I know that sounds strange coming from someone who just launched an AI product. But bear with me.

We’re seeing a pattern with enterprises adopting AI for operational work. It tends to follow three stages — and most companies get stuck at stage two.

Stage one is connecting. You give AI agents access to your data and systems — governed, scoped, audited. This is the “can we even do this safely?” phase. It’s necessary, but it’s not where the value lives.

Stage two is automating. AI agents start doing real work: analysing logs, responding to events, running workflows. This is where the excitement is right now. You deploy agents, they handle tasks that used to require a person, and suddenly your team has more capacity. Good.

But here’s the thing: if you stay at stage two, your AI costs keep growing. More agents, more tokens, more API calls. The work gets done faster, but the cost curve doesn’t bend. For many enterprises, this is where the disillusionment sets in — “I thought AI was supposed to reduce costs?”

Stage three is where it gets interesting. This is what we call evolve.

An AI agent that does the same task a thousand times should eventually notice the pattern. It should be able to say: “This is what I do every time. Here’s the rule. Here’s the workflow. You don’t need me anymore for this.”

At that point, you take the agent out of the loop. No more tokens. No more latency. Just a deterministic process that runs — cheaper, faster, and more reliably than the AI version.

The best AI agent, in other words, is the one that makes itself redundant.

This isn’t a theoretical idea. It’s how we’ve designed our AI OS. Muster provides the governed access. Klaus runs the agents. But the system is built with the expectation that agents should be working towards their own retirement — identifying patterns, codifying them, and stepping aside.

Think about it like this: AI is the exploration phase. You use it to figure out what the process should be. Once you know, you don’t need AI anymore for that particular task. You need automation — simple, deterministic, cheap.

The companies that will see real OPEX reduction from AI aren’t the ones running the most agents. They’re the ones systematically converting agent work into automated workflows. It’s the difference between paying for intelligence every time and paying once to learn the answer.

This won’t happen overnight. Not every task can be codified. Some work genuinely requires the flexibility that AI provides. But for the large category of operational work that is repetitive, pattern-based, and rule-driven — the path is clear.

Use AI to discover the pattern. Then let the pattern run itself.

If you’re thinking about how to make AI reduce your costs instead of just adding a new line item — this is the conversation I’d love to have.

And the room goes quiet.

Here’s the thing most people get wrong about AI agents and data sovereignty: the question isn’t whether the LLM runs locally. The question is where the agent operates — where your data is processed, where decisions are made, where actions are taken, and who controls all of that.

An AI agent can talk to an external model. That’s fine. What matters is that the agent itself — the thing that reads your logs, touches your infrastructure, accesses your customer data — runs inside your environment, under your governance, with your permissions.

Think about it like a consultant. You might hire someone with expertise that lives outside your company. But you don’t send them all your data and let them work from their own office with no oversight. They come to you. They work in your systems. They follow your rules. And you know exactly what they did when they leave.

That’s the model we built Klaus around.

Klaus deploys AI agents into your Kubernetes clusters. The agents run continuously — analysing, responding, managing — on your infrastructure. They can use external LLMs (Claude, GPT, open-source models, whatever fits your requirements), but the agent itself lives where your data lives. Your data doesn’t get shipped somewhere else for processing. The actions happen locally. The audit trail is yours.

If you’ve used tools like Claude Code, Klaus is what that concept looks like when it’s deployed into enterprise infrastructure — running continuously, governed, and under your operational control.

The name is German — because we are. (It’s a hard K, by the way.)

This distinction — between where the model runs and where the agent operates — matters more than most vendors want to admit. A lot of AI tooling today bundles everything into a hosted service: the model, the orchestration, the data access, the actions. That’s convenient. It’s also a non-starter for enterprises with compliance requirements, data residency obligations, or simply a security posture that doesn’t allow sensitive data to leave their perimeter.

With Klaus, you choose the model. You control the data. The agent runs in your cluster. And if you ever want to run a local LLM as well — because your compliance requirements demand it, or because you want to reduce external dependencies — that path is open too.

Here’s what Klaus is not: a model provider. We don’t build foundation models. We don’t compete with OpenAI or Anthropic on that level. What we build is the operational layer — the part that makes it possible to run AI agents reliably, continuously, and under your control.

There’s a gap in the market that’s hard to see if you’re focused on model capabilities: the gap between “it worked in the demo” and “it runs reliably at 3am without anyone watching.” That gap is operations. And it’s exactly the gap Giant Swarm has always filled — first for Kubernetes, now for AI workloads.

Klaus doesn’t make AI magical. It makes AI operational. And in enterprise environments, that’s the harder problem.

If you’re exploring how to run AI agents on your own infrastructure — with the governance and reliability your organisation requires — I’d be happy to walk you through what we’ve built.

It’s “how do we let this thing touch our systems without losing control?”

I’ve had this conversation dozens of times over the past year — with CTOs, with heads of engineering, with platform teams trying to figure out how AI fits into their world. The excitement about what AI agents can do is real. But so is the anxiety about what happens when an agent has access to production data, customer records, or infrastructure controls.

And honestly? That anxiety is well-placed.

Most AI tooling today assumes a single developer on a laptop. You connect your agent to an API, give it some tools, and off it goes. That works great for a demo. It works great for a side project. It does not work when you have compliance requirements, multiple teams, sensitive data, and an auditor who wants to know exactly which AI accessed what, when, and why.

This is the gap we kept seeing. Not a lack of AI capabilities — a lack of governed access to enterprise systems.

That’s why we built Muster.

Muster is an enterprise MCP Gateway — think of it as the secure data plane for AI agents. Every request logged. Every permission scoped. Every connection controlled. It sits between your AI workloads and your enterprise data, making sure that agents can only see and do what they’re explicitly allowed to.

The name is German — “mustern” means to inspect, to review. It’s what you do before you let something through.

What Muster is not: a way to slow AI down. The goal isn’t to add friction for the sake of control theatre. It’s to make AI agents usable in environments where “just trust it” isn’t an option — which, in my experience, is most enterprises.

RBAC, audit logging, scoped permissions — these aren’t exciting features. They’re table stakes for any technology that touches production systems. The fact that most AI tooling doesn’t have them yet tells you something about where the industry is focused. (Hint: it’s not on the people who have to run things in production.)

We think governed access is the foundation everything else gets built on. Without it, AI agents in enterprise environments remain an experiment. With it, they become infrastructure you can actually rely on.

If you’re trying to figure out how to give AI agents access to your systems without giving away the keys — that’s exactly the problem Muster was built to solve. Happy to talk about what that looks like in practice.

Fair question. Let me explain why this isn’t the pivot it might look like.

For over a decade, we’ve been doing one thing well: running production infrastructure for enterprises that can’t afford it to break. Kubernetes management, platform engineering, operational reliability — the unsexy but critical work that sits between “the developer pushed code” and “the service is running in production at 3am.”

What we’ve learned from that work is that the hardest problem in enterprise technology isn’t building something clever. It’s making something clever run reliably, under governance, at scale, in environments where failure has consequences.

That problem hasn’t changed. The workloads have.

AI workloads are the new thing that enterprises need to run seriously. Not as demos, not as experiments — as production systems that touch real data, make real decisions, and need real oversight.

And the gap we see is familiar: most AI tooling is built by companies working their way down toward infrastructure. They start with models, add some orchestration, and eventually realise they need to figure out deployment, security, compliance, and operations. That “figuring it out” phase is where enterprises get hurt.

We’re coming from the other direction. We already know how to run things in production. We already have the trust of enterprises that need this done right. What we’re adding is the AI-specific layer — the governed access (Muster), the agent runtime (Klaus), and the evolution path from AI to automated workflows.

This is why we now have two complementary businesses:

giantswarm.io — our platform business. The Kubernetes management platform that enterprises and cloud providers rely on. Battle-tested. Production-grade. This isn’t going anywhere.

giantswarm.ai — our AI OS business. Muster, Klaus, and what comes next. Built on the same operational rigour as the platform, but designed for the age of AI workloads.

The foundation is the same. The operational expertise is the same. The customer relationships are the same. What’s new is the workload type — and the recognition that enterprises need someone they trust to run AI the way we’ve always run infrastructure: seriously.

I won’t pretend this isn’t ambitious. Building an AI Operating System on top of a platform business requires focus and execution. But the alternative — watching AI tooling vendors struggle to learn what “production-ready” means while our customers wait — didn’t feel like the right choice.

We know what keeps a CTO up at night. We know what “it works reliably at 3am” actually requires. And we know that the gap between a demo and production is exactly the gap we’ve always filled.

The job hasn’t changed. The workloads have.

If you’re wondering what a serious enterprise AI runtime looks like — one built by people who’ve been operating production infrastructure for years — I’d enjoy that conversation.

_The power of waves of the pacific is mind boggling._

_And Zapallar is just beautiful._

_Listening to the pacific at sun down is a must._

_I loved the nature in general and interplay of flowers and rocks and water._

_Atacama Desert is diverse beyond belief._

_Visited a wonderful Canyon in the Desert._

_Geysirs were thrilling._

_It looks like a different world._

_Welcome to Mars._

_Having breakfast in nature._

_The Pelikan’s at the Chiringuito in Zapallar_

I might post some more photos some time. For now, I think it gives you an idea of just a tiny amount of the wonders of the country.

