Dan Romero is one of my favorite people to talk to about the internet, social media, influence, power, and network building. He’s spent the past four years building Farcaster, a Twitter-like protocol built with blockchains and crypto wallets in mind. Before that, he was part of the early Coinbase team for half a decade.
We kick off the discussion Peter Thiel’s old critique of innovation that “all we got was 140 characters,” the impact of Elon' buying Twitter and the splintering of networks on political axes, and the history of RSS and why it inspired Dan to value user-choice with information networks and to build Farcaster. We then run through the “Field of Dreams Fallacy,” or the notion that just because you build an open platform or network—it doesn’t mean developers and users will come.
From there, we do a deep dive on status in crypto and Farcaster. My hope is that this will be compelling for you regardless of your current understanding of these things—and ideally a doorknob to a richer picture of why I find Farcaster so exciting.
Afterward, we zoom back out and discuss Dan’s learnings about company and product-building, navigating the idea maze, why tech people are compelled to build new systems, Coinbase in the early days, Brian Armstrong, Dan’s side quest for Balaji Srinivasan, group chats and public vs. private discourse, politics, power, and podcasts, and more.
As always, your feedback is greatly appreciated as I learn the ropes of this interviewing thing. As a reminder, Dialectic is available on all podcast platforms and YouTube. Thank you for checking it out—it means a lot that you’d share your time with me.
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