Four years ago today, a startling conversation with an investor started my journey to “get good at sleep.” Years of trial & error, research, and life logging led to the ideas summarized in this post.

Implementing the habits and ideas outlined in this post have exponentially boosted my productivity and sense of well-being in life. Sharing them here in case helpful for other founders who can and must get better sleep. A summary of the conversation that sparked the journey is included at the end.

Why should founders invest in sleep?

Invest the money and time into your sleep practice. It’s worth it. You’re worth it.
It’s a compounding investment. You’ll accumulate new skills and unlock new worlds of possibility.
You will become increasingly capable of doing your job – which gets harder at each new rung of success you unlock during the startup years.

I failed to understand this until shortly after that startling conversation, and didn’t take pursuing better sleep seriously enough until around a full year after that conversation. The cost of my poor sleep extended beyond the discomfort of sleep deprivation, the irritable temperament, the avoidable mood swings and bouts of depression. The cost was cumulative, in the failure to recover from the extraordinary daily stresses of building a company, and in my inability to synthesize creative solutions to increasingly difficult problems quickly enough.

Poor sleep cost me dearly.

A bit of context:

• This is my 10th year as a “life logger” – I started tracking inputs, journaling, quality of life, daily inputting various quant & qual metrics starting January 2013. I added several sleep-specific metrics after the 25 Feb 2019 conversation.
• I’d been awful at sleep most of my adult life. I would lie awake and just think for hours on end. It used to take me an hour or more to fall asleep, I’d sleep in fits and starts, and would often skip sleep altogether. Now I generally get very high quality, sustained sleep most nights and fall asleep on average 11 minutes after hitting the bed.

Why sleep hacks specifically for founders?

Generally good sleep advice that might work well for most people can fall short for founders for several reasons:

1. Founders generally have higher work load and responsibility beyond the average person. A professional athlete has a different nutrition regiment than the average person, so it’s not crazy to think that founders can have different sleep requirements.
2. Optimizing sleep for overall comfort and consistency is important for most people, but optimizing sleep for creative synthesis is even more important for founders.

Optimizing sleep for creative synthesis is the target goal for ideas described in this post. Many of these ideas don’t match up with main stream sleep advice. Some of these ideas might even be exceptionally bad for most people. But all of these ideas have helped me personally get really good at sleep.

I’m not a doctor or a sleep scientist, please DYOR and find what works for you.

Founders can optimize sleep for creative synthesis.

Even after decades of research, sleep is still borderline magic. We know that it’s vital for many important processes of body and mind.

For founders who need to be prolific problem solvers, the creative synthesis gained in certain forms of sleep is essential to success.

Recently, cognitive scientists have begun to unravel of some of sleep’s mysteries. There are stacks of great sleep research papers, but “How Memory Replay in Sleep Boosts Creative Problem-Solving” by Lewis, Knoblich & Poe was the eye-opener ???? for me:

Memory replay mechanisms in non-REM can abstract rules from corpuses of learned information, while replay in REM may promote novel associations. We propose that the iterative interleaving of REM and non-REM across a night boosts the formation of complex knowledge frameworks, and allows these frameworks to be restructured, thus facilitating creative thought.

Creative problem-solving is critical for all spheres of innovation and pioneering thought. As such, it forms the foundation of a technology-based economy …

Such processing can provide mental clarity and facilitate creative problem-solving by promoting the comprehension of an overall structure or the extraction of hidden regularities or ‘gist’. …

Paradoxically, creative problem-solving often also requires the discovery of unexpected solutions through seeing beyond such rules and building new associations, which lead to novel solutions via analogical reasoning. Such creative leaps can be actively blocked by preconceptions or prejudices, which prevent us from seeing otherwise obvious solutions.

Importantly, these insightful rule-breaking associations are also facilitated by sleep.

from “How Memory Replay in Sleep Boosts Creative Problem-Solving” (NIH)

In other words… mixing sleep phases facilitates creative problem solving. Their paper goes on to document the specific mix of sleep phases where different types of cognitive processing seem to occur.

The result suggests something much more elaborate than the classic “8 hours a night” advice received.

