Mission: DeFi EP 94 - Josh Rosenthal - 🤯 A new model for framing crypto against the backdrop of renaissance & revolution parallels

Get ready to be blown away by the insights and frameworks Josh Rosenthal uses for building companies, investing, and understanding the full potential of crypto.

His interviews on Bankless have created a storm of theories on how crypto plays out, based on the historical context of the Renaissance and the American Revolution. He takes that further in this interview with a presentation that reframes how we talk to others about crypto, by helping them see the value before they know what it is.

This episode though goes far beyond this.

From a Fulbright historian to multiple startups with very successful exits, Josh, and his partners have built a framework for success in tech.

• Fulbright research & medieval manuscripts
• Built complex systems & started a company with his wif & sold
• Multiple startups with successful exits

• As investors - how to help the little guy succeed
• How to start a new firm based on a new model
• Stumbled on crypto. Went all in.
• Crypto as an unlock for founders.
• Began to see the parallels between crypto and the Renaissance

Renaissance

• How changing the nature of communications & value recreated the world.
• Sees it as a prediction for crypto
• How authority tries to tamp it down
• Renaissance was decentralized and distributed
• Could understand imagery
• Beginning of memes
• Authorities had to fight or join

• Regulatory threats make him want to double down on crypto.

How he layers in the arguments for crypto to entrepreneurs and others by showing how crypto unlocks new possibilities. Presentation.

• His philosophy on investing and an entrepreneur's focus on exits
• Positions entrepreneurs to be in control & have an advantage
• Always disintermediating someone else
• Simulating the differences between the old world and then in the new world decentralized innovation world
• How to keep control
• Understand rules of the game. Make intentional decision.

• Axiom: Trick people into doing the right thing and build a better world
• Try to figure out a way to make not doing something an actual thing
• Use market forces to make things flow.
• How to forget the sales and marketing and move around the motes built
• How can you step outside the frame and beat the boss and turn their source of power into a liability
• Why things are incentivized wrong for the founder and how they can flip it.
• Understanding the different models of Web2 in crypto versus web3 in crypto
• How he graphically demonstrates it with widgets
• Decentralized innovation
• Bottom up
• Capital to cooperate
• Owning the rails
• Explains the value and benefits
• Always accessible
• Smart contracts
• peer to peer
• Data owned by each user
• Determining factors of user-owned business models
• Thought exercise
• Users share ownership as an incentive
• Ads drive costs and never stop
• Imagine can do everything through code
• Users own like they might own Facebook
• Funding the new way
• LLC was revolutionary - Decentralization with fractional ownership
• From Mainframe to LAMP
• Cheaper and faster
• New way to finance yourself
• We are all medieval peasants
• Books he recommends
• Paul Arden - Whatever You Think, Think The Opposite
• John Micklethwait - The Company: A Short History of a Revolutionary Idea
• James Dale Davidson - The Sovereign Individual: Mastering the Transition to the Information Age
• Neal Stephenson - Snow Crash
• Videos
• Easy To Learn Hard To Master: The Fate of Atari
• Bankless 63. - The Crypto Renaissance
• How they invest in crypto
• How anybody can be a venture investor in crypto without getting in early

This is not financial advice. Nothing said on the show should be considered financial advice. This is just the opinions of Brad Nickel and our guests. None of us are financial advisors. Trading, participating, yield farming, liquidity pools, and all of DeFi and crypto is high risk and dangerous. If you decide to participate, do your own research. Never count on the research of others. We don't know what we are talking about and you can lose all your money. Never invest more than you can afford to lose, because you probably will lose it all.

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