One Block Wonder — 15 Seconds of Fame and Everything After

One Block Wonder

15 Seconds of Fame and Everything After

It's 2017. Ethereum ICOs are popping off and thousands of companies are convinced they've found the blockchain use case that will change everything. Ours was one of the first to act on it, a company that believed a public token registry could solve the oldest problem in digital advertising: fraud.

I watched a company pivot headlong into a cutting-edge technology, raise serious money, and launch a token; and then face the harder question nobody wanted to answer: what do we actually build?

One Block Wonder is a short, honest account of what that looked like from the inside: the product decisions, the political dynamics, the parts that worked, and the parts that didn't.

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Inside the Book

Part 1 — Trial By Fire

  • 1City of Angels
    A new city. A new job. No idea what's coming.
  • 2Drinking From a Firehose
    Ready or not.
  • 3Hacked
    Not a drill.
  • 4The Wrenchers and the Go-Fasters
    Lessons in duality.
  • 5You've Been Served
    Legal problems have a way of clarifying priorities fast.
  • 6C.R.E.A.M
    The day we had to take the stairs.
  • 7The Mythical Pivot
    Blockchange.
  • 8There's a dApp For That!
    If your answer to every problem is a token, you're gonna end up with a lot of shitcoins.
  • 9Big in Japan
    Crypto conferences, international ambitions, and a reality check.
  • 10Please, Don't Feed the Trolls
    Managing a community at peak crypto mania.

Part 2 — The Silver Lining

  • 11Keyboard Shredder
    Learning to exit Vim.
  • 12Coyote Teacher
    The lessons that only land after you've already paid the tuition.
  • 13Shrednight
    Diversity by design.
  • 14The Governator
    Maximum security landlord.
  • 15Decentralize Everything
    The ideology.
  • 16Hey, it's Olaf!
    Even Arendelle is bullish on ETH.
  • 17The Starfish and the Spider
    What happens when you try to decentralize the org chart?

Part 3 — Disillusionment

  • 18We Missed the Muffin Meeting... Again
    When the small things start to go, the big things follow.
  • 19"What Would You Say… You Do Here?"
    An Office Space moment that hits differently when it's real.
  • 20Practical Programming
    This is the way.
  • 21You're Not an Expert
    The most useful thing no one ever said to me.
  • 22The Cost of Quiet
    Everything I should have said, and didn't.

"We had a whitepaper, a product, 33k in ETH in the bank, and the belief that trustless systems could do what human accountability had failed to do for twenty years. We were not wrong about the problem. We were optimistic about the timeline."

Who It's For

  • Anyone who worked in crypto and wants to see their experience reflected back
  • People curious about what the 2017 boom actually felt like on the ground
  • Developers and product people thinking about joining a Web3 startup
  • Adtech people who've wondered whether blockchain ever made sense for the industry
  • Anyone who likes startup stories that don't have a clean ending

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85 pages; reads in an afternoon.

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