When pairing high quality phase-mixed sleep with techniques that guide the sleeping mind’s activities toward target outcomes, founders can hack sleep to help solve extremely complex problems by way of creative synthesis.

I’ve been practicing this approach to sleep for a few years now, generating results that, frankly, I never would’ve achieved “on my own.”

The rest of this post talks about things that I’ve found that work for me in order to maximize those results, which seem to compound in value.

Please find what works for you, but some of the ideas herein might be worth a try.

Invest in your hibernation lair: build your sleep stack

Invest in your hibernation lair.

• Eight Sleep Pod pro
  • Eight Sleep changes the game by removing heat during sleep. If you tend to “run hot” like me, Eight Sleep is a must-have in your sleep stack.
  • However mind that the technology layer consists of plastic, which is inelastic – movements are more readily telegraphed if you share your bed with a partner, you’ll feel their movements more, and stomach sleeping is impossible.
• This Pro sleep mask from Manta
  • I’ve used Manta Manta masks since the very early versions. Early Manta masks were superior to any other sleep mask on the market at the time. But the Manta Pro completely destroys the earlier versions of Manta masks. This mask is brilliant in comfort, effectiveness, convenience. It weighs nothing, gets the job done, feels like air, and is exceptionally well-designed.
• Noise cancelling headphones
  • I use Bose QC45, but don’t know if they’re the best for sleep. They’re comfortable and fit nicely with the Manta sleep mask. Just be sure to disable voiceover and make sure they’re charged before heading to sleep, to avoid distraction in the night.
  • To avoid any accidental connection to other devices or dead batteries, I have pair of headphones exclusively for sleep. They charge when I wake up and are by the bed ready to go at night.
• Apple Watch / equivalent sleep trackers
  • Keep on Sleep mode, avoid vibration / beeps
  • Use to track heart rate, log this – you’ll spot correlations that lead to surprises. For instance, my Low Heart Rate will be at least 15% higher if I have more than 1 beer in the day.
• Air purifier with white noise
  • Particulate matter can destroy sleep. Dust, pollen, pet hair – anything that can enter your airway can keep you from achieving optimal sleep, or wake you up. A high capacity air purifier improves air quality in your hibernation lair, and adds white noise to your acoustic environment.
• The right temperature and humidity
  • For me the right sleep temp is 69 degrees ambient.
  • It took moving from plush Karl the Fog perfectly humid SF air to a semi-arid climate to realize that humidity – or lack thereof – profoundly impacts sleep. I ended up needing to install a home humidifier, and still sleep with a Levoit (set to warm, 65%) next to the bed.
• Blackout curtains
  • Even though the Manta is immensely effective, you’ll still want to minimize light leakage and amount of light received during bathroom breaks, while falling asleep, etc.
• Phone on DND
  • The latest phones allow highly customizable do not disturb modes in which certain contacts can pass through your blocks in case of emergency. Otherwise block every potential disturbance.

What about travel?

Travel is unavoidable for founders. How do you maximize odds of great sleep when not at home? Invest in a mobile hibernation lair kit, adjust your habits for local time zones, and do your homework on places to stay:

1. Get a second sleep mask, headphone set, and a travel humidifier for visiting arid climates.
2. Research hotel reviews – fellow sleep enthusiasts will rate bed quality and noise. When in doubt, call ahead.
3. I ask to be placed on a high floor away from the elevator. This helps minimize incidental traffic noise. Use towels along the bottom of the door to help further reduce hallway noise.
4. Make sure your room includes a fan you can keep “on” even during the night. If this doesn’t work, use the white noise video linked below under “Dream Machine” on your laptop to create ambient noise. Just make sure all other notifications, bells & whistles are completely silenced.