We learned a few things everyone already knew

Before Giant Swarm & Friends, there was our Giant Summit in 2019. Picture it: a big giant hall in a BBQ shop filled with all our awesome customers for a party slash get-together. As you can probably guess, we did some barbecuing, and maybe less predictably, our customers spoke openly about their problems and amongst themselves found camaraderie and relief. While we offered the space to discuss, they drove the conversation. And so we discovered the first thing everyone already knew: a problem shared is a problem halved. Simply having the forum to discuss concerns seemed to provide intrinsic value. Whether a solution was discovered or not, a sense of family and a shared vision emerged, both of which lasted long after the Giant Summit had ended. And so, once again, we learned something that everyone already knew: casual conversations at parties are the glue that holds us together, and the world’s problems are often solved over a beer with friends. This isn’t because beer is magical* but rather because beer with friends simply cannot be faked. As my friend Manuel said as he delivered the closing speech at Pirate Summit: “You only connect with authenticity. Nobody wants to connect with fake.”

We struggled with everyone

Yup, COVID. No surprises there, but perhaps what was surprising at the time was how resilient our bond with our customers was (and thankfully still is). It mattered that we couldn’t all meet IRL, I’m the guy who tweets #realhugsrock, after all. But it didn’t matter enough to stop us from trying and succeeding at a bunch of remote events. From a remote Christmas party that included a magician and cocktail making to what is now our Giant Swarm & Friends events, we didn’t want to stop connecting with our community just because the world had stopped.

We learned from the struggle and thrived with everyone

Our Giant Swarm & Friends events were an attempt to rekindle the soft and fuzzy feeling of our IRL events while providing real value in terms of conversations and topics. Like our Giant Summit, we again wanted to center on our customers and their challenges. We invited our customers to talk about topics that were important to them rather than try to dictate what should be important to them and use it as a marketing stunt. As a result of this, we also decided to come up with some ground rules that support our mission.

1. Most importantly: Giant Swarm & Friends is not a sales event.

2. If we want to create a community, we don’t talk; we facilitate conversations.

3. Nobody’s special, so everyone’s special — first-name basis only.

4. Chatham House Rule

5. Everyone is welcome and encouraged to share.

6. Not exactly a hard rule, but chocolate, craft beer (alcoholic or nonalcoholic), and some stickers were shipped to all guests.

Regarding the last rule, we’ve been lucky to have our friend Daniel as our unofficial beer expert, who has guided us through the different types of beers in our selection. We’ve also been lucky that the conversations during the events have mimicked conversations IRL — in other words, they have been non-linear, organic, and often very entertaining. Our first event started at 8pm and finished at 1.30am, which is a point of pride, although we have since attempted to end them earlier as it’s still a weeknight. The debut included only about two hours of planned discussions, including presentations, Q&A, and beer talks. I can’t say I exactly remember the details of the remaining hours, but I do remember laughing, and I think that qualifies as a job well done.

We looked to the future

One of the best endorsements of our Giant Swarm & Friends events is that we have an almost 100% re-attendance rate. Those who join once are likely to join again, and for me, that’s a huge vote of confidence. We intend to reward that loyalty by continuously improving and building the community beyond the events. How that will all take shape is still being defined, but I do know it will all start with a conversation with our friends.

_*Although I know we have all felt otherwise at some point._

So it happened again this week, and as we have grown to close to 80 people, and 65 showed up, we needed a new system. The old system sadly does not work anymore. We used to rent one or several large houses and cook our own food, but while being a great social glue, it is too hard when you get to more than 30 people (but there are some ideas ;)). The last few events we have taken to renting a small boutique hotel, an island in croatia, and now, the Mas Salagros EcoResort.

_The view from the restaurant towards the main pool of Mas Salagros._

It was a great choice of venue, with wonderful rooms, great staff and food, and settled into a mountain valley. It had an amazingly tranquil vibe to it that rubbed off on everyone. But I thought I’d quickly write down what we do at these events and if you have questions, reach out.

People come mostly on monday, by train, plane or automobile, depending on where you live and what your preference is. Taking that monday as a day or arriving is actually good, because being a fully remote company, when suddenly everyone sees loved collegues in flesh, they want to talk and need time. So there is much rejoicing that first day and it is soooooo lovely to see everyone. On the first day I held a presentation before dinner showing lots of old photos and telling a bit about the history of Giant Swarm, which is fun for everyone, but insightful for all the new faces. The night continued with chats and dancing until well after midnight.

Tuesday is where the work starts… and at 10:00, right after breakfast, we met in our biggest meeting room, and started our Open Space. This time we had a big wall of subjects and a great mingling of groups, which is really what a well run Open Space helps to achieve: people that otherwise don’t talk to each other suddenly do, as the subject is interesting for both. We want people in the company to meet and form bonds and an Open Space is the perfect setting for that.

We had sessions on CAPI and how to work with Upstream projects of the CNCF. But also on how to make decisions, how to improve support, how to become a platform, leveraging our community approach, and many many more. I think the first day alone we had close to 20 sessions alone.

For the fun and games, we then, before dinner, had a runway show of all the old swag and to launch our newest items. Boy do we have some good models … I am wondering if the golden shorts need to become a swag item in general.

Wednesday is another day of Open Space and after dinner, at 21:00, we had a game of fun facts. Everyone needed to submit fun facts about them selves, one person gathered those and put them on slides, always giving an option of 4 people where that facts might fit. I now know who split their head open as a kid, recorded an album, got 3rd place a pole-dance competition, and many more. It’s a perfect setting to getting to know your team mates again.

Back on Thursday, we close the Open Space and everyone went back into their original teams that they normally work in to gather all the feedback and information and continue along their way. As a side note, the entire time, we are taking care of our customers, answering support requests, working on features, … we just do talk to our customers and ask if something can take until next week, and as we are just transparent and honest as we always are, this really works.

Thursday afternoon we had some events people could choose, like a wine tasting, nature walk, golf, … and then we had a nice last evening and with conversations and hugs and on friday, starting very early, the first people traveled back. A few are staying a bit longer as a holiday, but most are probably back home with their families by now.

All in all, it was a great success and I am feeling humbled to work with many so great people and am looking forward to many more onsites.

_Generated using Midjourney through the post title._

We at Giant Swarm have actively and conscientiously tried to rebel against this by contributing to our community through peer-to-peer engagements and events such as Giant Swarm & Friends. The name of the event we hope serves as a signpost of our intentions and a reminder to ourselves: a gathering of friends. As simple as that.

However, it’s not simple. We have to constantly be on the lookout for the traps of ‘good’ marketing. We don’t want to be good at marketing, or more specifically broadly targeted marketing speak, we don’t have to be. We want to be good at sharing what we do and connecting with our community in service of their interests, not ours.

The truth is that my intentions will always clash against reality — to maintain any connection that is real requires work, but how do I scale this when I aim to develop and maintain not just a handful of connections but upwards of 200? At the end of the day, Giant Swarm is a conduit for connection but not the connection itself.

People want to talk to people, and people build relationships with people and not with companies. This is not done in a one-dimensional way around one subject, e.g., Kubernetes. Instead, we are all multi-faceted, and we as a company need to enable conversations amongst individuals inside and outside Giant Swarm with the right facets. This means we must experiment, expand, and be creative, but it also invariably means we must make mistakes. After all, what is a more human and real experience than making a mistake? What do mistakes look like? Maybe, I should point out what they don’t look like. People vehemently disagreeing with us is a feature, not a bug, because it means we’re trying something. I would rather that than inspire no feelings at all. Inside Giant Swarm, we encourage honest conversations that sometimes get tough.

I’m inspired by our mission: to help companies innovate. We believe Kubernetes is currently one of the best ways to enable innovation, and so we have made ourselves Kubernetes experts to serve our community. We want to build a community because we believe that’s the best way to be generous with what we’ve learned and greedy for what we still need to learn. The bigger the community, the more everyone benefits. This is the same ​​reasoning that led us to ensure we have one product and not individual solutions on a per-customer basis, as everyone gains by fixing a problem experienced in the real-world working with one customer.

There is a lot more to say, but this is why this is a series, and I will be continuing on a biweekly basis. I would love to hear your thoughts on anything I mentioned here — but maybe don’t message me on LinkedIn; I might not be there much longer.

On Fertility: _The replacement level of fertility is that which maintains a population at a stable level. It is about 2.1, with the additional fraction needed to make up for girls who will not survive into fertile age._

which leads to one of the big ones. It seem that for the _during the 50 years between 2020 and 2070_ almost 75% of all births will be in Africa. Now this is something to think about on so many levels, and for me a founder and entrepreneur, simply for hiring. This is largely linked with the biggest indicator of quality of life, it being the infant mortality rate. Lower obviously being better. And for those vaccine deniers, it has been calculated that for _every dollar invested in vaccination, $16 is expected to be saved in healthcare costs and the lost wages and lost productivity caused by illness and death._

Now let’s go to human beings. We are way better equipped to longer runs than others. And here is why:

_The first advantage is in how we breathe. A quadruped can take only a single breath per locomotive cycle, because its chest must absorb the impact on the front limbs. We, however, can choose other ratios, and that lets us use energy more flexibly. The second (and greater) advantage is in our extraordinary ability to regulate our body temperature, which allows us to do what lions cannot: run long and hard in the noonday sun._

We went on into the entire field of motors and how important they are. Motors include e.g. 2 billion tiny 4mm diameter DC devices for making your cell phone vibrate. But these are also about the big ones and he postulated that _without the low operating costs, high efficiency, high reliability, and great durability of diesel engines, it would have been impossible to reach the extent of globalization that now defines the modern economy._ More on motors later.

He talked about Muybridge who build a device to film animals while running and in 1883 he _began an extensive series depicting animal and human locomotion. Its creation relied on 24 cameras fixed in parallel to a 36-meter-long track with two portable sets of 12 batteries at each end. The track had a marked background, and animals or people activated the shutters by breaking stretched strings._

The cool thing is that he invented that. And in 1878 Edison Patented the way to record and play back sounds.

