🍪 Two culty dudes make a comeback and Coinbase pilots something controversial

Top of the mornin to ya. Memorial Day Weekend is upon us - let’s get into it before we all break to go fight for the best room at the Airbnb. 

In the oven this week:

• 🔥 Freshly baked: two culty characters resurface with new ventures

• 🍪 Cookie crumbs: 4 quick nuggets

• ☝🏼One big pizookie: Coinbase pilots the controversial Dot Collector

• 😂 Snickerdoodles: because it's almost a holiday and what's a holiday without memes?

FRESHLY BAKED

This pharma bro is outta prison

After 4 years, Martin Shkreli is out of prison early. About 2 seconds after he got out, he was back on social media.

Shkreli was convicted of securities fraud, but was better known as “America’s most hated man” after he raised the price of AIDS drugs from $17.50 to $750 per pill. 

But what’s even crazier is his cult-like following. The guy’s a troll, loves attention, and knows how to entertain. Some woman even left her husband for him only to be dumped, FROM PRISON.

The guy graduated from high school in 2 years, so despite his moral shortcomings, he’s pretty smart.  

Well turns out, he’s back and he loves crypto. He hosted a Twitter Spaces about it this week and even Elon tuned in. Some takeaways: 

• He thinks Ethereum will overtake Bitcoin given its breadth of use cases. He’s bearish on Bitcoin in the long run even though he admits it still could go to $500K

• Decentralized finance will take over the world: by 2050, he predicts over half of assets in the world will be tokenized, and that companies like Tesla and Apple will issue their own coins 

• He’s highly bullish on DAOs and thinks we might even see DAOs replace governments one day

• He’s dropping NFTs (because who isn’t these days??)

Sounds like we'll be seeing him in Miami soon.

Adam Nuemann = climate change warrior? 

Adam Neumann (WeWork's founder) just raised $70M for a blockchain-enabled carbon credit trading platform. 

Roughly half the funding was from big names like a16z and General Catalyst, while the other half was from the sale of their “Goddess Nature Token.” WeWork 2.0 anybody??? 

Love him or hate him, he sure can get the people talking. 

His new company, Flowcarbon is a marketplace that allows parties to buy and sell tokenized carbon credits. 

And if you're like me, you might be wondering how carbon credits work. I did a little sleuthing, and here’s the TLDR:

If you have a carbon-positive project (e.g. you planted a forest), the government can grant you credits for every ton of carbon your project removes from the atmosphere. 

Each carbon credit basically represents an “allowance” to pollute, which you can turn around and sell to corporations. Corporations that are heavy polluters (e.g. factories) can use these credits to negate the emissions they create to conform to environmental regulations.

The end result is a win win - you get money to fund more projects, and they get to meet regulatory requirements by “offsetting” their carbon footprint.

Flowcarbon is where you'd buy and sell those credits, and it claims to solve 3 problems:

1. Lack of access: there’s no single marketplace to buy/sell carbon credits today.

2. Fees: Flowcarbon takes a 2% cut of the transaction vs. up to 30% in the old world. 

3. Poor transparency: carbon credits on the blockchain are pre-certified by governing bodies and everyone has full view into who’s buying and selling. 

Solid idea, but the proof is in the execution pudding. Neumann and his wife are founders, and this time, they're smart enough not to be the head honchos - they’ve hired this lucky lady to be the CEO.

COOKIE CRUMBS

• Rugs to riches: Pear VC locks in a fourth fund targeting $410M in commitments. The better story behind the story is how the founder, Pejman Nozad, went from being a homeless immigrant to one of the most successful seed investors out there. How’d he pull it off?

  • Step 1: he escapes war in Iran, makes his way to the US, and becomes a rug salesman in downtown Palo Alto.

  • Step 2: apparently, expensive Persian rugs + Palo Alto’s proximity to Sand Hill Road (home to all the VCs) = prime tech nerd & VC clientele. Nozad befriends his customers and naturally gets to know the tech industry through them.

  • Step 3: he happens to meet Doug Leone (one of the all time great VCs) when Leone comes to buy a rug, and offers to help source great founders. Leone is game, so Nozad starts hosting networking events at the rug shop with all his VCs and founders friends. There, Leone meets Dropbox’s founder and invests. Boom - big credibility for Nozad. His rug events become the place to be.

  • Step 50: rinse and repeat. He eventually meets enough industry insiders to raise a fund of his own, and invests in great names like Lending Club and Doordash. Man, what an inspiration.

• Snap’s stock crumbles over 40% in a day after it warned pre-emptively that it would miss Q2 revenue and earning estimates. Seems like an overcorrection, but at least Meta and Coinbase employees aren’t weeping over their RSUs alone now.

• Amazon opens Amazon Style, it’s first physical store in LA. Shoppers can use an app to scan displayed items and access fitting rooms, starting with a curated set of brands. With its selection, cult TikTok popularity, Prime membership, and best in class customer service, it’s looking like Amazon could eventually give Nordstrom a run for its money 👀

• It’s time to book that trip to Europe: the Euro to USD exchange rate is almost 1:1. The baguette that cost $4.45 in 2012 now costs $3.68, and we love a good sale.

THE BIG PIZOOKIE

Coinbase is piloting Ray Dalio’s dot collector, a real time micro-feedback system that allows colleagues to rate each other all day every day. Critics call it dystopian, but Dalio claims it’s changed the game for his company, Bridgewater (world’s largest hedge fund). 

The basic idea is that everyone gets ratings from their colleagues on how they stack up against company values. It's kinda like Yelp, but for people.

You came by my desk earlier and proposed an idea? You get points for assertiveness. Schedule a meeting that could have been an email? Watch your time management score plummet, buddy.

Your score for each trait is then “believability-weighted,” meaning your assertiveness score is more influenced by ratings from people who are actually good at being assertive. Double ouch…. but Dalio argues it’s more accurate that way.

The best and worst part? Everyone’s ratings are public to the company so you know exactly what you’re gonna get when you interact with people. Imagine being in a meeting and watching peoples’ scores change in real time. 

Is it a huge distraction? Do people collude on ratings? Who knows. The jury’s still out on whether the thing works.

Bridgewater and Coinbase have both been known to take strong stances on culture - even when it means losing 5% of the company. Looks like Coinbase employees are in for another shock to the system. 

SNICKERDOODLES

Happy long weekend, everyone! 

How'd we do today?

• 🍪🍪🍪 Top notch!

• 🍪🍪 Meh... could use more milk

• 🍪 Undercooked, do better