Habits & Inputs

1. Build a daily script.
   • Great sleep stems from great waking habits. The over-active founder’s mind is a powerful tool if wielded correctly, but can be difficult to turn off.
   • Build the habit of a daily script – a note file you copy and paste then fill out to contain the things you need to do each day, the things you need to get done on a specific day, and any other pieces of self-guidance you want to include. Make sure to check every last thing off each day, or move forward those undone things that still need to get done, with a clear outline of what you need to do the following day.
     • This habit will help to fully ground out the chatter that will otherwise keep your mind engaged when you should be falling asleep.
2. Guide your desired synthesis.
   • Before falling asleep, think about the specific problem or general area where you want to create results the following morning. It’s the #1 thing you put on your daily script for tomorrow.
3. Cold therapy. A couple of minutes per day in 50 degree or below water profoundly changes the mind and body. I’ve found it to be a miracle for sleep.
4. Hot bath before bed. Spiking overall body temperature before sleep triggers the lowering of core temperature. The brain needs to shed a few degrees to bring on great sleep.
5. Intense BUT SAFE workouts.
   • Weights – there is nothing sweeter than the deep, narcotic sleep the night after an intense weight session. Mixing barbell, kettlebell, and dumbbell activities, and mixing low rep heavy, time under tension, and high rep cardio movements seems to work best.
   • Walking works wonders for sleep. When you absolutely must sleep deep tonight, try getting at least 15,000 steps on flat land or 5-10k hilly steps during the day. Beast mode: get a weighted vest. You look goofy as hell but it’s highly unlikely you’ll be awake more than a few minutes after hitting the bed after this workout.
   • Running is great, too, but I find it less effective than long walks and weights for some reason, especially after Covid vaccines reduced my V02 Max by 5 points.
   • I’ve not found the magic time to work out, but generally like doing very early workouts some of the week, and later afternoon workouts other parts of week.
   • One caveat: be safe when working out, because physical injuries keep the mind activated during sleep. It’s hard to know until you try to sleep after sustaining the injury, but there is something mentally active about garden variety injuries – a torn rotator cuff can cost you many sleepless nights for weeks on end. The cruel paradox is that you need to be sleeping for optimal healing.
     • If you do get an injury, try a bio-wave electrolysis machine rather than pain pills (see “sleep threats” below)
6. Plenty of sunlight during day
   • I’m not sure if it’s vitamin D or photo receptor modulation or some other mechanic, but my sleep is always better if I get a good dose of sun during day
   • However, sunburn is bodily injury, which can have the opposite effect by taxing the sleep and distracting with another stimulant (pain)
   • BUT – make sure that no sunscreen (or other agitating topical) can seep into the eye at night, because the irritant will severely alter REM and prevent deeper sleep…
7. ASMR while falling asleep – but you don’t need weird videos or soothing sounds to trigger ASMR. You can trigger ASMR yourself. I find concentrating on all-encompassing gratitude – for all that I have, all that I seek, all that I am, all that I will become – is the easiest way to trigger a deep, sustained “dose” of ASMR.
8. Bias toward over-hydration
   • Better to wake up a few X for bathroom breaks than to not have enough water in system for all the processes that need to take place during sleep.
   • A SMALL amount of mag or cal-mag before bed – I found a tbsp in a quart of water to work wonders. 2-3 bathroom breaks a night, I’ll drink a bit of the magnesium-infused water
9. Pillow Fort!!!!!
   • I ignored the importance of pillows and body support until very recently. It took many years of experimenting to figure out a very strange pillow configuration:
     • I have to sleep with two full pillows under my knees. Doing this removes lumbar pressure so I can relax.
     • I also found out that I prefer no pillow under my head!
     • But I also prefer one pillow over each shoulder, angled away from my head like front-mounted wings. No idea why, but this weird configuration does the trick most nights.
     • However! If I’m getting sick with something respiratory or nasal, it’s extremely important to elevate the head or I’ll cough the entire night.
10. Avoid sleep threats like “time release sugars” and inputs that destroy creative synthesis
    • While a melatonin supplement does seem to help with sleep onset, it also seems to “scramble” the sleep itself, and in the end I find that it undermines the invaluable creative synthesis that would’ve occurred falling asleep naturally.
    • The “magic” in Magic Spoon cereal is allulose, a poorly-researched sugar substitute that looks good on paper as a ketogenic miracle, but seems to seriously disrupt sleep from my personal trials. It seems to function like “time release sugar” with delayed onset energy. Every night after consuming anything with allulose, without fail I would wake up with the same deteriorated sleep quality and “buzzing” brain effect.
    • While alcohol doesn’t metabolize into sugar as is commonly believed, the net effect is comparable: sleep while metabolizing booze is shallow, easily disturbed, and poor for synthesis.
    • Many people swear they’re “immune to caffeine,” and I was once of them, or so I thought. I was surprised by personal A/B tests of sleeping heart rates (LHR, RHR), differences in sleep graph, and brain wave reads with caffeine cessation before 10am versus drinking caffeine later in the day. I try to have caffeine no later than 9am Sun-Wed, but relax this Thu-Sat.
    • Foods that spike brain activity – excessive salt, for example, and foods that cause allergic inflammation. Foods very high in fat can keep the brain buzzing.
    • The stomach is a second brain with its own neurons and linkages. It can make or break your sleep session. Heart burn can cost you the good stuff. A weird trick I learned from my dear Grandma V – who partied like an animal and slept like a rock – a teaspoon of baking soda before bed!!
    • Certain spices and food additives will keep me awake for hours. I still don’t know which specific foods do this, but certain curry mixes and most processed foods consistently reduce sleep quality and overall synthesis.
11. Forgiveness & patience
    • Even with investment of time, money, and practice, the sleep won’t always come the way you hope.
    • Be patient and forgiving of yourself. You’ll get there the next night, and learn from tonight. A sleepless night is not the end of the world.