_He designed a small device with a grooved cylinder overlaid with tinfoil that could easily receive and record the motions of the diaphragm. “I then shouted, ‘Mary had a little lamb,’ etc.,” Edison later recalled. “I adjusted the reproducer, and the machine reproduced it perfectly. I was never so taken aback in my life. Everybody was astonished. I was always afraid of things that worked the first time.”_

Another good things to think about: _And why do we measure the progress of economies by gross domestic product? GDP is simply the total annual value of all goods and services transacted in a country. It rises not only when lives get better and economies progress but also when bad things happen to people or to the environment. Higher alcohol sales, more driving under the influence, more accidents, more emergency-room admissions, more injuries, more people in jail — GDP goes up._

Let’s move into the biggest part though, power and energy. The thing is that a wind turbine probably needs a year to generate enough power to pay back for the environmental impact of the hundreds of tons of concrete and steel.

So, _for a long time to come — until all energies used to produce wind turbines and photovoltaic cells come from renewable energy sources — modern civilization will remain fundamentally dependent on fossil fuels._

And let’s take shipping: _What would it take to make an electric ship that can carry up to 18,000 TEUs, now a common intercontinental load? In a 31-day trip, most of today’s efficient diesel vessels burn 4,650 tons of fuel (low-quality residual oil or diesel), with each ton packing 42 gigajoules. That’s an energy density of about 11,700 watt-hours per kilogram, versus 300 Wh/kg for today’s lithium-ion batteries — a nearly 40-fold difference. […] The conclusion is obvious. To have an electric ship whose batteries and motors weighed no more than the fuel (about 5,000 tons) and the diesel engine (about 2,000 tons) in today’s large container vessels, we would need batteries with an energy density more than 10 times as high as today’s best Li-ion units. But that’s a tall order indeed: in the past 70 years, the energy density of the best commercial batteries hasn’t even quadrupled._

So where is all our energy usage going that we can hardly turn off:

_In contrast, several key economic sectors depend heavily on fossil fuels and we do not have any non-carbon alternatives that could replace them rapidly and on the requisite massive scales. These sectors include long-distance transportation (now almost totally reliant on aviation kerosene for jetliners, and diesel, bunker fuel, and liquefied natural gas for container, bulk, and tanker vessels); the production of more than a billion tons of primary iron (requiring coke made from coal for smelting iron ores in blast furnaces) and more than 4 billion tons of cement (made in massive rotating kilns fired by low-quality fossil fuels); the synthesis of nearly 200 million tons of ammonia and some 300 million tons of plastics (starting with compounds derived from natural gas and crude oil); and space heating (now dominated by natural gas)._

For example, _today’s jet fuel — the most common formulation of which is called Jet A-1 — has a number of advantages. It has a very high energy density, as it packs 42.8 megajoules into each kilogram (that is slightly less than gasoline but it can stay liquid down to –47°C), and it beats gasoline on cost, evaporative losses at high altitude, and risk of fire during handling._

The other big part are ammonia and liquid nitrogenous fertilizers … we need 150 million tons of NH4 a year, which produces 1% of the global greenhouse gas emissions. Of course I have to admit “have to” is a bit hard a term. But it comes to a good point: _In order to cut future nitrogen losses, we should do everything possible to improve the efficiency of fertilization, reduce food waste, and adopt moderate meat consumption . And even that will not eliminate all nitrogen losses — but that is the price we pay for having gone from 1.6 billion people in 1900 toward 10 billion by 2100. […] The UN’s Food and Agricultural Organization puts the annual global losses at 40–50 percent for root crops, fruits, and vegetables, 35 percent for fish, 30 percent for cereals, and 20 percent for oilseeds, meat, and dairy products. This means that, globally, at least one-third of all harvested food is wasted. […] Cutting food waste in half would lead the way to a more rational use of food worldwide, and the benefits could be huge: WRAP estimates that a dollar invested in food waste prevention has a 14-fold return in associated benefits._

But on for some interesting data:

We build short-stalked wheat because you know, the stalk takes nutrients to produce :)

_The average weight of American broilers rose from 1.1 kilograms in 1925 to nearly 2.7 in 2018, while the typical feeding span was cut from 112 days in 1925 to just 47 days in 2018._

On Wine: _By 1980 the per capita annual mean was down to about 95 liters a year, by 1990 it sank to 71 liters, and by the year 2000 it had fallen to just 58 liters, cut by half over the course of the 20th century. The current century has seen further declines, and the latest available data show the mean at just 40 liters a year, 70 per cent below the 1926 record. The wine consumption survey of 2015 (to be repeated in 2020) details deep gender and generational divides that explain the falling trend._

_The minimum water requirement per kilogram of boneless beef is, indeed, high, on the order of 15,000 liters, but only about half a liter of that ends up incorporated in the meat, with more than 99 percent being water needed for the growth of feed crops which eventually re-enters the atmosphere via evaporation and plant transpiration, and rains down._

_Bacteria account for about 90 percent of the human body’s living cells, and as much as 3 percent of its total weight._

And to finish:

_The affluent world has used hundreds of billions of tons of it to create its high quality of life, but right now we do not have any affordable non-carbon alternatives that could be rapidly deployed on mass scales in order to energize the production of enormous quantities of what I have called the four pillars of modern civilization — ammonia, steel, cement, and plastics — which will be needed in Africa and Asia in the decades to come._

My deepest respect go to the author, Adam Fisher.

So why is silicon valley special:

> Stone: The infrastructure is here: the real estate people, the legal people, the you-name-it people. They get start-ups, so it’s easier: “Oh, okay, you’re a start-up. So, here you go.” It’s just easier to do start-up stuff, because everyone in the whole ecosystem knows about start-ups.”

On what the early hackers were building with that internet:

> Jamie Zawinski: We weren’t building a toy. We were building a communications medium. We were letting people connect to each other in a way that they hadn’t been able to before. It was the opposite of television; it was giving people a voice.

The problem of the wrong people coming to silicon valley during the first bubble:

> Sean Parker: And then it becomes the post–social media era. It’s all the people who would have become investment bankers who want to go start internet companies, and it’s a purely commercial, purely transactional world. It’s just become this transactional thing, and it’s attracted the wrong type of people. It’s become a very toxic environment. A lot of people have shown up believing, maybe correctly, that they can cash in. But that’s Silicon Valley the ATM machine, not Silicon Valley the font of creativity and realization of your dreams.

Around the special kind of people that are founders:

> Steve Jobs: The people who really create things that change this industry are both the thinker and the doer in one person.

On building programming tools:

> Alan Kay: In programming there is a widespread theory that one shouldn’t build one’s own tools. This is true — an incredible amount of time and energy has gone down that rat hole. On the other hand, if you can build your own tools then you absolutely should, because the leverage that can be obtained can be incredible.

By the way, Flickr was a tool as part of a possible game and Slack an internal tool for a company building a game, both companies built by the same founders.

The really really and amazing story of the founding of Atari:

> Nolan Bushnell: I got on a flight to Chicago and called on Bally and said, “Would you like to license my next game? A driving game? It’s going to cost you this much of money in development.” They said, “Yeah, we’d love to do it!” And so I had my cash flow in hand. I went back to Nutting and said, “I’m going to have to leave.”

> Ted Dabney: We wound up getting this contract, $4,000 a month for six months to develop a video game and a pinball machine for Bally.

> Al Alcorn: Nolan then goes and hires me, employee number three, and we go off and start Atari.

Seriously? WTF!

> Ted Dabney: Bally paid for it. They paid $24,000 to us for that game, but Bally kept not accepting the game, kept not accepting it. Nolan and Al and I were sitting around looking at each other: What are we going to do?

> Al Alcorn: So Nolan said, “Put it out on location.” We put it next to a Computer Space at Andy Capp’s Tavern. I remember the day we put it in. Nolan and I popped it in one day after work and went and bought a beer and watched until somebody played it. I never thought anybody would play it! Think about it. There’s no instructions. It just says “Pong,” which meant nothing. There’s two knobs and a coin box. What’s the motivation here? So, some guy plays it. Nolan went up to him afterward: “What did you think of that?” And the guy said, “Oh yeah, I know the guys who made this machine.” And I’m thinking, Save the bullshit for the ladies. So we left. Not long afterward, Alcorn receives a phone call from Andy Capp’s Tavern.

> Al Alcorn: The machine stopped working. It didn’t surprise me. It was just thrown together quick and dirty. It was never meant to run on location. So, I went there after work and the attract mode was working, so that tells me most of the thing is working. So what’s wrong with it? I open up the coin box — it was a Laundromat bolt-on coin box — to give myself a free game to see what was going on, and when I opened that coin box up it was just jammed full of quarters. I can fix this! I told Nolan, “Wow, this is interesting…”

You stumble upon your greatest successes. Remember that.

> Michael Malone: It’s hard to capture just how crazy Nolan was in those early days. He was a wild man. He was young. He lived high. He had the Rolls-Royce. The code name for each new product was named after some hot girl on the assembly line. He really did have that master-of-the-universe thing. I mean there was coke with the assembly-line girls in the hot tub. This guy did the whole Cash McCall thing. He was just throwing out sparks in every direction.

or

> Ray Kassar: When I arrived there on the first day I was dressed in a business suit and tie and I met Nolan Bushnell. He had a T-shirt on. The T-shirt said: I LOVE TO FUCK. That was my introduction to Atari.

Nolan seems to have been a character.

Why corporates sometimes fail … :)

> Alvy Ray Smith: I get the call from Jerry Elkind, my boss. He says, “We’re going to let you go.” And I went, “Well, why?” And he said, “Well, we’ve decided not to do color.” I said, “But Mr. Elkind, the future is color. It’s obvious. And Xerox owns it completely!” He said, “That may be so, but it’s a corporate decision to go black-and-white.” Okay, bye.

