Was It the Hardest Thing You've Ever Done?

2min Snip

00:00

Play full episode

Summary

Transcript

Episode notes

I always loved nashville. For me, it was very personal too. I felt very deflated, very beat down, very kind of completely under the water after doing a sist ih. It was not an incredible exit. It was a good exit. But i think going through all the ups and downs of being the sea of a start up for seven years, and really doing that, and doing it very unhealthy. And so Nashville was actually an escape for me to hopefully go, like, not be around the tech,. So that i could try to find a work life balance that i didn't really have ye for all of the kind of holistic health veneer of san

In this episode of Jorgenson’s Soundbox, I continue exploring the world of web3 with my friend and former coworker Shane Mac. Shane is now the cofounder of XMTP, a decentralized and economic messaging protocol being built for web3. During our conversation, we talk about XMTP as a new protocol for building communication tools. We can spam-proof the next generation of the web! How Shane builds company culture to help him compete with world renowned companies and his personal and professional investing strategies.

To kick off our conversation, we talk a bit about Shane’s decision to move to Nashville, driven by the exhausting culture of work scale at all cost in San Francisco, and the music scene there. Shane then discusses how he came to work with Matt Galligan and start XMTP. When looking for an opportunity to build a new company, he had a lightbulb moment when Robert Leshner, the founder of Compound, presented a communication problem in the web3 space. Shane realized that people who have wallets want to be able to communicate with others that have wallets and to be able to prove ownership, and he recognized the potential for a new messaging communication protocol with the wallet as a means of sending and receiving messages. XMTP was thus founded as a decentralized messaging protocol with a universal backend that developers could build on top of and that we can all be owners of.

In the second half of the conversation, we explore Shane’s ability to create an awesome company culture. Shane says that while he can’t compete with renowned companies on having the most interesting idea, he can compete on culture. Shane aims to remove people’s anxieties so that they can be more productive. He does so by hiring personal assistants and coaches not only for executives but for everyone, removing the vesting cliff, and teaching people how to quit. We wrap up the conversation by talking about how Shane goes about investing. He says he focuses on what he knows well and believes in. Regarding crypto, he thinks of it as startup investing, and he has invested in Bitcoin and Ethereum and plans to hold for the long term. He also is the General Partner of the Logos Fund which invests similarly in startups, mostly focusing on the seed stage.

Links:

Eric’s Newsletter

XMTP.com

How to Quit (and have everyone support you)

Compound

Squared Away

Koinly

Additional Episodes If You Enjoyed:

SquidDAO: Web3 Project Deep-Dive: Part Crypto Hedge Fund, Part NFT DAO. An Anonymous Conspiracy for Mutual Enrichment

Jason Hitchcock: Your Guide to Web3 (DeFi, NFTs, and The Metaverse)

If you want to support the podcast, here are a few ways you can:

>> Buy a copy of the Navalmanak: www.navalmanack.com/