Advanced sleep hacks – proceed with caution

If it only came down to a few standard tools, habits and guidelines, most founders would deep sleep most nights. But there is an ocean of mystery between what works good enough most of the time and what works exceptionally well. Here are some controversial tools I’ve found to be extremely effective at maximizing my sleep for creative synthesis.

My “Dream Machine” – A dedicated sleep iPad with a Youtube sleep playlist

With over-active brains, one paradox is that founders often need “escape stimuli” to relax. To let the mind wander.

Most sleep advice lists recommend an hour of fiction before bed, but if you’re like me, this can backfire pretty fast. For instance, you start out from the Shire and the next thing you know you’re deep in Moria and you need to wake up in two hours…

I’ve tried other forms of escape stimuli – audiobooks, music, guided meditations – they all have limited “stopping power” in the face of an extremely charged up mind.

One of the strangest, most powerful sleep hacks I’ve discovered flies in the face of popular sleep advice, which dictates “NO DEVICES!” It took a lot of trial and error and config to make it bulletproof, but the result has multiplied my ability to optimize sleep for synthesis. No matter how stressful the day, no matter how active my mind, this technique has become an absolute multiplier of sleep quality for me.

I love falling asleep to simple but engaging videos like SEA, Why Files, After Skool, etc. These 20-30min vids are far more effective at bringing sleep for me than fiction on a kindle, and I’m not equipped with the super power of just being able to nod off to sleep without some form of content input. I also utilize guided meditations that, in an ideal world, auto-play after I’m already asleep, and really high quality white noise to promote relaxed sleep.

I ended up building a “Dream Machine” – an iPad that only plays select videos in a very specific way. The net effect is something like the warm, flickering screen of an old black &white tv like my grandpa would fall asleep to in the recliner.

There are so many things that can go wrong: autoplay, loud noises, ads, bright screens, auto-update shut off, alerts…

However, if you’re willing to invest a few hours, you can create your own dream machine setup. You need a dedicated ipad, a premium (ad-free) youtube account, and a willingness to experiment with what works for you. Here’s how:

1. Optimize the device to be a sleep aid.
   • Disable auto-updates.
   • Remove other apps and titles – I do keep a note file in case I have “must write down” ideas while falling asleep.
   • Set the screen filter to warm shift to remove blue light.
   • Set the color filter to grayscale only to remove color stimuli.
   • Set it to the lowest possible brightness. You won’t be able to see it with the lights on, and you won’t get excited by the light when dark.
   • Have only one bluetooth connection – pair with your noise cancelling headphones.
   • Set the max volume to be comfortable and not distracting, it should never be loud.
   • Use this device only for sleep aid – nothing else.
2. Build your zzzzzzzzzz list
   • The list material varies but is generally three “phases” – vids to fall asleep to, followed by a guided meditation, followed by white noise.
   • My personal faves include SEA (space!), Why Files (conspiracies!), After Skool (alternative viewpoints!), – but you’ll ultimately need to find what works for you. Intriguing, but not gripping.
   • Plug in your fave guided meditation after around an hour or so of fall asleep material. This way it starts to play after you’ve already dozed off.
   • Follow that by white noise. Here’s some really, really good white noise.
   • Each night drag the list order for the three phases. Click through to test – sometimes Youtube mixes up order and you have to reset the last played marker each night by scrubbing an unfinished video to the end.
   • Setup takes about a minute per night, but the result can become an extremely powerful sleep aid.