Amazing stories on Steve Jobs:

> Al Alcorn: And he came back a few months later. I remember Ron Wayne came in and said, “Hey, Stevie is back.” And I said, “Steve who?” “Steve Jobs.” Oh that kid, yeah. “Oh, bring him in.” And I wish I had a camera. He was wearing a saffron robe, shaved head, barefoot, had a Baba Ram Dass book, Be Here Now. Steve gives me the Baba Ram Dass book and says, “Can I have my job back?” “Sure.”

Fun stuff you could do with the Apple II.

> Andy Hertzfeld: For the Apple II you could write programs that played music — but it had no real sound hardware. All you could do with the software was hit a memory address, which I still remember: C030. So if you hit C030 it would produce a “click” on the speaker. That was all the hardware could do. But if you did that a thousand times a second with software you’d get a one-kilohertz tone, if you did it three thousand times a second you’d get three kilohertz. And the Apple II was literally full of stuff like that, where by just using tiny little bits of resources it could do amazing stuff. In fact, just looking at the Apple II design gave you the feeling that anything was possible, if you were just clever enough. That’s what the main lesson.

But back to Atari, which is one of the best parts.

> David Crane: Pitfall took me about a thousand hours sitting at a computer to do. Now that’s a long time except it’s only a few months. Six or seven months. And it turns out that Pitfall earned Activision $50 million wholesale. So I made for them $50,000 an hour given the thousand hours I worked on it.

> […]

> Alan Kay: That year Atari’s gross just by itself was $3.2 billion, and that was several hundred thousand dollars more than the entire movie industry in Hollywood. So at that time Atari was bigger than all of Hollywood: They had money coming out of their ears!

> […]

> Alan Kay: They used to send the corporate jet up the coast to get shrimp for the executive dining room, and the joke was you could tell how Atari was doing by the size of the shrimp in the executive dining room.

> […]

> Howard Warshaw: By mid-1984 we were down to two hundred people. So, in about a year and a half the company goes from ten thousand employees to two hundred employees, and I was still one of those people. It was a dark time.

Simply Amazing.

> Jamis MacNiven: Titans rise, titans fall — that’s the nature of the world. It just happens faster in Silicon Valley.

The startup that was eBay and how Pierre came to his boss who didn’t see it.

> Michael Stern: So Pierre came to me when I was the general counsel in 1994 and said, “I’ve created this little electronic community. I’m getting people to talk to each other about trading tchotchkes. We’re creating traffic on the network and getting people into a community. That’s kind of in our sweet spot, isn’t it?” That was General Magic’s thing: the whole notion of electronic community. I said, “That’s the stupidest idea I’ve ever heard! If you want to do it, bye, see you later.” That was eBay.

And this was its power:

> Joey Anuff: When eBay came around I couldn’t think of anything better to do than buy every single toy my parents ever told me I couldn’t get. Like Bionic Bigfoot from The Six Million Dollar Man. Still in the box! It was a fucking miracle.

And there were funny side effects:

> Steve Westly: eBay has this stunning idea: that they will enable you to sell anything to anyone. But there’s these wild downsides, like, one Saturday I get a call from our engineering department saying the FBI is calling and they want to know why we have an operational rocket launcher for sale.

But let’s get to the eBay IPO:

> Jim Griffith: Goldman Sachs had scheduled the IPO for October of ’98.

> Steve Westly: We’re there with literally the most serious people from Goldman Sachs, and they’re saying like, “How big do you think the Beanie Baby playing-card sports-card trading-card industry is? One hundred million? Two hundred?” And that’s when I jumped up and said, “Well, you know we now have a thousand categories and we have an average eleven hundred items per category and we have a sell-through rate of X, and we’re adding categories at this rate, and by the way, we’re going into more geographic areas, and so we think this is a multi-billion-dollar company,” and we were able to convince the people from Goldman Sachs that we might be on to something.

And then came the first trade:

> Brad Handler: There was a long wait before the first trade. It was more than an hour after the market opened, and when the first trade came across the tape I think it was somewhere in the fifties. We all realized that our lives had all irrevocably changed. In that instant everyone in that room was probably worth more than their parents had ever made in their lifetimes.

This sounds amazing but at the same time, it was a website, with immense growth, so this is what happened there:

> Steve Westly: I was used to this, because I’d have to be handling marketing, and the press would start calling and asking when the site would come back up, and I’d talk to engineering and we’d say, “Fifteen minutes,” or “Forty-five minutes,” but that day there was an outage to the extent where engineering for the first time ever said, “We don’t know.” I said, “What do you mean, you don’t know?” This was a bad one.

> Pete Helme: It made the whole site unusable, and nothing worked, and people had to scramble, all the engineering teams got together, and Meg was there, rallying the troops: “How do we figure this out?”

> Jeff Skoll: Part of the problem was that the only person that knew how the system worked was Mike Wilson. Pierre had worked with him before at The Well. And Mike worked his tail off: He was in the office seven days a week. And Mike for the first time in three years took a vacation. He went off to the Caribbean somewhere and he was sort of out of touch for a week, and that was the week the system went down. Pierre had long since lost track of what was going on, Meg didn’t have a clue — that’s not her background — and neither did the other engineers in Mike’s group. The holy grail was held by Mike, so nobody really understood what was wrong.

> […]

> Pierre Omidyar: It was front-page news. We had CNN satellite trucks in the parking lot. It was big, big. It was, “The world is watching, this company is gone. It’s going away.”

> […]

> Maynard Webb: And Meg had promised, based on the June outage, that we would do a free listing day, which meant we took the fees away, and everybody would go crazy for twenty-four hours, and our site traffic would double or triple in volume — which is not necessarily a recipe for greatness when you’ve had scale issues.

It must have been fun, and hell, and fun, and hell, and fun.

> Steve Westly: The stock split twenty-four to one from the initial IPO. It turned out to be a thousand-to-one return on the venture investment. Still one of the biggest in history.

How Steve Jobs bought Pixar:

> Ralph Guggenheim: The story I was told was that there was a conference call between Steve and the execs at Lucasfilm, and you can imagine execs in a conference room with a speakerphone on the middle, and Steve’s on one end of the phone and all of these execs are trying to negotiate with him at the other end. Steve says something like, “I’ll give you five million dollars for the thing. I’m going to have to put in another five million dollars. That’s my offer!” And one of the execs undoubtedly said, “What! Five million? That’s not nearly enough.” And I was told that Steve said, “Fine, go fuck yourself!” and instead of going and fucking themselves they took the offer and they closed the deal.

And on to Steve finally finding out about the first Pixar movie, Toy Story:

> Alvy Ray Smith: So Steve’s busy running NeXT and Disney took the movie to New York and the critics saw it. They went nuts and they said, “This is going to be a huge success!” And as soon as Steve heard that he pushes Ed aside to be there when the cameras roll.

Then we go on to Netscape:

> Jim Clark: I clicked around, I found Marc’s e-mail, sent him an e-mail right there saying, “This is Jim Clark. You may not know who I am, but I am the founder of Silicon Graphics, and if you know me, you know that the news has come out that I am leaving Silicon Graphics. I would like to start a new company. I would like to know if you would like to get together and join me to talk about that.” Ten minutes later, he responded. Marc Andreessen: I said, “I know who you are.”

And how they thought about what to do:

> Marc Andreessen: We were talking one day and we said, “Well, this internet thing — no one takes it seriously but it’s growing vertically…”

> Jim Clark: All I had to do was look at the growth of Mosaic for a year and see that it grew to a million users, and I figured there was a network effect of people getting online.

> Marc Andreessen: The idea was to basically do a new version of Mosaic but from scratch, and in particular do it as a real product.

> Jim Clark: I said, “Okay, let’s hop on a plane and go out and recruit your buddies.”

> Aleks Totić: Then Marc calls: “Hey, we’re flying in — I think we’re doing it: We’re going to do the Mosaic killer.”

And Jim Clark about Jamie from further up, or simply about geeks:

> Jim Clark: He had half of his head shaved. Some stylistic statement on his part. I completely ignored it. It did not matter to me; I did not give a hoot. He was a great programmer, brilliant young guy. I do not think anyone bothered. People have just got to realize that a computer geek is respected on the basis of how much code he can write and the quality of code he can write. People do not give a crap what he looks like. If you generate good code quickly, no one cares. Jamie made everyone a lot of money.

And then a big one about Google.

> Scott Hassan: Very quickly, in six to eight weeks, we were able to build the whole structure of Google. It was mostly just Sergey and I from two a.m. to six a.m. in the morning.

And the drain Google took on the Stanford network.

> Larry Page: We caused the whole Stanford network to go down. For some significant amount of time nobody could log in to any computers at Stanford.

And that they won’t get broke:

> Andy Bechtolsheim: The question, of course, is, “How do you make money?” And the idea is, “Well, we’ll have these sponsored links and when you click on a link we’ll collect five cents.” And so I made this quick calculation in the back of my head: Okay, they are going to get a million clicks a day at five cents, that’s fifty thousand dollars a day — well, at least they won’t go broke.

Which in the end really was not so easy and if you read The Search you see the other side. But still they got first investment:

> Sergey Brin: He gave us a check for a hundred thousand dollars, which was pretty dramatic. The check was made out to “Google Inc.,” which didn’t exist at the time, which was a big problem. […] We hadn’t really discussed valuations and stuff like that. He figured it would pay off, and he was right. We finalized all the details on the round after that. I guess we figured if we didn’t agree later, that it would be a loan. He liked us and he just wanted to sort of push us forward.

Because the Google founders actually were at Burning Man:

> Brad Templeton: In the early years Sergey would just actually sleep in whatever camp he found himself in at the end of the night. Google is incorporated immediately after the return from Burning Man.

