GM. Welcome back to Micro Digest, the newsletter you look forward to reading every week. We're like the weekend for 9-5ers.

Alright now on to today's issue. 

This crypto winter has been absolutely rough. Whether you're a newbie or a seasoned veteran, its's time like this that makes you wonder: "Is crypto really the next big thing or is it just another hype that has died down?"

Well, today we're going to answer that with the help of Chris Dixon.

Who is Chris Dixon?

• A partner at a16z where he heads their crypto fund
• Co-founder of Hunch (acquired by eBay)
• Co-founder of Founder Collective
• Co-founder of SiteAdvisor (acquired by McAfee)
• Let's just say he's an OG internet guy

He recently wrote a blog post called Toys, Secrets, and Cycles: Lessons from the 2000s. He talks about how web 3 is similar to web2 in the early 2000s.

His take:

1. What the smartest people do on the weekend is what everyone else will do during the week in 10 years

• Back in the early days of web 2, what the smartest founders and engineers talked about on the weekends are vastly different from what the mainstream tech world would during the workdays
• For example, one popular trend at the time was enterprise security appliances (boring stuff). Smart people would go to work and talk about "serious" products then go to dinner and talk about consumer products and web2
• But web2 was generally just a hobby, not something you would take seriously during the workdays and looked at how web 2 turned out
• Hobbies are how smart people spend their time when they're not constrained by short-term financial goals and these hobbies might seed future industries

2. The next big thing will start out looking like a toy

• Disruptive technologies are dismissed as toys most of the time because when they first launched, they "undershoot" user needs
• The first telephone could only carry voices a mile or two. The leading telco of the time, Western Union, passed on acquiring the phone because they didn’t see how it could possibly be useful to businesses and railroads

Chris believes that the current market sentiment closely resembles 2008. His advice:

• Preserve capital and focus on product cycles
• As you can see from the chart above, product and financial cycles evolve mostly independently
• Financial cycles fluctuate unpredictably but product cycles tend to be more predictable 
• You could also see that crypto is already entering its growth phase. History may not repeat itself but it sure rhymes.

"Things that look interesting to smart people usually do so because they are rich with product possibilities. These possibilities eventually become reality. Toys become must-have tools. Weekend hobbies become mainstream activities. Cynics sound smart but optimists build the future."

Before you go...

• Check out issue #78 where we talked about how to survive the crypto cycle 🌕📉
• Follow us on Twitter
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• You could also read past issues here

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