  
• https://www.cybavo.com/blog/defi-hacks-2021/ - It is critical to understand the safety/security implications of these systems. Because they are open source adversaries also can find holes in the system, but so can white hat hackers. This double edged sword is important to understand. I want to share the downsides of Crypto as well... sometimes bad people to bad things, and good people get hurt. Be Careful!
  

There is so much more to go into, but I'll keep this a V1 and optimize for getting it started.