Tlon CEO Galen Wolfe-Pauly: Urbit Is The Personal Operating System For The 21st Century

Host Tom Shaughnessy talks to Galen Wolfe-Pauly, CEO of Tlon, which is building out Urbit. Galen discusses his vision for Urbit, how developers can work with it, what’s on the horizon for Urbit in the near future, and more.

Episode Highlights:

• Galen learned programming really young and was interested in web and app design.
• Urbit functions like an operating system rather than an app and provides a better user experience.
• Urbit is the platform from which you contact the blockchain, and Galen sees them as two systems working cooperatively.
• Galen’s vision for Urbit is for it to be the ultimate productivity tool.
• Tom summarizes Urbit as a general-purpose code base that people can use as their own personal cloud computers.
• Galen hopes this is the technology that you are able to use less because you don’t have to think about it as much and doesn’t incentivize them by mining their data.
• There will be a finite number of users on the platform to retain its security and value, through address blocks.
• Developers will own pieces of the system through these address blocks, incentivizing them to improve the system.
• Urbit is designed for digital communities to shape their own environments.
• The most important thing with new technologies is their stickiness.
• Many Bitcoin users have adopted Urbit because it has an authenticated digital identity through which you can communicate with people and transact.
• As people adopt Urbit, either platforms will develop to run on Urbit or they’ll simply go away, like AOL did when the Internet grew.
• Galen wants an actual archive of his data that won’t go away when the company folds, which most things will. 
• Now that the Urbit infrastructure is stable and reliable, they’re now shifting to think about it as a product.
• Galen most worries about Urbit’s current shift towards wanting users who don’t care about the technology.

Key Points

1. A big reason more people haven’t adopted blockchain technology is that it has terrible user experience and is too difficult to operate.
2. The most important thing for new technology’s longevity is its stickiness with a particular population of users.
3. All technology will eventually go away and be replaced by something else.

Tweetable Quotes

• “If you’re a developer it should be easy to build on top of this whole stack. You ship to the network & when people install it, they can easily port their data from one thing to the next. So you have more fluid competition between different alternatives.” –Galen Wolfe-Pauly

• “We have the benefit of these early incentives from relatively technical address space holders & honestly just people who think this is really fun. Which I think is bigger than people think. A lot of the internet was built either for fun or on a gov't grant.” –Galen Wolfe-Pauly

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