⏳ It's Not a Business, It's a Passion Project
T.I.N.Y Blog, Time Billionaires #022
Hello to 16,229 nerds reading this T.I.N.Y blog.
TL;DR (feel free to skip around):
Thought: The world is a museum of passion projects
Interesting: Reddit search continues to grow
Not to be missed: FTX vs Binance
Yes: Keep it simple
The World Is a Museum of Passion Projects
Everything you see around you is the vision of some person.
Someday in some room, someone thought of building Twittr so that we could share our thoughts and ideas with the world and people could follow along.
Someday in some room, someone thought of starting that restaurant you love at the corner of the street. At one point in time, it wasn’t there. Difficult to comprehend but it’s true.
Someday in some room, someone thought of creating a bridge to make it easier for people to go from point A to point B easily.
Everything you see around you is the manifestation of some person's passion project.
Look at Walt Disney.
He wanted to build a magic kingdom. That is now known as Disneyland in 6 different locations around the world.
Disney has brought in $60B in revenue per year for the last 3 years.
And it started as a passion project by a dreamer who dreamed beyond his imagination.
At age 18, he took art classes and got hired as a commercial illustrator.
At age 22, he started Disney.
At age 27, he experienced his first hit (Steamboat Willie, the first cartoon to include a synchronized soundtrack).
And the rest is history.
I guess what we consider “entrepreneurs” today are actually just “visionaries”.
They’re people that believe something must exist in this world. And they go out and build it.
This thought is inspired by John Collison (founder of Stripe).
“The World is a museum of passion projects.” — John Collison
Reddit Search Continues to Grow
You hear about new social media apps that come and go. Some peak in activity or DAU (daily active users) quite early. Others keep going (like Reddit).
Look at Facebook. Peaked in 2012. Twitter in 2013 (and we can see another wave now).
Instagram peaked recently but it’s so recent that we can’t say it’s going down (yet).
TikTok started very recently so it still has to go through the test of time.
But look at Reddit. Reddit was founded in 2005. And it still hasn’t peaked.
By the way, I’m curious if you use Reddit (extensively). Drop your anonymous vote here.
Binance (No. 1) buys FTX (No. 2)
There are 3 levels of people in crypto:
Level 3: They understand crypto to a level where the world thinks they’re odd.
Level 2: They don’t understand crypto but have friends that understand crypto to a level where the world thinks they’re odd (aka me).
Level 1: They don’t understand crypto.
If you’re on Level 1 or Level 2, here’s what you need to know about what happened this week:
Crypto exchange = where users can trade (buy and sell) digital cryptocurrencies. Kind of like a stock exchange for digital currencies.
So…
Binance starts in 2017. FTX starts in 2019.
Binance (#1 crypto exchange) invests early in FTX when it launches.
FTX becomes #2 crypto exchange.
Binance decides to sell its stake in FTX.
And that’s not good for FTX. There is $2B of selling pressure. People panic.
And now it seems like Binance is going to buy FTX. The deal hasn’t gone through as of Wednesday, 9th November 2022.
My Twitter feed was full of this talk and then I found this Twitter thread that explained it simply:
Keep It Simple
Yes.
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Nice!
Great post!