hot 🔥 takes

Hi, friends.

I’m back after a week off, did anything interesting happen last week?

I was in Maui for a quick holiday. We were swimming with my four-year-old daughter Harper when we looked up at the hillside and saw a wildfire start with smoke billowing. Of course, I snapped the “tourists swimming while the hillside burns in paradise” apocalyptic climate change photos.

We packed our ‘go bags’, although we didn’t have to evacuate. I did take Harper with us on a drive that night because she wanted to see and understand what was happening. This is the 4th wildfire she’s dealt with. She asked me, “Was it like this when you were little?”

Nope.

Our climate is changing and things are coming into focus. To me, it seems as though neither the worst case nor best case scenarios are going to happen. Renewables are getting cheaper and being adopted on a global scale, the economic case for saving the planet is there. We’ve got to redouble our mitigation and adaptation efforts, and a focus for me is teaching my daughter resiliency.

Speaking of resiliency…things have been busy this last week online.

Will Elon make Twitter relevant (and profitable) again? He’s following a certain someone’s playbook of generating attention through daily upheaval. Fortunately for him, Twitter is a company that directly converts attention into dollars. Will we keep paying attention? The time seems ripe for a new app where we spend all our time, I don’t think the Metaverse is it. If it's decentralized and follows Web3 ideals, maybe we will earn for the attention we pay with.

How about the FTX collapse? An investor friend was surprised that Sequoia didn’t do their due diligence on this one. I mean, it didn’t take much. So, FTX is a web of 133 entities, and it has no real board? 🚩🚩 Definitely a sad situation for people who lost funds. I’m not talking about investors. Sequoia and the rest of investors losing their money sucks, but that's why startup investors have to be accredited, sometimes startups can go to zero. It’s the folks who saw a TV ad with Tom Brady and Giselle and wired funds to an unregulated entity. The widespread loss of funds… in an entity people thought was safe… after the consumerization of the “get rich quick” nature of crypto… is really sad.

This will take more wind out of the sails of crypto, but to me, it's a reminder that the bottom is falling out of crypto trading, but not the building of Web3 technologies. Are you an engineer or a financier? Do you build value, or extract value?

At Flow State Industries, we’re building. In the last month we’ve built smart contracts, a physical art display that connects with people's wallets to display NFTs, and had recruiting calls with talented teams in Nigeria, New York, and Eastern Europe.

It’s time to build. Hit me up when you’re ready.

- Chris