And it gets even funnier:

> Heather Cairns: They handed me a folder full of checks for like $100,000, $200,000 from Andy Bechtolsheim, Jeff Bezos, David Cheriton. They sat in the back of my car for weeks because I couldn’t get out of work in time to even get a bank account opened.

And at the end Google people just wanted to continue to be in a frat house.

> David Cheriton: I’m tempted to say it was like a frat house, although I’m not sure I’ve ever been to a frat house. It was a long way from a professional company — frankly, once I invested I really didn’t have the sense for some time whether these guys were really taking the company routine seriously or not, so I used to say, “Well, I spent $200,000 on a T-shirt.”

I mean check this:

> Charlie Ayers (note: first chef at Google): I come from the world of the Grateful Dead, so I know how to party, and so on the ski trips in Squaw Valley I would have these unsanctioned parties and finally the company was like, “All right, we’ll give Charlie what he wants.” And I created Charlie’s Den. I had live bands, deejays, and we bought truckloads of alcohol and a bunch of pot and made ganja goo balls. I remember people coming up to me and saying, “I’m hallucinating. What the fuck is in those?” It was like something out of The Hangover — hot girls drooling all over themselves and people passed out on the chairs.

> Larry Page: All sorts of fun things.

> Charlie Ayers: Larry and Sergey had like this gaggle of girls who were hot, and all become like their little harem of admins, I call them the L&S Harem, yes. All those girls are now different heads of departments in that company, years later. […] Sergey’s the Google playboy. He was known for getting his fingers caught in the cookie jar with employees that worked for the company in the masseuse room. He got around.[…] HR told me that Sergey’s response to it was, “Why not? They’re my employees.” But you don’t have employees for fucking! That’s not what the job is.

It was wild times back then.

> The joke used to be at the time, this being ’97 through 2000 — the golden era — was basically all you had to do was stand at the corner with a cocktail napkin, and VCs would throw money at you from a passing car. I loved it.

> Ev Williams: I remember leaving some party with a bottle of champagne. It was like, “You’re leaving? Have a bottle of champagne!” In those days, it wasn’t a ridiculous gift…

> […]

> Jamis MacNiven: There was a guy — the name of the company was Pixelon — he raised fifteen, eighteen million dollars, had no product, went to Las Vegas, hired the Who and, I think, Kiss.

> Jamis MacNiven: Draper Fisher Jurvetson once rented one of the biggest buildings in the world, Hangar One at Moffett Field — it was where the USS Macon zeppelin was — and filled it with amusement park rides. There must have been eleven thousand pounds of shrimp and it was raging. Barbara Ellison, Larry’s ex-wife, used to throw parties with zebras and elephants and giraffes. There was a party once that had army tanks driving around with naked women. One guy had a huge party and hired these four party girls, to just walk around completely naked, in Woodside, on a Sunday afternoon!

And you always think it is about work only over there. :)

> Ev Williams: The thing that people missed was that it was the financial bubble that burst, not the internet. This whole time usage of the internet continued to climb dramatically.

On to the next big one, Apple. Steve coming back wasn’t an accident.

> Larry Ellison: We used to go for these long walks in Castle Rock State Park over by the coast. It cost $5 billion to buy Apple in those days, it was run by a fellow named Gil Amelio. I had raised the money. I was going to give Steve 25 percent of the company, and we were going to take it private and he was going to run it. And Steve said, “You know, Larry, I think I figured out a way I can get control of Apple without you having to buy it.” I’ll never forget this conversation as long I live. I said “Okay…” and then he said, “Yeah, I think I can get them to buy NeXT Computer and I’ll go on the board, and eventually the board will recognize that I’m a better CEO than Gil Amelio and I’ll become CEO.”

Let’s get to the iPod:

> Tony Fadell: So I am getting on a ski lift in Vail, and I get this call: “Hi, this is Jon Rubinstein from Apple,” blah blah blah. The very next week I had my first meeting with Jon.

> Jon Rubinstein: There was a key meeting. It’s me and Phil Schiller and Jony — there was a group of us, but Tony is the lead.

> Tony Fadell: Steve comes in the room, does not say a word, takes the checklist, throws it on the desk, and gives the vision for it. Ron Johnson: It was, “I want to make a music device and I want it to hold all your music, I want it to be digital, with great software so you could take your music everywhere.” I don’t think he had thought of “a thousand songs in your pocket” yet, but that was what he was imagining.

How Apple used being small back then:

> Jon Rubinstein: We put together a pitch to the music companies: “Look, we’re at 2 percent market share with the Mac — we are not successful, so you have no downside to licensing us the music. You can do this experiment and it will cost you nothing.” If we’d been wildly successful in the market, there’s no way they would have licensed it to us. We didn’t matter, so they could license to us and who cares, right?”

> […]

> Mike Slade: People didn’t really think that the iPod was going to be a viable product for Windows, because it was a pain in the butt to hook it up to FireWire. It was kind of a hack for a Windows user until the USB 2.0 iPod came out. That’s one of the reasons why the music companies were willing to give him the Windows option. Jon Rubinstein: By then it was, “You’re kind of pregnant, so it is too late to back out now.”

Then comes facebook and its first investment:

> Mark Pincus: And then Sean put together an investment round quickly, and he had advised Zuck to, I think, take $500,000 from Peter Thiel, and then $38,000 each from me and Reid Hoffman. Because we were basically the only other people doing anything in social networking. It was a very, very small little club at the time.

And Facebook worked at night:

> Ezra Callahan: When we first moved in, the office door had this lock we couldn’t figure out, but the door would automatically unlock at nine a.m. every morning. I was the guy that had to get to the office by nine to make sure nobody walked in and just stole everything, because no one else was going to get there before noon. All the Facebook guys are basically nocturnal.

And they actually pushed code in the middle of the night to not effect too many people.

> Ruchi Sanghvi: So then we would only push out code in the middle of the night, and that’s because if we broke things it wouldn’t impact that many people. But it was terrible because we were up until like three or four a.m. every night, because the act of pushing just took everybody who had committed any code to be present in case anything broke.

DOMINATION!

> Ezra Callahan: We had company parties all the time, and for a period in 2005, all Mark’s toasts at the company parties would end with “Domination!”

> Mark Zuckerberg: Domination!!

> […]

> Max Kelly: We literally tore the Yahoo offer up and stomped on it as a company! We were like, “Fuck those guys, we are going to own them!” That was some malice-ass bullshit.

> Mark Zuckerberg: Domination!!!

> […]

> Steve Jobs: I admire Mark Zuckerberg. I only know him a little bit, but I admire him for not selling out — for wanting to make a company. I admire that a lot.

So what is the difference between Google and Facebook? (and then on to Odeo and Twitter)

> Ev Williams: Roughly speaking, there are two engineering cultures in Silicon Valley, which you could describe as hackers and engineers. And obviously Google is engineers. Engineers generally have computer science degrees and higher. They study the fundamentals. Hackers just want to make stuff work, and it’s not about doing it right necessarily. Facebook was kind of famously built by hackers, but they’re not the hippie hackers. Hippie hackers are a particular strain of hackers, and Noah is a total hippie. And so we hired hippie hackers — I mean Noah really hired these people. They are his people, he got along with them.

> […]

> Biz Stone: Those guys were a pain in the ass. They would specifically sit down during a stand-up meeting — on purpose! There was one stand-up meeting where they were sitting down and Ev was like, “Guys, please, I need everyone here by ten a.m.” Because everyone was showing up at noon or whatever. And one of the guys raised his hands and said, “I have a question.” And Ev was like, “Yes?” And he said, “What’s our motivation?” And Ev just lost it. Ev just yelled out, “It’s your fucking job!!”

I feel Ev. :)

So the launch of Twitter at South by Southwest.

> Ray McClure: Twitter just totally took over South by Southwest that year.

> Biz Stone: A couple of things that happened. One is this story of the guy at the bar who tweeted, “This bar is too loud. If anyone wants to talk about projects let’s go to this other bar that’s quiet.” And then in the eight minutes it took him to walk there eight hundred people had showed up! That was my realization that, Oh, shit. We definitely invented a new thing. We definitely made something that the world had never seen.

This was a great book to read. So let’s end with this:

> Nick Bilton: And at the end of the day, Twitter became a place for people to become more famous, and not a place for conversation.

> @RealDonaldTrump: My daughter Ivanka thinks I should run for President. Maybe I should listen.

> Nick Bilton: Twitter today is one person talking to a lot of people — not a conversation. And I don’t think that we as human beings were designed to enable 320 million people to have a conversation together.

> Steven Johnson: It’s true, Twitter is not a conversational medium, and that’s fine. Not everything has to be a conversation medium. So if you are judging it by that standard, then yes, it’s a failure. But I have found Twitter, personally, to be just a great addition to my life.

> @RealDonaldTrump: I love Twitter… It’s like owning your own newspaper — without the losses.

It’s written by John LeFevre who has started it all with registering a Twitter account called GSElevator, an account built by telling the tales out of the Goldman Sachs Elevator.

> Everyone else doesn’t get it: the lifestyle, the long hours and canceled plans, the binge drinking, and the nihilistic sense of humor. I don’t think any of them have ever woken up from a blackout on a subway car and gone direct to office still wearing last night’s tuxedo, only to be showered with praise. How could they understand? And they certainly don’t have the disposable income — although it doesn’t always feel limitless at the rate I spend it.

Even if the stories are only 50% true, they are so over the top, it is mind boggling.

> Banking has given me a very distorted view of money, priorities, and what I deserve or feel that I am entitled to. Despite my paycheck, I feel poor. This detached sense of reality, combined with my increasingly selective social circles and a blindingly aspirational culture, has created a lifestyle as precarious as any middle-class one. The numbers are just bigger.

