Mathematical dating, standards, and a lil bit of luck

Hi nerds -

I salute you from ETHCC in Paris, where I just presented a keynote about the smart contracts behind DAOs.

We’ve been working hard at Aragon to launch our new product - a permission management system - and today was the first time we were sharing it so widely!

Exciting time to be building in the open 🚀.

3_brain_farts

💖 How to find the one: Image you’re an employer looking to hire a Secretary and you need to hire him/her right after the interview. How do you know when to stop searching?

If you select one of the first few, you risk not meeting the best one later on.
If you wait too long, you risk loosing the best one.

This is called the “Optimal Stopping” problem and it’s a famous computer science algorithm which has found that you should select the best one after you’ve studied 37% of the sample. Of course, this assumes you know the exact sample size.

Not surprisingly, it’s also called “Mathematical Dating” and it applies to finding a partner, selecting a home, hiring, or even selecting items at the supermarket.

Bear and bull glasses: In bear markets, people and projects scramble to find meaning. In bull markets, people see meaning even where there is none.

It’s all about perspective. And it always has been.

So choose your glasses wisely.

📱 Standards Innovation Paradox: Technical standards are awesome because they allow projects to reach popularity faster with a low engineering effort. For ex:

Based on top of SMTP, email newsletters can reach any email client.
Podcasts can stream into any platform thanks to them accepting RSS feeds.
Different phone devices can send text messages because they are sent through SMS.

However, paradoxically, overtime these same standards also end up hindering innovation.

Standards enable products to reach product market fit faster, but it also makes these products stall. The more stakeholders connected to such standards, the harder it is to innovate because more people need to agree to the changes.

2_smart_goodies

“The amount of serendipity that will occur in your life, your Luck Surface Area, is directly proportional to the degree to which you do something you’re passionate about combined with the total number of people to whom this is effectively communicated.

Luck = [Doing Things] * [Telling People]”

~ Jason Roberts