The Power of Building in Public

2024 was the year I beat my fixed mindset. I used to believe my biggest weakness was my fear of failure. Building in public taught me that my greatest strength lies in embracing the vulnerability that comes with growth.

I have lived most of our last year in the open, chronicling successes and many failures through twitter, and learning in public as much as possible. This was a transformation for an exceedingly private individual - until last year I had never posted a picture on social media (save for Facebook pre 2012).

But facing the prospect of having to build, live, and opine in public forced me out of fixed mindset that has plagued my life. Fear of failure, driven by high expectations, created in me a paralyzing aversion to risk. Learning to turn off that voice in my head that said "publishing on linkedin is cringy was as freeing an experience as graduating from high school. Writing, podcasting, and public speaking on a week-in-week-out basis forced me to face this fixed mindset regularly: if i didn’t get over it, it would turn into my personal hell.

Salvation came as I sat at the nth conference of the year, speaking to a crowd of forty-somethings who would much rather have been on the golf course. I stumbled halfway through answering a question - one that should have been easy to knock out of the park. As I recovered my bearings and moved on to the next one, I looked around, expecting to meet a sea of judgmental, twitching eyes. There were none. Afterwards, I asked a friend in the audience what he had thought of my stumble.

“What’re you talking about dude” he replied, half listening to my worried diatribe. “You did great!”

Then it dawned on me that my good friend, who came specifically to see me, hadn’t even been listening. This experience made a macro point very apparent: nobody cared what I had to say if it wasn’t interesting. So this paralyzing aversion to judgement came from a story I was telling myself in my head about how other perceived me, and the expectations people had for me. No more.

I learned to stop blaming people around me (family, friends) for my putting crushing expectations on me. Instead, I realized how much of a gift the high expectations were. High expectations reflect a form of unspoken belief: a quiet voice saying “yes you can.” The need for academic achievement, and the ignominy of hierarchical admissions processes teaches kids nowadays to fear those high expectations, leading many to choose a path of non-action for fear of consequences. I’m constantly shocked by how many of my high-school classmates have decided either not to work, or to pursue the same sort of socialist politics that lashes out blindly at this hierarchical system. I’m grateful to have found a search for purpose that restructured this frenzied need for achievement into a exploration of uncharted territory, both outside and within.

This was also a year in which I learned again how fun team sports can be. Two years of monotonous banking jobs drilled into us that collaboration is a hierarchical, and follows a rigid path. When my co-founder and I shifted to startup land, this led to us working alone for long hours on ideas we would bring into the world ourselves: collaboration would bring bureaucracy. How wrong we were. Publishing State of DePIN 2023 with our friends at Messari made it clear to us that while knowledge generation has an individualistic component, idea communication and distribution is a social exercise. As such, one of the biggest evolutions we effectuated this year was to move from self-publishing for our small social media bubble, to working with partners. We’re grateful that the publishing partners we worked with this year gave us a lot of freedom to pursue esoteric ideas with an open mind, and see this as a more viable path ahead for our ideas than self publishing through EV3.

EV3 is just three years old, and that means we don’t have many traditions yet. Our first that I want to share with everyone is winter reading lists. These are things we wrote this year that we think did a great job of showcasing who we are and what we believe, as well things we read that informed these views. Below are the six pieces EV3 published this year that I think are most representative of how we see the world today and the next five years ahead. Below those are six pieces of work i read this year that changed a fundamental belief about something I thought i was sure about. Brace yourself, 4-6 are really out there4.

Happy Holidays, and thank you for playing a crucial part in our journey to build in public.

EV3 Top 6 Reads:

1. Helium Case Study: Harvard Business School (HBS)

2. State of DePIN: Messari

3. Why the Media Loves the Worst of Crypto: Coindesk

4. The Next Frontier in Computing: HBS & Franklin Templeton

5. Rebuilding the Grid from the Ground Up: Coindesk

6. Disrupting Real World Infra Onchain: Fidelity

Mahesh Top 6 Reads:

1. Who Gets What and Why: Alvin Roth

2. Propaganda: Edward Bernays

3. Things Hidden Since The Foundation of the World: Rene Girard

1. The Adam and Eve Story: CIA

1. Tenth Incarnation: Gopi Warrier

2. The Intelligent Plasma Hypothesis: Massimo Teodorani