The money that is flowing there is ludicrous and the way they are just pushing deals down the pipe because they need to be winning against the other bank, tells you that this entire market is somehow wrong. At the same time, their services are needed.

And John is doing a good job in walking that tight rope between entertaining over the top stories …

> I realized a very important thing that had eluded me during my exploratory trip a few months prior: that Lipton was leaving Hong Kong, not because of the opportunity in New York, but because he had a coke problem and his wife was threatening to divorce him. It’s a good thing that I wasn’t moving here with a wife or a coke problem. [ … ] Here I am, locked in a stranger’s bathroom, staring at myself in the mirror, sweat pouring down my face, white powder all over my nose, and my limp cock in my hand. I’ve been in Asia for all of eight weeks.

… and showing what it is like to work in international banking, and how the processes work, banks interact, clients demand, real people work on hundreds of millions of dollar deals.

Entertaining book.

The premise of the book is simple:

> Everything is becoming vulnerable in this way because everything is becoming a computer. More specifically, a computer on the Internet.

Of course there are a lot of details and anything Bruce cites, is linked to the origin story, so you really get all the sources that are used to bring that above point home. Especially when thinking about a few years down the road, internet connectivity will be like the power grid, something you do not think about.

> 1989, Internet security expert Gene Spafford famously said: “The only truly secure system is one that is powered off, cast in a block of concrete and sealed in a lead-lined room with armed guards — and even then I have my doubts.” Almost 30 years later, that’s still true.

and …

> Rod Beckstrom summarized it this way: (1) anything connected to the Internet can be hacked; (2) everything is being connected to the Internet; (3) as a result, everything is becoming vulnerable.

If you have to do with technology, this is all kind of clear, but it still needs to be very much in your mind at all times because it is so easy to forget that security is important. Bruce also added some additional fun points:

> David Clark, an MIT professor and one of the architects of the early Internet, recalls: “It’s not that we didn’t think about security. We knew that there were untrustworthy people out there, and we thought we could exclude them.” Yes, they really thought they could limit Internet usage to people they knew.

Ok, security is important, but on the other end we have to make sure that we can still hack things and find backdoors to be able to increase security because current laws are prohibiting that and are actually using stuff like copyright to enforce things that normally wouldn’t be enforceable. Check this:

> Keurig coffee makers are designed to use K-cup pods to make single servings of coffee. Because the machines use software to verify the codes printed on the K-cups, Keurig can enforce exclusivity, so only companies who pay Keurig can produce pods for its coffee machines. HP printers no longer allow you to use unauthorized ink cartridges. Tomorrow, the company might require you to use only authorized paper — or refuse to print copyrighted words you haven’t paid for. Similarly, tomorrow’s dishwasher could enforce which brands of detergent you use.

Think about it, you cannot build your own K-cups because the software that verifies the codes can’t be analysed. Before software, that wouldn’t be possible. Strange world. But it is not simple either:

> For example, some people are hacking their insulin pumps to create an artificial pancreas — a device that will measure their blood sugar levels and automatically deliver the proper doses of insulin on a continuous basis. Do we want to give them the ability to do that, or do we want to make sure that only regulated manufacturers produce and sell those devices? I’m not sure where the proper balance lies.

I agree. It’s as always complicated. But if the source code for insulin pumps was open, if everyone could hack it, and you had authorized update providers, then people could choose who could update their device but also know that the world has made it more secure.

Of course, then we need to make sure we have enough funding to let people find security problems in all those systems because otherwise they will not search for them.

And this again brings us to something I have been really thinking about a great deal. The country Estonia has their resident records in a blockchain _because_ it is a lot more important that they are not changed than that they are stolen or similar. It is ok that everyone knows my blood type, but that it is changed in some important database can be life threatening.

> It’s the same with databases. I am concerned about the privacy of my medical records, but I am even more concerned that someone could change my blood type or list of allergies (an integrity threat) or shut down lifesaving equipment (an availability threat). One way of thinking about this is that confidentiality threats are about privacy, but integrity and availability threats are really about safety.

> […]

> In the future, however, we might also see more cyber operations that will change or manipulate electronic information in order to compromise its integrity (i.e. accuracy and reliability) instead of deleting it or disrupting access to it. Decision-making by senior government officials (civilian and military), corporate executives, investors, or others will be impaired if they cannot trust the information they are receiving.

Maybe, just maybe, one such hack will lead to suddenly the incentives being put in place to make Internet security happen. Really happen.

> […] once we got the incentives for security right, the technologies came along to make it happen. With spam, it took a change in the e-mail ecosystem to shift the incentives of e-mail providers. With credit cards, it took a law to shift the incentives of banks. Similarly, Internet+ security is primarily a problem of incentives — and of policy.

He also has a lot of suggestions what could possibly be done but admits its a complicated road ahead, just that we need to travel it. Additionally it is not only about security and technology but also about philosophy and social norms.

I really liked this part here, which just means we need to have discussions and not hold everything sacred.

> Addressing the 2014 Munich Security Conference, Estonian president Toomas Hendrik Ilves observed: I think much of the problem we face today represents the culmination of a problem diagnosed 55 years ago by C. P. Snow in his essay “The Two Cultures”: the absence of dialogue between the scientific-technological and the humanist traditions. When Snow wrote his classic essay, he bemoaned that neither culture understood or impinged on the other. Today, bereft of understanding of fundamental issues and writings in the development of liberal democracy, computer geeks devise ever better ways to track people . . . simply because they can and it’s cool. Humanists on the other hand do not understand the underlying technology and are convinced, for example, that tracking meta-data means the government reads their emails. C. P. Snow’s two cultures not only do not talk to each other, they simply act as if the other doesn’t exist.

Great book.

You already get that this is different because it starts with definitions:

> Catabolic: Anything that results in the breakdown of the organism.

> Anabolic: Anything that results in growth and differentiation of the organism.

> Health: A physiological state in which there is an absence of disease or pathology and that maintains the necessary biologic balance between the catabolic and anabolic states.

> Fitness: The bodily state of being physiologically capable of handling challenges that exist above a resting threshold of activity.

> Exercise: A specific activity that stimulates a positive physiological adaptation that serves to enhance fitness and health and does not undermine the latter in the process of enhancing the former.

To understand what to do you need to understand how the body works and what effects certain actions will have.

I will try to put it very shortly, and you have to read the book to really understand it, but you have a very quick glycolysis cycle that leads to ATP relatively quickly, and the krebs cycle which is a lot more complicated but also more powerful. You need to stress the glycolysis cycle to train the krebs cycle. Call it the support system that needs to improve together with more muscle. But the glycolysis cycle will always be faster, but might just not be enough.

The most fun thing is that this stuff is so majorly complicated. If you really work out and lactate forms in your body, it goes through the liver back to pyruvate and from there glucose, made again available to the muscles either spent directly or stored as glycogen in the muscles directly.

Also, this lactic acid, you also produce hydrogen ions that act on hemoglobin molecules so they have less affinity to oxygen which leads to better osygen delivery to the tissues. Scary eh? It’s called the Bohr effect and btw, high altitude training does not really lead higher lung capacity (I doubt that admittedly, probably a bit too), but to an easier give up of oxygen by delivery molecules.

So why do they talk about importance of high intensity training? Because if you run or walk, you burn X calories, makes no difference. The difference is that high intensity trainings activates hormone-sensitive lipase. Ok, it’s complicated. A lot more depth is in the book.

The second part is that you have slow-twitch, intermediate-twitch and fast-twitch muscles fibres. Normally you only employ the slow twitching fibres and the fast-twitching ones were really built for high emergency situations. The latter really were needed to use every now and then and hence need a week to re-energise and you need to make sure that you push weights over a 45–90 second interval (150 seconds absolute max), constantly (think TUL aka Time Under Load) and slowly, to cycle through all different fibre types. It means you start with a weight that is a bit too light, which will become heavier during the workout, and at best in the last few seconds you continue pushing for 10 of them while nothing really moves.

> Proper strength training does exactly the opposite. Rather than recruiting all muscle fibers in tandem, it recruits them in a sequential, orderly fashion and taps the fast-twitch motor units last, after you’ve tapped out all of the other, lower-order fibers. This yields a far more thorough stimulation of your musculature and of your metabolism. There isn’t a rock that’s left unturned. Not only are all fiber types stimulated, but also, because of the tie-in of the metabolic pathways to mechanical movement, you’re involving everything related to fitness in the organism by using this protocol.

You just need to work until positive failure. You should move the weights as slowly as possible, at best at 75–80% of your starting strength, go above the point where you feel you need to quit, continue breathing, and push at the very end for 10 seconds even if nothing moves.

> After all, the purpose of the exercise is not to make the weight go up and down; it is to achieve a deep level of inroad, to reach the point where you can no longer move the weight but still keep trying. If you have that degree of intellectual understanding, then you will be able to override the instincts that otherwise would intercede to prevent you from stimulating the production of a positive adaptive response from your body.

If you can push longer than 90 seconds, increase weight by 5–10%.

> In the face of epinephrine, hormone-sensitive lipase will mobilize fatty acids out of the fat cells for emergency energy usage, but in the presence of insulin, the action of hormone-sensitive lipase is inhibited. When you perform high-intensity strength training, epinephrine stimulates an amplification cascade of hormone-sensitive lipase, allowing the liberation of fatty acids from the fat cells, to begin the fat-mobilization process. This outcome is a dividend of high-intensity exercise itself, irrespective of calorie balance.

Also, the reason why doing these exercises burns calories long after the exercise is that due to the nature of your workout the energy stores of your muscles are empty need to be refilled.

> A mere pound of fat stores an astounding 3,500 calories for delayed use at any time in the future. Because it is dormant tissue, there is almost no metabolic cost for keeping it on the body. As members of the human species, we all owe our existence to fat.

