#20 Tings Newsletter 8

Why I hate Token2049, obsessed founders, and my first 10K run

1. You’ve probably seen the viral Tiktok of a janitor in blue jumpsuit pranking gym-goers by lifting heavy weights with his small build. He is actually Vladimir Shmondenko, aka “Anatoly” and has 13M followers on Instagram. He grew up in a small town in Ukraine with only 200-300 people and the story of how hard he’s worked to become successful is truly awe-inspiring.

2. I (almost) got pickpocketed in Paris, which got me thinking… Where is the perfect city in terms of (i) safety — prefer somewhere without rampant phone-snatching, (ii) weather — prefer somewhere that’s not hot and humid year round, (iii) English-speaking, so I don’t need to learn a new language. Obviously everything is relative and if you’re rich enough you can hide in your Beverly Hills mansion. What city would you put in the middle of this Venn diagram and what other criteria would you add?

   

3. I always get recommended restauranteur videos and watching this video about New York’s most popular fried chicken restaurant just reminds me how the best founders and investors have the same defining qualities as the best chefs and athletes. It’s the absolute fucking obsession over perfecting their craft. This Kobe video is one of my all-time favourites — You want first place? Come play with me. You want second place? Go somewhere else.

4. Traba is one of those startups that has an “Olympian” culture. Founder Mike Shebat always had a chip on his shoulder. He has a 996 work ethic — 9am-9pm six days a week, popular in China — and expects the same from all joiners. He always finds ways to achieve something — eg. he saw that Keith Rabois (Founders Fund) likes to go to Barry's. When he LinkedIn DM’d Keith, instead of asking him for coffee, he asked to do Barry's the next day and then go for brunch. It’s a long read, but I feel Traba is one of those businesses that intuitively makes sense, and will be a huge cash cow in the future.

Source: X, Evan Armstrong

6. Are there any billionaires that fit the criteria above? My dad used to tell me “don’t envy those rich people, their relationships with their wife(s) and kids are always very bad. Their families are always a mess”. For some reason that seems to be the case most of the time. Perhaps it takes a certain type of character to become a billionaire, and “moral people” tend to stop after they get a few $100m. (Side note on the article: obviously it’s hard to quantify “morals”, i.e. divorces might just be due to lifestyle differences)

7. The “hardest geezer” ran across Africa (south to north) from the southern tip of Cape Town, South Africa to the northern tip of Tunisia, running 16,500km and 1.5 marathons (63km) every single day through the Sahara desert, military zones, the Namibian desert, and rainforests. He’s pissed blood, robbed at gunpoint at Angola, almost got killed in the forest, and raised £200K for charity.

8. I went to Sui Basecamp in Paris to see if I was missing anything… and I don’t think so. Sui’s team, tech, and devrel are undoubtedly good. It’s just missing a “10x improvement” and a community. I like the zkLogin and zkSend features — I even managed to access my wallet via their app with my gmail without my seed phrase. I don’t think that’s enough though, as it’s quite copy-able to existing L1’s. My problem with Sui is that (i) it’s still the same ~10-ish projects on Sui since its mainnet, (ii) there still isn’t USDT or USDC, (iii) there still isn’t anything #OPOS (only possible on.. Sui). Things like Movement Labs also don’t really help Sui.

9. Token2049 is one of those events I have a love-hate relationship with — it’s probably the noisiest conference with the most scam projects, but it’s also where everyone congregates so it’s easy to meet people from all around the world. Despite the flood, the energy was really great. The key themes there seemed to be AI, Memecoins, Bitcoin DeFi and RWAs.

10. Why The Winners Won. Sometimes we just look back and say Lido, Uniswap and dYdX became successful just because they were first movers, but this glosses over a lot of details. Uniswap wasn’t the first DEX, EtherDelta was; Uniswap won on distribution. Lido also wasn’t the only liquid staking token in town and wasn’t even the only token called “stETH”, but they had a strong bias to action. dYdX’s first product was Expo, but they iterated quickly based on user feedback.

11. There’s no podcast as transparent as Moneywise about how rich people spend their money. How much money do these hundred 9-fig exited entrepreneurs spend? How much money do they think is enough to retire? Do you actually just get a bank transfer of $100M when you sell your company? Spoiler: On average $80K pm, but some $5K pm and some $250K (of which $150K pm are donations). At $80K pm it’s $25M liquid net worth. And, yes.

12. You know there needs to be a running update section now — I ran a 58:20 for my maiden 10K, smashing my sub-60 goal. I’m actually most proud of the fact that I managed to maintain a steady pace throughout. The next goal is to break 55min and work my way up to a half marathon!

Look at this beauty

If you enjoyed reading this issue, drop me a “like”, I need that ego boost 👀. Thanks for reading!