Long-Term Games and New Adventures
Welcome to the 33rd entry of my public journal, where I share *some of the things* I've been thinking about, learning about, and exploring across work, tech, wellness, and life.
Dear Friends,
Here’s the latest from my side—catching up with old friends, rethinking ‘early’, and gearing up for an exciting week at FarCon.
Playing Long Term Games
I had several interactions this past week that reminded me of Naval Ravikant’s famous quote about playing long term games with long term people. Up until two years ago when I took my first steps down an entrepreneurial path, I had never thought much about my network—I was in engineering, after all, not in sales. The idea of "networking" always felt too transactional and fake to me.
Looking back, I realize I never had a need for a strong external network, having had long tenures through my career (10 years at Aon, 10 at Cornerstone). For the most part, everything I ever needed I could get from a colleague who was always within reach.
In the past two years, I've founded a consulting firm and a media company, both bootstrapped startups. I now find myself spending a lot of time on the phone, reconnecting with former colleagues. I look forward to these conversations because it feels like talking with old friends — intimate, friendly and rooted in trust, even when we haven’t spoken in months or even years. The conversations typically follow the same formula - “how are you doing” followed by “how can we help each other?”.
I had chats with four former colleagues from Cornerstone just this past week and left each one with a sense of satisfying warmth. The four people I connected with this week have also all moved on to different roles at different companies but there’s one thing they all have in common: they’re long term people playing long term games.
When you’re playing long-term games, not every day feels like a win. You don’t get rewards all the time. But when they show up, like they did for me this week, nothing feels better.
On Being Early
In the crypto world, there's a lot of backslapping and high-fiving about being early. The prevailing wisdom being that the earliest investors reap the greatest rewards. “We are so early” is both a meme and a rallying cry. Lately, though, I’ve been finding this attitude increasingly irksome. Simply being early isn't sufficient; we need to be proactive and constructive as well.
As a child, I was always obsessively punctual. If I wasn’t five minutes early, I was late —to school, birthday parties, gymnastics practice, horseback riding lessons, anything. My dad was like me, ready to go with shoes on, five minutes early to everything. My mom, on the other hand, was notoriously late, always leaving me as the last one waiting to be picked up, her car last in the carpool line.
When my now husband and I first moved in together and we would be getting ready for parties I would always be ready on time. If a party started at 8, I’d be ready by 7:45, while he would be taking his time. It used to annoy me until he pointed out there was no reason to go to a social event on time when everyone else arrives fashionably late. It’s a waste of time. I’ve since adopted his approach, intentionally going late to social events. Surprisingly I like it better this way.
FarCon
I’m excited to attend FarCon, a Farcaster user conference in Venice Beach this week. I attended the first one in Boston last year. Last year’s event was very much an unconference - planned by and for Farcaster users without any influence from outside vendors, VCs, investors, corporations, etc. This second conference is still following the same format of being planned entirely by the community with no direct involvement from the core Farcaster team, however the scale of the event is significantly larger than last year, mirroring the explosion in Farcaster usage over the past year. Whereas last year there were about 70 attendees, this year there will be about 400, with side events lasting over 5 days.
Where I’ll be hanging out this week:
My GM Farcaster cofounder Nounish Prof and I are hosting welcome cocktails at the roof of Hotel Erwin for any of our subscribers who have minted mole or wowow. Access to private events is a cool use case for NFTs.
Base is hosting a BuildHER breakfast Thursday morning before the main summit starts. All 30 spots are full! Very excited to meet this group.
I am giving a lightning talk at the main summit on Thursday to answer the question “Is Farcaster still a scenius?”
We will be live streaming our 100th GM Farcaster episode with Farcaster founders, Dan Romero and Varun Srinivasan on Friday at 9:30 AM PT.
Attending a Pioneer lunch hosted by Cabin for people interested in Network States and network communities.
A Farcaster Art Night gallery party Friday night.
A pickleball tournament, because, why not?
Some of the (other) Things
As always, some of the other things I’ve been reading, creating, thinking or learning about since my last post:
Last year I wrote a blog documenting a tech stack for a minimum viable podcast. I published a follow up post last week for people interested in a minimum viable onchain podcast. In the post I define what it means to have an onchain podcast, what benefits it provides, and what is involved in creating one.
Erik Torenberg published his one page master plan for Turpentine, his startup focused on B2B technology, investing and media. It’s a great read for podcast fans as well as people interested in the attention economy and new media.
The TV show Fallout was excellent. Definitely recommend it! I think I particularly enjoyed watching it after having just read Tomorrow, And Tomorrow, And Tomorrow. Both have something to do with gaming. I’m not a gamer in any sense but I have an appreciation for that whole world.
I recently revisited the book Cloud Strategy: A Decision-based Approach to Successful Cloud Migration by Gregor Hohpe when I was doing research for my DevOps paper and was reminded how good it is. A great read for anyone interested in how to migrate legacy applications to cloud.
Some of the Pics
Top row: Inside the capital building in Madison, WI; college diet in a college town, optimistic art at the Whitney museum
Bottom row: Lots of grass, happy spring and happy earth day!
A Note to My Subscribers
I started this substack in December 2022 as an experiment to see if developing a writing habit would help clarify my thinking and/or provide other benefits. You can read about my original intentions in my first post or my more recent reflections after sticking with it for a year.
I write about twice a month and share musings, meditations, and links to things I’m finding interesting as I build out my consulting company, raise my kids, and have fun creating and learning in the worlds of crypto, tech, finance, science and wellness.
Thank you for supporting my writing and journey. If you’d like to get in touch you can reply to me here or find me on X and farcaster.
Until next time, keep putting good into the world. —adrienne🌏❤️