> For about 150,000 generations, efficient fat storage was essential for survival, but only three to four generations have seen efficient fat storage lead to obesity.

Also important is that if you work your muscles, the body will try to build up muscle, hence if you have a calorie deficit it will try to get rid of other nutrients (e.g. fat) first. Also the reason that fruits, vegetables and lean meat are better to loosing fat is because the cost of converting those is higher than e.g. refined carbohydrates, a concept known as “thermic cost of digestion”.

In the end, this function holds, no matter what:

> Energy intake − basal metabolic rate (determined largely by the degree of muscle mass) + increase because of added muscle through proper exercise + energy cost of activity, including exercise + thermic cost of digestion + heat loss to the environment = fat loss (or fat gain, if energy intake is greater than the energy cost of the listed components).

To loose weight, they suggest the following:

> First, eat natural, unprocessed foods. These foods typically have a lower calorie density per unit of weight. Research has shown that humans gravitate toward eating a specific weight-based quantity of food each day.

> Second, stay cool. Keep your thermostat down, and wear cooler clothes.

> Third, sleep well and sleep cool.

> Fourth, avoid stress as much as possible.

> Fifth, employ high-intensity exercise.

Good insights I have to admit and the science play allows me to understand and accept their insights better. Let’s see how I think about that in a few months :)

One thing I am following a bit is Zoox. For those that do not know, they are reinventing the car in an autonomous world. My easiest example is, as you do not have a steering wheel, there is no back or front. CNBC has a video about Zoox and general autonomous driving that gives a good overview. Anyway, they had a busy few months, raising $500m at a $3.2b valuation, they lost their CEO. If you are still interested, there is a good piece on Bloomberg about Zoox.

When I find more time I have to digg deeper into the Cannabis industry. The first IPO happened on NASDAQ and a few days after legalising Cannabis Canada is running out of the stuff. In Cologne, Cannamedical is pushing hard into the market with great success. This is a really interesting space from many angles.

On the infrastructure side, Facebook has replaced Zoo Keeper for managing its servers,

Going into Crypto, there is a new app to login to MyEtherWallet, which is likely a good thing. We are still a long way away from really simple and distributed wallets. Coinbase is nice but it’s one central glob. Also listen to this podcast with Vitalik Buterin.

Continuing with the money game, Fred Wilson writes about Opportunity Zones in the US where investments are incentivised also linking to a map of where they are.

On the Gear Front, Peak Design is releasing their Travel Backpack. I myself love the Everyday Backpack and don’t need a bigger one, but if you like the idea of an extendable travel backpack, take a look. Headphones probably being my second problem area, Audeze has released closed back ones and the open back ones seem to be simply amazing (-ly expensive) but I tend to listen to loud music and it would drive people next to me crazy if I had open headphones. Speakers… this seems to be the next ones to get: Devialet Phantom. For the privacy minded among you, there is now an email server that you can use. Your own Helm.

As some of you might know, we at Giant Swarm are also running Kubernetes clusters for customers in Mainland China, hence the intersection of tech and china is somehow on my radar. I had to smile/frown/shiver when I read that Apple’s iCloud data is handled by China Telecom. I thought Apple would be better. Also interesting, the thought to be dead Docker raised $92 million.

There you go, happy reading. Next up next week… ok, never mind, I know it will not happen, still trying to see if I blog more often :)

_Photo byJohn LegrandonUnsplash_

> Und Arbeit ist nun mal Arbeit, wenn der Arbeitende für die Kunden, Mandanten, Patienten, Klienten, Leser echte Wertschöpfung erbringt. Sonst nenne ich es Beschäftigung.

aka: A job is a job, as long as the worker is doing things of value for customers, patients, clients, readers … otherwise it is just activity.

And that is very true if you think about it. What you do needs to create value.

The author goes on to talk about strategy and that things change. His example is Ali against Foreman, where Ali changed his strategy when he noticed that his existing one didn’t work against Foreman. The point is that if current things do not work, change them.

Remember this: Every employee is there for one thing: The problem of the customer must be solved. It cannot be ignored. Then, some other market participant will solve it.

He then goes deeper into Ocean’s Eleven, as an example, where there are different accomplices how no fixed jobs but roles they take from time to time. Done is what needs to be done and what needs to be done is defined by the problem that needs to be solved.

The only problem I have with that is the long term view.

If you push that further, schools, businesses and the like are really an aggregation of jobs with a distinct set of expectations that are totally independent of the people that fill them. That is very very dangerous and especially with people that can choose where they work, it might not be the right setting.

It is hard to translate from germany, but the german word Amt, which is maybe translated as “office” or a job of authority, actually comes from the celtic ambactos … the whorish, the servent, … somebody that does something that he is told.

And that is where the problem comes in. If you have offices, if you have jobs of authority, people will want to keep that authority and hence the production manager will not allow anyone else to have the best ideas for production problems and the marketing manager not for marketing. This is simply because they are attached to the office and not to solving the customer problem. Everyone wants to keep the peace. I still think you need some kind of focus for people but maybe that needs to be on the task.

We have that at Giant Swarm in that we have Special Interest Groups around topics that take the focus away from the person but at the same time allows a person to be in the lead in that group, at least temporarily. And you always have to remember that we have people inside the company that other people look up to but simply because they know they have knowledge in the field, that they are good in the field. Not because they hold an office.

The author continues going down the path that you need to not have individual appraisals when team performance is important. This is nothing new, but it is always forgotten.

Something that corporates to do not understand: Overregulation leads to a situation where criminal acts take over. Sounds harsh but if you have a rule and people have to break the rule to do their job, they will, and you will love them for it and that it totally stupid. Throw out rules as often and as fast as you can.

Instead of rules you need principles that mean something, that exclude something. We are honest to each other … is not a principles. It needs to be clearer. Real principles exclude something that would be ok. We will not work with people that are not honest, even if it would be good for the company in a monetary way…. that would be a principle.

And these principles need to allow you to increase your level of preparation because in a complex world, often things happen that you could not plan for so you need to be prepared. You need to be fit for different realities. That is what is important for the future, not planning. Of course you can plan for the known part of the future, but for the unknown you need to prepare and yes that takes time and effort but it is not more than planning, and especially a lot more worthwhile than useless planning because of an unknown future.

Very good book.

I have one favorite quote though.

> The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time. — Bertrand Russel

Always remember that. But I actually read a book that has some good points: 15 Secrets Successful People Know About Time Management. I didn’t like all of the points but that is because the subject is individual and you need to find your own truth, but here are some points from the book that I liked and would like to remember.

> SECRET #1 Time is your most valuable and scarcest resource.

Ok, this actually does not need a comment. It’s simple enough. The question is of course what you do with it. One good point was this one:

> Invest the first part of your day working on your number one priority that will help build your business. Do this without interruptions — no email or text — and before the rest of the world is awake. –Tom Ziglar is the CEO of Ziglar, Inc.

At the same time, successful people start their day with things like sports, meditation, news, … again, it is personal. I like caring for my kids. It makes me feel better. The point can probably be summarised more like this:

> SECRET #2 Identify your Most Important Task (MIT) and work on it each day before doing anything else.

That I can agree with. I often am one of the first in the office, and I need to focus on things before 9 or 10 to be relatively sure to get them done.

> SECRET #3 Work from your calendar, not a to-do list.

I really like that one, but I tend to not like be that focussed. I might need some things like that to get things done, so maybe 1–2–3 times a day of 90 minutes. I tend to already do this with free time after and before meetings. This is what is called “blind spots” in the book and that is probably the biggest take away. I think you can’t do it beforehand easily but you can once your day gets too full, schedule them.

Some good points from Andy Grove: “My day ends when I’m tired and ready to go home, not when I’m done. I am never done. Like a housewife’s, a manager’s work is never done. There is always more to be done, more that should be done, always more than can be done.”

So this for me is the most important thing that I am still learning but getting better at.

> SECRET #5 Accept the fact that there will always be more to do and more that can be done.

Then, there is this one:

> SECRET #6 Always carry a notebook.

Hmm… I am trying to do this with the iPad now, but with handwriting. I might need the app on the phone too, but then I would need the pen. Really unsure here. I just think notebooks are not me. Pieces of paper thrown away are more me. This is why I mostly carry Atoma Notebooks. You can tear out pages and keep a clean notebook. The perfect way still has to be found. I also have A LOT of notes in iA Writer. There is a point though in that you remember what you write down AND, even more important, you allow your mind to not needing to remember when writing it down, hence freeing up room.

Now for a big one.

> SECRET #7 Email is a great way for other people to put their priorities into your life; control your inbox.

Yes. Remember. Done.

> SECRET #8 Schedule and attend meetings as a last resort, when all other forms of communication won’t work.

Yes, agreed and this is a thing for company structure, even more than personal one.

> SECRET #9 Say no to everything that doesn’t support your immediate goals.

Yes, and no, a fuzzy one. And as mentioned, if you like doing it, and draw power out of it, then the question is if that power helps you do other things. It’s a balance. Keep it in your mind. I do say no to A LOT of things because of that.

> SECRET #10 Eighty percent of outcomes are generated by twenty percent of activities.

HELL YES! I so much damn agree with that. There is A LOT you can do that will not add a meaningful difference. You can do that in certain aspects when you think it is part of your brand or something, but remember that those 80% are different for other people, so do your 80% and get people that do your 20% in their 80%… I hope you understand what I mean. It’s logical.

> Ask, “How valuable is this task to me or to the company? What would happen if I just dropped it completely?” Ask, “Am I the only person who could do this task? Who else in or outside the company could accomplish this?” Ask, “How can the same outcome be achieved but with a faster process? How could this task get completed if I only had half the time?”

And then the one that does not really mix well with Secret #2, as I already mentioned.

