Hi nerds -

I salute you from Miami, as I pack my bags to fly to Panama later today.

This week was particularly special because I spoke in front of the Panamanian Congress advocating for the Crypto Legislation proposed by Senator Silva. Fingers crossed, we should know more details on the decision soon 🤞🏽.

I also started the Female Founder Circle hosted by Pear VC, which connects female technical founders with VCs and leaders in the space. Super empowering to meet women engineers from different backgrounds building crazy innovative projects 🤩.

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3 brain farts

😎 Return on Hassle: The question is not how much of a hassle it takes to build and run a project, but rather what kind of margin are we getting from that hassle.

Software projects are a perfect example of this. Designing, building, and maintaining software is incredibly hard and expensive. However, margins are so big people go for it anyway.

If the hassle is big, the margin must be bigger to optimize for entrepreneur’s happiness, and ergo his/her productivity.

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How to NFT: Building an NFT project consists of three main steps, and a special bonus:

1. The Art: the visual or audio that users will see or listen to. This can be designed all at once or through a generative art algorithm.
2. The Contracts: the smart contracts deciding what each NFT can or can’t do. They can either be generated through no-code tools or crafted from scratch.
3. The Marketing Campaign: directly correlated with the success of the project, this is where most collections struggle. Why?
   1. Projects don’t have enough popularity before drop day
   2. They use Web2 marketing techniques to sell to a Web3 audience​
   3. They overhype the collection before drop, and then the project tanks on secondary sales
4. [optional] Utility: not all projects have utility, but those that do, add value to token-holders beyond the art itself. Because NFTs can act as a form of identity, token-gated perks both online and IRL are becoming increasingly popular.

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⏰ The Newsfeed Timezone: The never-ending now brought on by the never-ending newsfeed blurs the lines between what was, what will be, and what is. It makes us continuously more distant from the present:

• When we feel nostalgic or ashamed, it's usually because we're thinking of the past.
• When we feel stressed or anxious, it's usually because we're worried about the future.

But in the present, we just are. If we can remove the thought of past and future, we would inevitably feel calm. Because, in the present, things are always okay - we are breathing and alive 🧘🏻‍♀️.

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2 intellectual goodies

“Much of what destroys our lives can be attributed to emotions that our conscious selves haven’t found a way to understand or address in time.”

~ Alain de Botton, School of Life​

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“It’s as hard to start and run a small business as it is to start a big one.

You will suffer the same toll financially and psychologically as you bludgeon it into existence. It’s hard to raise the money and to find the right people.

So if you’re going to dedicate your life to a business, which is the only way it will ever work, you should choose one with the potential to be huge.”

~ Stephen A. Schwarzman, What It Takes​

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1 funky audio

In celebration of Women’s day, today I’d love to share a podcast where I spoke about what it means to be a software engineer and a woman in the technology space (in Spanish). Hope you enjoy it 💙

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Thanks for reading.

As always, feel free to connect by hitting reply and sharing a juicy thought 💡.

We all help the curious community grow.

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Best,

Jules 🤸🏻‍♂️