I said twitter because it already hosts things like @whitehouse and @potus - so in a certain sense it is already fulfilling the function - but any public short message platform would suffice if they held those types of accounts
G+ was glorious in the beginning days. With no qualms it was the best social network I've experienced yet. IMO, what killed it was Google requiring the real names - which I still believe was a good idea - but then the death knell was when they waffled on that. If they would have stood firm on the real names policy, I'm convinced they would still be here today and there is a very good chance they would have surpassed both Facebook and Twitter.
I commented something similar to this below - the true value of Bitcoin is that it was put on autopilot and took off - in the meantime, there is no record of who the creator of it is - except a persona called Satoshi Nakamoto. It has been adopted widely enough that it cannot be shut down. It is decentralized, extra-governmental, and you can't sue or indict the founder or a centralized organization. Yes, bitcoin is code. Yes it is being used for the same purposes as fiat and banking. Yes it could certainly still use lots of adaptation. The simple matter that most people don't understand (yet) however is that Bitcoin is Anarchy.
Is it really "Anarchy" if it's essentially controlled by small a clique of miners with specialized hardware that most people don't have / can't realistically have access to?
How? What I've described is closer to an oligarchy than it is to anarchy.
So either you disagree with my initial description, or you disagree that that description matches something other than anarchy. Either way, I think you'll find either one of those a difficult argument to make.
Only if you presuppose that the 'small clique of miners with specialized hardware' represents the same interests as the system that bitcoin is slowly starting to displace.
Perhaps I should have specified anarchy to the system as it currently exists. It's a time bomb built and released to destroy the economic status quo.
Perhaps the most powerful thing about Bitcoin is that the guy who created it is unknown (if Satoshi was a guy or a lone person at all) and that it mostly runs on autopilot and at this point is not governed by a single body. It can't be sued. The creator of it can't be sued. And yes, more of it can't be made and there is deflation built into it. Genius.
Recent startup failure was ZguideZ - an app that allowed locals to create their own digital tours, charge what they want, and then collect the majority of the profit on tours sold.
It failed because it was a far bigger project than I was able to manage as a solo founder - though I tried. It was beyond my ability to code it and I didn't have funding to recruit quality developers. I hired a budget team and we cut corners to stay in budget. I was unsuccessful in recruiting a team - partly because I had taken on a cofounder who decided he would rather surf than work on the business development end of our product - without a founder agreement, he was dead weight that scared investors and potential team mates away. In desperation for help, I began working with a veteran who had recently separated from Army intelligence - he had undisclosed mental issues and when our business plan was made a finalist in a university bizplan competition, he accused me of being a spy sent to retrieve classified information from him and sabotaged our meetings with investors, potential hires, and the competition administrators. He withdrew us from the competition and sent out insane accusatory emails to our bankers and advisors.
I attempted to carry on but the shutdowns of tourism in Hawaii and sheer exhaustion over my co-founder mistakes led to shuttering this project we thought would be the next AirBnB.
All told, this was a budget MBA program for me which ended up costing about 1/4 what a quality MBA would have cost me and probably taught me far more.
Lessons learned were:
1) the importance of a founder agreement
2) the importance of doing enough due diligence to understand the true scope of a project and then doubling or tripling the amount of work it will take to achieve that scope
3) the importance of working with the right people and refusing to settle when it comes to product or team
> I had taken on a cofounder who decided he would rather surf than work on the business development end of our product - without a founder agreement, he was dead weight that scared investors and potential team mates away
This is, unfortunately, very common in startup communities. There are a lot of people who attach themselves to startups, discover that they're not interested in putting in the work required, and then decide to coast as long as possible when they realize it's not so easy for their partners to cut them out.
These people are often very charismatic and are experts at inflating their previous credentials. Always do a deep dive on potential cofounders' backgrounds, including backchannel references. Always establish cofounder agreements and, most importantly, at least a 1-year vesting cliff on any equity, no matter how much you like the other person. If they aren't pulling their weight at the 9-12 month mark, do everything to remove them from the company before they have any vested equity.
> In desperation for help, I began working with a veteran who had recently separated from Army intelligence - he had undisclosed mental issues and when our business plan was made a finalist in a university bizplan competition, he accused me of being a spy sent to retrieve classified information from him and sabotaged our meetings with investors, potential hires, and the competition administrators. He withdrew us from the competition and sent out insane accusatory emails to our bankers and advisors.
Mental illness is also, sadly, disproportionately represented in startup communities. I think it's a combination of factors: People who suffer from certain untreated mental illnesses like you describe are more likely to be unable to maintain a normal career, so they seek out alternative career paths like startups where they don't technically have to report to a manager. Certain mental illnesses can also come with bouts of grandiose thoughts, delusions of grandeur, a penchant for risk-taking, and other traits that can easily be confused for confident, ambitious startup personalities.
This is a perfect example of the importance of operating agreements and vesting cliffs, as well as due diligence on anyone you might go into business with.
AirBnB has something like that called "Experiences." I'm not saying that to be critical; if anything it should be affirmation that you were onto something, i.e. there really is a market for such things.
Definitely a market for it. Another Hawaii company, Shaka Guides has a similar concept though with voice-actor recorded tours and they seem to be doing well. Our concept was to have locals sharing their history and knowledge on a self-guiding tour.
AirBNB Experiences is things like "Come swimming with dolphins" or "come on a wine tour".
This idea seems more like the voice-guided tours you can get in museums etc but creating a market for them. It's probably a decent idea, but possibly complementary rather than competitive with what AirBNB is doing.
The idea of running it through a pair of AR sunglasses is wild! We were doing it strictly on smartphones - some of the biggest headaches came as a result of Apple's App Store process - we had to rework everything and since the back end was independent that meant we had to rework the android version as well.
> due diligence on anyone you might go into business with.
> importance of operating agreements and vesting cliffs
I'd argue it's more important to work with someone you've worked with in the past and know you can trust and will work hard. The operating agreements and due diligence are there for the worst case scenario, but from your story it seems pretty clear they were questionable co-founders to start with.
I think this was a great idea btw, sorry that it didn't work out. Before covid I always used to try and find audio walking tours for cities, and alternative ones to the normally rather dry official ones for museums, but there really isn't much out there.
Really powerful experience that I am grateful for (though I wish my hair would grow back - lol). At the moment working on a much more manageable project with a great team (Iwahai.com) and maybe in the future there will be an opportunity to revisit the ZguideZ concept. I still love the idea, but managing a worldwide network of independent guides is more than I want to take on at the moment.
Just prior to smartphones, I founded a startup called Puhrump that allowed people to call into a call center and have the operators google anything for them. It was a way to solve bar bets and find things out before the internet was in everyone's pocket. Unfortunately, the internet appeared in everyone's pockets before we had completed our seed round of funding. Great idea but a couple of years too late.
In 2004 my brother and I developed a buttplug shaped like George W. Bush - we called it the Bushplug. Manufacturing was more expensive than we had expected but we sold about 100 of them - presumably as novelty gifts. Our price point was too high for a novelty gift and the nose was a little too pointy to be an enjoyable sex toy. We made our money back and had some fun with being featured on BoingBoing and Fleshbot. Someone tried to sue us. We sent the last of the Bushplugs to the Smithsonian's presidential museum. We made our investment back but didn't become buttplug millionaires.
The other alternative to the pointy nose theory was that there just weren't a lot of people who were into having W up their butt, but we felt that must not be the case.
If we had that, we 'wood' have certainly succeeded! Hey...that makes me realize the Cheney Dick could be made out of wood so the splinters would stay with you forever.