> SECRET #14 Invest the first 60 minutes of each day in rituals that strengthen your mind, body, and spirit.

But that is really what I said. Start with your, start with your family, start with the important tasks in your company, know when you stop and care for something else, delegate like crazy, know your strengths.

Many interesting points, nothing too new but things to remember. Buy the book to get the other secrets and A LOT more additional material.

Then there still is the entire Cryptocurrency thing out there that will be challenging but interesting this year, so more learning around lightning networks, banking infrastructure, distributed teams, …

Last but not least we have the question what the next step is, and I like keeping an open mind. I am thinking vertical pharming, crispr, living spaces of the future (people moving out of cities due to remote work and later also flying and autonomous cars, … what will that mean).

I might be looking at AI but at the moment do not feel so interested. There are people a lot better equipped than me to think about that.

And please remember that I am well diversified beyond cryptocurrencies and have put only a very small amount of my liquidity into them. Do not invest more than 2–5% of your assets into high risk things like this. If they go up in value and become 20–40% or more of your net worth, take money off the table at the latest. Remember this is still high high risk stuff.

Additionally, there are A LOT of scams out there and A LOT of coins that should never have existed. In case you have no IT background, do not really understand what those coins are about, keep your fingers from it. Now for the list.

Bitcoin

I started buying Bitcoin in 2013, when everyone still thought about it as a currency. These days, most people really think about it like a new world Gold. This is really already the first notion that I think is important to understand. The cryptocurrency space is no longer a one size fits all thing, but rather a lot of different things that are tokens or coins on blockchains or even only slightly related mathematical things. The idea to put them all in one basket to understand them does not work.

Why did Bitcoin rise so sharply in recent times, other than simply because more people bought it for higher prices, is a question that was often asked and I have a possibly slightly different answers.

Remember, Bitcoin does not belong to anyone, it is a really distributed system and there are different factions pulling it in different directions. That always made people uneasy in terms of what might happen when one of those factions manages to _change_ Bitcoin into something else. With the latest upgrades, one of those actually failed and this was a good thing, as it showed that Bitcoin is really, if anything, set in its ways. It is what it is.. Of course you can argue this is bad, but an alternative view is that this is making Bitcoin more predictable.

Bitcoin has become a relatively safe bet in the long term in my mind, within the real of high risk assets mind you.

Ethereum

The idea of making a blockchain touring complete, and to allow applications to run on that blockchain is simply amazing. There is a lot of opportunity in that general idea. Of course Ethereum has its own scalability problems but those will all be dealt with in due time. The team is amazing. Ethereum is the blockchain of choice for the ICO market for now and first really interesting things are starting to appear. 2018 will arguably need to be the year of signs of real usage.

Ripple

Ripple is trying to replace (parts of) SWIFT, the interbank monetary exchange. I actually got the first ones ages ago as part of the gift from Ripple Inc, and then after one of our developers was going all wild about Ripple, I added Ripple to my list and bought some more. It has a totally different set of problems, like being too centralised around Ripple Inc, but Ripple the company (with Billions of USD of its own Cryptocurrency on his own books now!!!) behind a cryptocurrency actually makes it easier for big banks to work with them, and that again makes it more likely for Ripple to build up an alternative to SWIFT. At this time all those customers are using a Ripple product that does not need the XRP Coin by Ripple, but there is another alternative product that does use XRP and is more efficient and cheaper to use. In either case, this is promising and will turn out to be one of the best Startup Investments ever for the VCs. At this time, the value of XRP reflects the general idea that all of the customers of Ripple will eventually fully use XRP. I expect this thing to drop hard some time 2018 when reality sets in.

Btw, I also have some Stellar, which was co-founded by Jed McCaleb, who was also Co-founder of Ripple and actually has still a few billion ripples under tight sale controls under his belt. Let’s call it the open and egalitarian Ripple that has gotten some traction recently too, though nowhere near Ripple. But Jed can fund Stellar for some time to come if need be. The B2C play of Stellar makes the upside bigger and the likelyhood smaller than the B2B Ripple.

Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin Gold

I simply got those as part of the Bitcoin Split in recent times and I am holding on to them for at least a year, partly simply due to German tax laws around cryptocurrencies being treated like money. Bitcoin Cash seems to possibly become a real rival to Bitcoin though, which I heard by some very powerful people in the space, so we will see what happens there.

EOS

Often not the first mover wins, but somebody later to the game and the group that is behind EOS is really interesting. I also had some chats already with Brock Pierce and I wouldn’t count him out to say the least. If EOS manages to really launch something secure and scalable, with thousands of transactions a second, interconnecting decentralised chains, coupled with them having hundreds of millions of USDs to give to startups to use EOS as their base, this will turn out very well. Let’s call it a startup investment, but check their latest development update.

Tezos

[Tezos has gone up in flames](https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/11/tezos-a-cryptocurrency-that-raised-232-million-in-july-is-in-crisis/) but still has a small chance of seeing the light of day. In short, the code belongs to the founders, who setup a Foundation in switzerland to take over that code after the ICO and now they are fighting and are in the deadlock. The Foundation has close to a Billion USD of crypto worth from the ICO, and the founders and their company have the code. Totally stupid to say the least. At least the money is still there, as Bitcoin Swiss AG posted.

I heard about Tezos in several podcasts and over Twitter from the right people. The idea I like most about it is that they have a voting mechanism to be able to upgrade things more easily in case of problems. I think DApps and DAOs are important but in their purest sense, aka code is law, they are going to far due to our missing experience. We still need to learn and play with this stuff as it is too new and for that, a more easily usable upgrade path in case of problems, putting people above code programmatically, is the right way to go. My mind. Let’s see how this turns out. I still wish them luck and actually … get your act together and stop playing he-said-she-said.

Litecoin

This is actually all about the founder of Litecoin, Charlie Lee leaving Coinbase and focussing on Litecoin again. If something like this happens you listen and it was worth the shot. Also, Litecoin is kind of the Bitcoin playground and gets a good amount of attention. Them being listed in Coinbase is also not bad. All in all there is nothing OH MY GOD about this but a list of small things. Admittedly, that Charlie sold all his Litecoin recently to avoid conflict of interest is an emm… interesting move. Caution.

Side Note: I am still investigating lightning networks (billions of transactions a second) for another post and that might also be interesting in that in the future there might be transactions across litecoin and bitcoin through “Cross-chain atomic swaps”, as long as they can support the same cryptographic hash function. Mind blown. Need to read more.

HumanIQ

[HumanIQ](https://humaniq.com/) was one of the first app coins I bought. It resides on the Ethereum Blockchain and the idea behind HumanIQ is to give the unbanked in Africa both an ID and a Payment Mechanism and I would love for this to work. I feel best when this goes up among all of the coins I have. :)

BTW., the team feels rather un-technical but this is a good thing in this case I think.

Monero and ZCash

I will group Monero and ZCash into the general anonymity play group of cryptocurrencies. There are others, but these are the two I like, first one being the underground-gang-lords-use-it one, and second the crypto-coder-driven. You might agree with the idea of an anonymous cryptocurrency or not, but always remember that cash is very anonymous too and this has real value. Some things you want to do not under the eyes of the state or your employer or others and cryptocurrencies are really an open book. This provides a way out and an important one.

IOTA

[IOTA](https://iota.org/) is one I am fighting with myself, and I came late to the party as IoT is totally not my use case and this is exactly where IOTA has it’s adoption. While the coin itself might not be needed and I highly doubt that IOTA will every become something you use to pay other people, it might be used in their machine to machine infrastructure and that infrastructure is getting some real usage and is being praised by friends. Usage is important, sooner or later. Books will be written about this one, especially because you either love or hate it.

Something Different: Neufund

I actually committed Ether to Neufund, a fund investment they call ICBM (Initial Capital Building Mechanism), which means I can invest that money into startups and earn Neumark as a side effect, which again gives me credits in the revenues of the entire fund. It’s a really interesting concept, read the paper, and committing those ether for a year actually cost me nothing, other then them being locked up for 18 months. If I don’t invest, everything is back where it was. No risk, all fun and a really new use case. Actually, just to make the hype market clear again, my Neumark are now worth almost double my committed Ether, so I could sell my Neumark, pay 50% taxes and have my Ether sitting there for free to invest in Startups. Makes no sense.

Some other app tokens

While we are still in the time of the tools making the money, think Netscape, Exodus, Level3, Cisco, … and the applications on this network/system, like Amazon, Facebook, Google, will come later but will be way bigger still. So it might be a bit early to invest in those, but there are some that I like that might be worth the shot.

One of them is Monaco, who are building a credit card bridging the crypto and real currency gap. How much fun would that be, and a 2% cash back is good too. Let’s see if it works.

[Augur](https://augur.net/) is a decentralised prediction market where you can put your money where your mouth is, nice concept.

[Aragon](https://aragon.one/) is about creating a platform to be used to build your own company on the blockchain, with shares, and voting and so on. Very cool indeed as I love the space in general. They are also making some huge progress at the moment. Check their latest update on Medium.

[Golem](https://golem.network/) is the first network of idle compute resources… on the blockchain, as the concept has existed for a long time, just remember the Seti@Home Project that was running on my machines when I was still living in a student home.

[Aventus](https://aventus.io/) is using blockchain methodologies and smart contracts in the ticket space, trying to build a totally new model about secondary sales and the like.

The Rest

If you have stuff in your own wallet (I have all of mine secured via the Ledger Nano S hardware wallet, you get some tokens given to you. In my case this includes some Xenon, INS Promo, Cobinhood, GCS, EMO, Bitclave-ConsumerActivityToken, SSS, VIU, DataCoin, AMM and OmiseGo. I am not really sure what to think of those though. I just add them here for the fun of it, maybe you have a view on them :)