Dan Romero & Varun Srinivasan (Co-founders of Farcaster)
Episode publishedPodcast: The Slow HunchThe Slow Hunch
Transcript preview
Preview only
The sufficient decentralization post, it's crazy how misunderstood that is. We've heard so many, I just think, stupid arguments around, so you're not decentralized. When the reality is, like, it will be actually one of the only social protocols out there that have two significant apps with, like, you know, reasonable number of users every day that are actually using it. Because I think most other apps or decentralized social approaches basically have one app.
We spend a lot of time worrying about, like, the decentralization aspect, which I think turned out to be the easier problem. Like, the hardest thing is building something that people care to spend their time on.
Lesson we've learned there is, like, who cares? It's a participation trophy in some ways. It's like you actually need to drive user growth because that's actually how you get to a a an actual protocol that matters is you have enough people using it that it matters and and actually creates the flywheel for more apps to wanna integrate.
Welcome back to the Slow Hunch Podcast. This week, I'm thrilled to welcome Dan Romero and Varun Srinivasan, the founders of Farcaster. Farcaster is a really interesting project. It's a social network, but it's not just an app. It's a new type of social network rebuilt from the bottom up, as an open protocol that is fully programmable, fully open, and fully crypto native, meaning that every account also has built in support for, digital assets, and really is a wallet under the hood. And that combination of things, leads to some really interesting possibilities, and something that's really diffe
Sure. Yeah. So Dan Romero, I'm one of the two co founders of Forecaster.
I'm Veron, one of the other founders of Forecaster. Dan and I actually worked together for a long time. We both spent almost five years together at Coinbase. And then we started Forecaster, which has been another five year journey since.
Yeah. Forecaster is a social network, and it's also a protocol. And so we've been working on that for the last five years, and there have been twists and turns along the way. Happy to cover that today. But I think today, you could say it's it's it's a social network focus for people interested in crypto. And from a protocol standpoint, everything is pretty much programmable. So we've kind of spent the last five years building out all what we call developer Legos. So kind of any part of the stack as a developer, you kinda have permissionless access to both read the data and kind of write and bu
When you think of the journey that you've been on or the sort of slow hunt you've been pursuing over the years, including building Farcaster, but maybe maybe even before that, like, how would you characterize it?
Yeah. I'm I'm happy to start. So I joined Coinbase in 2014. I I wasn't particularly interested in crypto, to be honest. I think the thing that I was most interested in moving to Silicon Valley was I I wanted to work on kind of, like, consumer products that reached massive scale. I think to me, that's the most interesting stuff that Silicon Valley builds is is this kind of, like, at scale, the type of app that everyone you know can go use. And and I think that that was an early sign in 2014 was that people potentially okay. The next mobile is is crypto and specifically Bitcoin. That ended up be
Keep exploring with a free account.
A free account preserves the short preview. Upgrade to Pro for the full transcript and episode chat.