Hi nerds -

I salute you today from Panama City.

As we head into the final weeks of Write of Passage, we’ve been talking about creating serendipity online by sending cold emails to people we admire.

Someone who's been on my radar for a while is Whitney Wolfe, Bumble’s CEO.

Named the youngest female billionaire after Bumble went public last year, it’s crazy to see that out of 559 companies that went public in the US in 2020, only 3 were founded by women, including Bumble.

I became so fascinated by her story, I’ve decided to make a curation piece on her work. You can find the juicy article here.

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3 brain farts

🕰 Crypto clock: The crypto clock seems to have a speed of its own.

While the world is used to transformation taking months or years, crypto communities on Discord are collaboratively creating smart contracts with revolutionary impact within days.

​It took us nearly 400 years to go from gold to paper money and yet, we’ve decentralized our entire finance system in less than 10.

With innovation cycles becoming shorter by the second, the past is no longer an accurate measure of the speed of the future. If we want the world to change to our liking, there has never been a better time to build it.

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✍🏼 Corporate writing: One of the best pieces I've read recently is Brie Wolfson's guide to corporate writing. After leading Stripe Press for ~5 years, Brie is convinced writing helps organizations work more effectively. She categorizes this in two buckets:

• Papertrails: These are meeting notes, change logs, decisions, FAQs, snippets, etc. Anything that keeps the record straight within an organization.
• Curations: Meant for people not directly involved in a given project, these are accounts of the work produced within a team. In an attempt for every employee to have access to a project’s insights and lessons, you can imagine these as stories of projects shipped, the state of a workstream, observations about something you care about, retrospectives, etc..

The key thesis is that writing means (a) you think through your work more clearly, ergo your output is more productive, (b) enables you to take control of your narrative, so you can scale up easier.

The compounded result? A documentation set detailing all of the organization’s actions and projects, longer-lasting relationships between people who may not otherwise know of each other, and overall better asynchronous work.

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👩🏻‍💻 Code vs Law: The difference between law and code is that law suggests we can or can’t do something, while code enables or disables the possibility entirely.

Laws encourage behaviors and punish those who behave unaccordingly.

In code, we simply cannot behave in ways that haven’t been built on software - you can’t break the law because there’s no feature for it.

Code creates limits and these constraints create trust among users because of matching expectations in behaviors. We can’t steal or murder within Instagram because there's simply no feature for it.

As the world becomes evermore digital, I predict we’ll start placing more trust in cryptography than we do on error-prone legal texts that are open to human interpretation and enforced by a threat of nation-state violence.

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2 intellectual goodies

"If you aren’t willing to be mocked, you’ll never be able to lead."

~ Naval, Eric Jorgenson's Almanack of Naval Ravikant (free pdf here)

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“To pursue a desire, you must give up something else. Always.”

~ 7 Pieces of Wisdom Most People Don’t Learn Until Their 40s, by Barry Davret

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1 funky audio

For those of you who like listening to music in different languages, Radioooo is a true gem.

Select a decade and a country, and this site generates a playlist from that era and region. A global trip back in time.

Thank you to Florian sharing!

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& featured snack

When it comes to entrepreneurship, technology, and productivity, The Slice delivers a weekly newsletter filled with actionable reads, useful resources, and attention-grabbing digital art.

Check out some of the past issues here if you’re interested.

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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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Talk soon,

Jules 🤸🏻‍♂️