product | angel | crypt◎ | 🇰🇪
I turned 39 this month and I had three thoughts / reflections that I thought I’d write down and share: Great people, over long term: Meet lots of new people and be open, generous and curious. When you discover great people try to help them repeatedly without asking for anything in return. Relationships are built […]
As a small Angel Investor I aim to be a “friend to the founders” and an loyal supporter of the company throughout it’s growth. Here is the note that I typically send to founders after making an investment in their company to share how I like to collaborate. I’ve gotten some good feedback on it, […]
I’m experimenting with Decentralized Finance (DeF) as I’ve been thinking more about unbundling of work and cash flow. I think that DeFi, and yield farming in particular, could be a viable mechanism to generate predictable cash flow, that is not tied to active labor. I hope to be able to only commit a few hours […]
DeFi is evolving quickly and presents interesting opportunities to make money by investing in new projects. This is a summary of what I wish I’d done before starting to invest more seriously and my current diligence process before backing a project. As always, I’m writing this all up to be helpful to others, clarify my […]
Decentralized Finance could potentially change the way we interact with financial services forever and is a total rabbit hole. Here are some of the “levels of depth” that you can get into DeFi and roughly reflects my journey into the DeFi abyss (yes, I will be overusing this analogy!). I don’t think that most people […]
One of the movements I’m most excited about is decentralized finance. Here is the description is taken directly from the Investopedia article which sums it up nicely. “Decentralized finance is a system by which financial products become available on a public decentralized blockchain network, making them open to anyone to use, rather than going through […]
This month marks my 10th year of angel investing so I synthesized a few learnings as a complement to the more tactical “Angel Investing Learnings” post from last year. This post is broken up into three parts; dissecting the why behind angel investing, understanding your asymmetric advantage and how to apply this advantage in the […]
I’m starting to find more purpose in my career, and invest more time, energy and capital into activities that further this purpose (my 2021 goals here). There was a period in my life where I thought I only wanted to work on problems in emerging markets (particularly Africa) and although I still care deeply about […]
I’m learning more about products to support the evolution the way we work and collaborate. As I dig deeper into the problem space and talk to founders who are designing their own company ‘Operating System’ there are a few questions that persistently stand out for teams adopting distributed work: Sync vs. Async: There is a […]
Aligning on “Why” for product development work is always important, but it’s especially important for distributed teams. When the “Why” is consistently missing, projects end up feeling like a list of context free tasks from ‘up above’ and teams can become demotivated and resentful – no one likes being told what to do all the […]
I’ve been leading product development teams for over 10 years in different industries (ads, gaming, fintech, tools) and customer segments (consumer, enterprise, SMBs). There are a few things have been consistently true across these industries, but particularly at scale. I typically broken up my role into four different buckets: Principles: What is our building culture? […]