In what areas can I invest into the future? https://twitter.com/theorangealt/status/1292046520271994880

I like small businesses. They provide value (more than each individual employee can). They also avoid some pitfalls of large businesses.

Small businesses need infrastructure: capital, quality banking, quality law systems, quality logistics, etc.

Things like Stripe Atlas (open a business in the US from anywhere in the world) are great. In general, Stripe is great. They are going in exactly the direction I’m thinking of.

Ethereum is also great. It’s money for people who can’t tolerate the complexity of the current financial system, especially when it comes to moving money across borders, *especially* anywhere outside of the US and EU.

There is a lot of low-hanging fruit there — building simple, less powerful substitutes for existing financial infra, on top of Ethereum.

I don’t know anything about logistics and laws so I won’t comment there.

One example though: in Belarus, there is literally a separate law system for cryptocurrency businesses, based on common law and not Belarusian law.

Without that, AFAIK, nobody from the outside would want to interact with those businesses — the lawyering would get too tricky.

Back to small businesses, http://Brick.do  should start moving into that direction.

It was never meant to be a blogging platform. The true purpose is “if you start a project, at least you can make a landing page for it in a minute”.

That’s why the video on our landing page is about writing a meetup announcement, not about writing a blog post.

What else do small businesses need?

Examples.

I’ve had co-founders for both of my businesses so far. I think I should also have co-founders for all future businesses, and I should involve more people into running them.

Not to teach them how to admin, but to show it’s easy.

Capital — this is about “well-off friends are your safety net”. It’s not enough to have VCs and banks.

The best way to give small businesses capital is to make sure everyone has ten friends with disposable income / savings.

Government-run safety nets — “if you get sick or something we’ll care about you” — are inadequate. They are negative safety nets. We also need positive safety nets, which aren’t safety nets at all, but just grants or friends with money or whatever.

Next: physical businesses need access to customers.

Example: this is the subway map of Minsk. Above and below we have Wastelands. I live in one of the two wastelands.

If I want to open a coffee shop, it will be much easier there, but also sad and pointless.

In Berlin, it probably makes sense to open a coffee shop literally anywhere.

(Not sure about it though)

I don’t know how to get more subway lines, but one thing they are probably bottlenecked on is people who are good at executing? And executing as in “really executing dammit”.

Note how all of this ties into: “be good at your job”.

Should you be good at your job because that’s what your employer *expects* and it’s good to do what people expect? No.

The reason to be good at your job is that your job probably creates value, and much more value than you are being paid.

The reason to be good at your job is to create more value for other people. Not your employers, but their customers.

“And those greedy capitalists benefit from that”

Yes, *and also the rest of society*. Focus on that.

“I’m working in gambling/advertising/something horrible”

Quit then.

If you quit a job that doesn’t create value, or a job that destroys value, I suspect you can forget about donating 10% to charity, you can forget about protesting, about fighting for causes, anything. You’ve already done enough.

In fact, working at Google and donating 50% (!) of your income to charity might still be worse than quitting a Google, finding another job, and donating zero.

Note: all of the above is thinking out loud, just delivered without “maybe probably”.