Optimize your weekly routine for creative flow state blocks

Another core tenet of popular sleep advice is to fall asleep each night at the same time and wake up each morning at the same time.

While that advice makes sense for most people, I find that it’s not necessarily ideal for founders optimizing for creative synthesis, for two reasons:

1. It’s unrealistic for founders, especially founders with kids. Between travel, the increasingly global nature of remote teams, and the happenstance of a schedule that’s busier than the typical person.
2. For better or worse, we’ve organized modern work according to 7 day weeks, and those weeks established a certain rhythm. To make the most of creative synthesis requires a mix of peak creative output and deep recovery. That rhythm is at odds with a “same time every day / night” rhythm. Here’s a rough outline of my typical fall asleep / wake up times to illustrate:
   • Monday: sleep by 7p, wake by 2:30a Tues. First meeting 9a.
   • Tuesday AM is my big creative flow state block. I get up very early well ahead of the commotion of the day to deeply focus. I’ll do this again on Wednesday as needed.
   • As the week progresses, I back off of the very early rise and “play it by ear” – one of the mornings will be a recovery morning, and if there are social events of an evening, I work those in without worry that I’ll lose sleep.
   • Saturday is flexible, up early to clear mind from week, stay up late to watch movies with family etc.
   • Sunday is a reset day, I do three intense workouts to make sure I’ll fall asleep at night: sleep by 7:30p, wake by 3:30a Mon. First meeting 8:30a.

It’s a general outline: I am not religious about any start or stop time. Going with the flow and adapting to change yield better value than stressing over rigidity.

Backstory – the startling conversation that prompted my exploration of sleep

Four years after the startling conversation, I now think of sleep as a practice, like yoga, or a professional skill. Four years in to building up my sleep understanding, rituals and habits, I still have no idea what exactly happens during sleep – only that it’s possible to get better at it, and that getting better at sleep yields compounding value for founders.

I mistakenly thought that “powering through” sleep-deprived days was part of “the grind.” Here is the story of when I became aware that I was very wrong.

On this day four years ago, I received a startling piece of advice from Ashton Kutcher during a strategy session with the thoughtful Sound Ventures team at their Beverly Hills office.

“How are you doing?” he asked me suddenly in the middle of my opening update.

“Great, other than lack of sleep,” I said, then continued with the update. Which was true, but not noteworthy in my mind, as I’d been pretty bad at sleeping for as long as I could remember.

While not a total insomniac, since high school I’d slept very little most nights, and in erratic form, some days missing sleep entirely, at times on purpose. In my twenties I’d pull routine all-nighters, sometimes back-to-back. In college these were a kind of badge of honor, misconstrued as a sign of toughness and dedication rather than what they really were: a reflection of poor time management.

I only mentioned “lack of sleep” when he asked, because in the months leading up to that meeting, I’d gotten so busy with work that my historically poor sleep had combined with fewer hours in which to sleep, and it was beginning to take a toll, which he seemed to sense.

I began to move to the next points in the update, but he cut back in: ”You need to get good at sleep.”

Something about this startled me. Many things, in fact: that he cared enough for the well being of one of the founders he backed while being busy with family and multiple careers. That sleep was something I could get “better at” – what the hell did he mean by that? Isn’t sleep something that happens… or doesn’t? That it was an important enough topic to pause a strategy session. Above all – that I really hadn’t thought much about sleep up to that point. If anything, I viewed sleep as nice-to-have, and something that was at odds with the demands of being a founder.

He clearly thought it important, because months later, at our next checkin, his first question was “how’s your sleep?”

It was improving, but I still had a long, long way to go.

