Part 1 (of 2): Farewell Web2.

A few weeks ago, I left the Stripe design team. I left what I – and many other designers – might consider a dream job. More importantly, I left an incredibly talented group of people I really, genuinely liked being around. I wrote this farewell letter (lightly edited for clarity) to help myself and all of them make sense of why I was doing this.

“So this is my last day.

Like with wedding speeches, they say it’s best to keep a departure email short and sweet. I probably won’t be able to do that, so forgive me.

Let’s start by acknowledging the fact that we all were forced to deal with (and still are?) an absolutely brutal, hellish nightmare of life these past ~2 years. I joined Stripe bright-eyed on February 25, 2020. I spent a week in a small conference room in a secluded area of our San Francisco office with ~30 or so other new Stripes. By the time I got home every day I was exhausted from all the interpersonal stimuli and the sense of drowning in information – nothing new for onboarding but particularly acute at Stripe lol – so I just watched whatever series I was watching nonstop. I think it was The Night Of on HBO. Great show, highly recommend. This is all to say I had zero idea what was going on in the world. How gravely ironic.

I came into the office on Monday, March 2nd, to find it basically empty. This came as a surprise to me, though by this point I’d grown more aware of this COVID thing. There were a few designers around and we went over to the couch huddle area where standups occurred. Our head of design, Malthe, was on Zoom, as were many other folks. Malthe advised us to start working from home as a safety precaution until we had a clearer sense of how this thing would play out. In hindsight, my optimism that this would be temporary is devastatingly hilarious.

Tuesday, March 3rd, was my 30th birthday and the first official day of working from home. Unprecedented, but temporary for sure I thought. No. I was very wrong. In a matter of days our lives became unrecognizable from what would come to be known as “the before times”. As an extroverted person and new designer to Stripe, eager to be among this group of people I long admired, I felt…distraught. It was worse, hard to capture in a word, but let’s leave it at that.

As time went on, and we stayed inside with no end in sight, I spent unhealthier amounts of time on the internet, looking for something that felt remotely thrilling. About halfway through 2020, I started finding some thrills in this NFT thing. As a music lover, I was waiting for my favorite artists to use this forced reclusion to release their magnum opuses. I was looking in the wrong place. The cultural renaissance was happening in digital art. For the rest of 2020 and into 2021, I grew more and more fascinated by everything happening in Web3. I was having fun on the internet. Like real fun, real laughs. I’d never thought of the internet as a “fun” place before. This was eye opening.

With this budding fascination, a rudimentary understanding of how to operate a MetaMask wallet, and at least a smidge less pessimism, I started feeling more creative and more inspired. I started having ideas again. I started feeling like exploring the contours of those ideas. I started engaging with anonymous people online and having genuinely engaging conversations with them. I started really participating in this world and, the more I participated, the more I yearned to discover. I’m driven by curiosity and experiential novelty, and Web3 is, if absolutely nothing else, curious and experientially novel.

By late summer, it became clear to me that this is what I want to do with my time. I believe that we are watching the future start to form before our eyes. And I believe the largest barrier to our collective realization of what’s possible in this future is how hard it is to engage with its foundational tools and systems. So that’s what I want to do. I want to try to make these tools and systems easier to use. This is an epic experiment and I feel compelled to put on my pixelated lab goggles.”

Part 2 (of 2): Hello Web3.

There’s a famous F. Scott Fitzgerald quote that goes…

“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless yet be determined to make them otherwise.”

To me, this idea of opposing truths so aptly represents the current state of Web3. On one hand, I feel completely convinced that Web3 will fundamentally reshape many aspects of our world. On the other hand, I feel that using Web3 is simply way harder than it needs to be.

Identifying these Two Opposing Truths™️ made something powerful click in my mind. To most people, the Internet and Google are basically the same thing. What matters is not that they're technically very wrong. What matters is the wisdom of the synonym. The spread of ideas depends on their ability to be understood. The adoption of technology depends on how easy it is to use. Web3, like Web2 before it, is built on very novel, very powerful ideas, and technologies.

That's where great product and design come in. Enabling the rest of the world to harness the power of Web3 requires at least as much product and design excellence as that which made Google synonymous with the Internet. Probably more.

As fate would have it, around the time this started making more sense to me, I began developing a friendship and thought partnership with Jeff at Chapter One. Many of you reading this probably know or know of him. In case you don't, he's a gifted product person and early-stage investor who crushed his first fund (my words, not his 😉). Through Chapter One, he made a number of prescient crypto investments like Dapper, Compound, Rabbithole, The Graph, SyndicateDAO, and Blockfolio, among others. Jeff was about to close a much larger, much more in-demand second fund focused exclusively on Web3.

Outside of generally liking each other a lot – a good sign – we shared beliefs in the Two Opposing Truths™️ and in the potentially contrarian idea that a new breed of venture capital firm could play a meaningful role in bridging Web3's present and future. What if Chapter One could be that fund? What if we could offer founders money and the product and design excellence crucial to their success? Should we do this? Did I want in? I mean yes, duh, twist my arm.

Onboarding Web3's next billion users will require thinking from first principles, encouraging exploration, abstracting complexity, prioritizing usability, and clearly demonstrating value. Figuring out what matters to the people it should matter to. Moving past whats into hows and whys. How it works. Why they’ll love it. And of course, the product needs to look the part.

This is product and design excellence. And this is what you'll get when you partner with Chapter One.

We're ready to buidl. Are you?