So far, almost $60 billion has flown into about 160 SPACs (Special Purpose Acquisition Companies) in 2020. All of those are looking or had looked for other companies to take public via a merger/acquisition. It means that 160 viable companies will also have to exit, for these SPACs to succeed with their intentions.

SPACs are relatively new to us, as public investors. The first SPAC that drew attention to this “old-new” innovation was the merger between Virgin Galactic and Chamath’s $IPOA SPAC at the end of 2019. That deal has opened the door for more investors to raise money via this vehicle. In terms of the SPAC cycle, the SPAC sponsor typically has about 24 months to find a company to merge/acquire. So far, we’ve seen mergers happening much earlier in a SPAC’s lifespan(Chamath’s $IPOB has merged with Opendoor within less than 6 months post-IPO). …

Intro

As more consumer-enterprise products are coming to the market, it’s getting more challenging for users to find the time to get hooked on the good products. People(including me) are signing up for products before they are ready to try them out. In other cases, they sign-up to more new products than they are capable of trying(bandwidth wise). This creates a potential problem for products to compete on the users’ attention, even if they aren’t in the same category!

If I were to look at it from the macro-level perspective, a few things became more apparent to me after have been trying products of all kinds and have many onboarding experiences. …

The past decade had been the most significant to tech venture capitalists’ portfolios. The result is driven by extreme growth and user adoption of internet monopolies’ products following an extreme version of the 80/20 principle for value creation.

While some of the investment opportunities in these ‘high-growth’(as Elad Gil puts it) companies were hard to participate for some, others enjoyed the privilege to pass on them and leave their checkbooks in the pocket.

Passing on these 🦄 turned out to be extremely painful for some VC years down the road, missing on hypothetical significant returns for their funds and LPs. Some VC specified on these missed opportunities and have dared to share that with the world. With that in place, I had a chance to look at some of these cases and extract significant patterns for investors passing on investment opportunities for the wrong reasons. …

As part of my interest to understand Blockchains, I look at sophisticated terms and try to simplify them — so I could understand their role better, and help others to do so via writing. This time, I took the subject of Phragmen’s method in NPoS and will try to explain it’s importance in the Polkadot Blockchain.

In this specific post, I’m going to touch an interesting election method invented by a Swedish mathematician, and explain how it’s used in the Polkadot Blockchain. If you’re not familiar with Polkadot, I suggest visiting Polkadot.network before reading this.

Phragmen’s method — and how it affects DOT holders

Phragmen’s method is one of the methods helping to design the Polkadot’s validators elections process. We’ll touch the most important points about it in regards to participating in the network as a DOT holder. …

It’s been two years since I started working remotely, after getting introduced to the idea thanks to the 4HWW. I’ve worked at a startup, and now as self-employed. I’ve enjoyed the nomad’s life, working from Israel, the US, Canada, Switzerland, Germany, France, England, Czech Republic, Italy, and more. I collaborated with people working from 4 different time zones while having my schedule. It’s been a treat to unlock the world, knowing I can work and still earn money while being wherever I’ll choose. What a great time! After doing this for approx. …

Talented teams are working hard to look in shape for the
Y-Combinator’s demo day of the summer 2019 batch(19th-20th of August).

I’ve seen a lot of exciting projects getting built(some also launched on HN) in the last weeks, backed with help and guidance from the YC partners. I’ve wanted to lighten up some of my favorites companies from this batch!

Even though access to the demo day is minimal, some(hopefully lucky) investors will have the opportunity to invest directly(or indirectly via AngelList syndicates, for example) in these companies.

There are a lot of cool projects out there trying to improve consumer experiences around things like deliveries, waiting in like to get coffee and else. Other notable ones try to build a solution for the housing problems in SF (see — Rent the Backyard). …

After coming back from AraCon, back in January, I couldn’t stop thinking about the parallels between a DAO and my small hometown — A Kibbutz in Israel.

Important — those not familiar with the term DAO, I’d suggest checking aragon.org and the DAO incubator

The goal of writing this

I’ve published this piece to emphasize one of the most potentially impactful use cases for crypto networks in our world. While a lot of the public discourse seems to revolve around the idea of crypto as sound money, I am most excited by the use cases of blockchain to empower freedom for decision making and human collaboration. In this specific use case, I see enormous potential for communities to become a DAO. To start realistically, I thought my hometown’s example could make more sense to most. It’s a rural village(Kibbutz) in Israel that is built on an interesting governance model and happens to be my hometown. …

Last week was loaded with great experiences around the events of AraCon1-the flagship event of the community of the Aragon project. I had the privilege to attend and help to make this event unforgettable, it was a blast!

Most of the events and talks were concentrated on on-chain governance and DAOs — Decentralized Autonomous Organizations. Aragon gathered together the core contributors and minds of this specific niche inside the Blockchain movement to create a unique experience for the DAO enthusiasts. …