Top

Crypto is a huge topic, and this format is too short to share comprehensive thoughts, but I want to dive into crypto MVPs, integrity, and the gap between the promise of crypto and its current reality.

Artificial Intelligence will solve our problem. Lot's of entrepreneurs have a grand vision of how AI can solve any difficult problem for their business. This doesn't mean they're wrong, but the fields of AI and ML (machine learning) have many sub categories and areas of active research that allow us to make progress on quite specific computational tasks. Applying the wrong form of learning or problem solving to a task can produce underwhelming results. Tweaking and tuning a model or method is the way to get solid results and outpace your competitors in business use cases. I'd like to go through a few ML methods and what they're used for maybe to inspire some new ideas.

A common use case to build an essentialist MVP is to get more support for your idea. Taking the functional demo and pitching it to an investor, so you get more funds to flesh it out further, and recruit more team members to mentor, give resources, ideas, and connections to the project. Here I'm going to discuss some considerations around building an MVP for this purpose.

When facebook pulled together a simple app for dating, it was immediately valuable. This is the power of network effects. Not the most popular dating app in the world, but a viable, useful, and profitable tool. When you launch your dating app, while more innovative, it suffers from the cold start problem. You have zero users, so who am I going to match with? There are two main solutions to the cold start problem, and your MVP must keep these in mind while building to be successful.

We've built dozens of MVPs, some were brand launches at Google, some startups that raised $3M in funding, and some productivity tools we conceived that got acquired by bigger companies. Here's some of our hard won knowledge about building a product from the software perspective.

You're a white collar professional with over a decade of experience. You've found some major inefficiencies in your work, and repetitious tasks that you have to do, and not only you, but everyone in your role at other companies. If you're driven, creative and have an insight that's repeatable, you can leverage and sell it with software. This lets you stop trading time for money, and gives greater opportunity for growth. Hard work, no doubt, but worth a risk to escape the 9-5.

I and every peer of mine in software have been approached dozens of times to be an equity partner in a startup. As with any decision in an early stage company, there's pros and cons to this approach.