#32: Dan Romero, Co-Founder @ Farcaster | How two Coinbase early employees designed one of the most thriving web3 social networks: product decisions,tech trade-offs & community building tactics

Dan Romero was employee #20 at Coinbase. After helping to build the company for 5 years, he left Coinbase in 2019 to build an alternative to Twitter with his Coinbase colleague, Varun Srinivasan. This idea transformed into Farcaster - a web3 social network that has become a go-to place for the crypto community in the last few months. 

TIMESTAMPS:

00:38 What is Farcaster

1:20 How Dan Romero became employee #20 at Coinbase and what he learned about crypto, and why he left in 2019

4:32 Why RSS lost and how Farcaster started as RSS+

6:56 Farcaster as a Twitter for crypto people, sufficient decentralized social network, why it’s great for users and developers, and what are parallels to crypto exchanges

12:23 What’s so unique about their user onboarding process, and which parts have been inspired by Coinbase

19:00 How permissionless building inspired the community to build a bot to make onboarding greater

20:25 Why they went for slow growth… just like Facebook

22:44 Why are they more interested in Daily Active Users than sign-up growth

26:29 Special moments that Farcaster delivers and how they designed the app to facilitate them

30:00 Why they don’t have quote tweets

34:15 What apps have already been built on top of Farcaster

37:00 Why developers should be able to create new social experiences

38:39 History of pseudonymous co-creators of the US Constitution

40:00 Why does the growing amount of data inspire people to build apps on top of Farcaster

42:45 How web3 social makes it much easier to start a new social app

45:52 How does Farcaster works technically, and how it’s similar to Domain Name System

51:11 Why they gathered FC developers on Telegram instead of Discord

52:45 What’s the 6 months plan for Farcaster, and what’s their 3 years vision

55:50 How switching clients would help people to “build their own Facebook”

58:24 Where people can learn more about Farcaster