Fast forward to today – in hindsight, I think he’d sensed my fundamental misunderstanding of sleep, included my under-estimation of its importance, and wanted to make the point in a way I’d absorb the advice.

I did absorb that advice, and am beyond words grateful that he shared it in a way that I’d “get it.”

Footnotes / further reading

These articles were somewhat helpful in shaping the thoughts summarized above, but far less so than experimenting with what works, using a life log to incrementally improve.

How Memory Replay in Sleep Boosts Creative Problem-Solving – PMC

ADHD is bi-directionally linked to entrepreneurship. Not all founders have ADHD, but for those that do, sleep can be extremely challenging as business takes off.

Trouble sleeping and ADHD go hand in hand. Theories about why this is so range from melatonin production quirks to circadian arrhythmia, but my guess is it stems from our heightened response to stimuli. Noises, changes in temperature, and light might impact sleep in someone with ADHD more so than someone otherwise. The same lower stimulant barrier for inputs processed during waking life remain so during sleep.

48 Sleep Hacks – How to Get the Best Sleep of Your Life, Every Night!

An Algorithmic Solution to Insomnia

Sleep. Recently I’ve been getting great sleep… | by Harj Taggar | Medium

• I like that Harj caveats “this advice won’t work if you have kids.”
• And he shares the best advice on getting good sleep I’ve heard was from Naval — “don’t run a company” 🙂

How Memory Replay in Sleep Boosts Creative Problem-Solving – PMC

Founders, as you know, founding is really f*ing hard. Especially the quiet psychological battles you’re forced to fight many days.

If you’re looking to unlock the next-level you, I highly recommend The Gap & The Gain.

Having read hundreds of books on entrepreneurship, performance, self-help etc., I would put The Gap & The Gain in the foundational canon – a must-read – for every entrepreneur, at any stage of their journey.

Packed with eye-opening revelations about the high achiever’s psyche, anecdotes, wisdom… I won’t do it justice in the few minutes I have to write this, but the gist is simple:

There are two kinds of mindset:

1. the gap mindset – observing the world through the lens of comparison to an ideal.
   
2. the gain mindset – observing the world relative to prior progress.

Highlights included:

• How to measure one’s own progress in a productive way

• The trap caused by ever-shifting goal posts

• Why optimism is the only rational mindset if you’re looking to increase performance

• The hidden psychology of happiness, and why it’s crucial to high performance

• How our default state – the gap – causes stress, anxiety and fear

• How being in the gap mindset harms team members and undermines progress

• How the gain mindset propagates – but requires ongoing awareness

• Powerful examples from real-world high achievers

• Above all:

I personally believe Hardy & Sullivan excavated the root cause of anxiety itself.

Pro tip: The audiobook is insanely value-add, with hours of back & forth between the two authors. Full of extra treasures.

Thank you Dr. Hardy & Dan Sullivan for bringing this project to life.

After revisiting Szabo’s The God Protocols for an upcoming project with my friend Nathan (who nicknames Bitcoin the God Coin), I couldn’t help but take a trip down memory lane.

I grew up in pretty modest means early in life, which might be why money’s always fascinated me. Especially the mechanisms through which different governments at different times in their history communicated money. For the past few centuries, up until what turns out to be the imminent end of the base analog era of money – that’s been by way of physical coins and notes.

When I was very young, I collected coins. Collecting is an understatement – more like obsessed over them. Their form factor was a source of endless fascination. Organizing them. Cleaning them. Precious… maybe a bit of Gollum energy.

It’s unclear why, but I’d pour over those coins. I’d be electrified when coming across new coins. Finding wheat pennies felt like winning the lottery. I had questions for every coin: how did they decide your circumference and material? Bi-centennial variants omg. Liberty half dollars… SILVER DOLLARS?!

Some family members were hobbyist numismatists, and I caught that bug early on. They encouraged me and helped me develop an appreciation for the space. The first time I laid eyes on a Canadian nickel I nearly flipped — not a smooth circle!! I’ll never forget finding a rusty old mercury dime, nearly a century out of print, resting in the dirt near my Grandma’s house.

Later I started collecting paper-based financial instruments. Family members visiting other places would bring me foreign notes from their travels afar. I was 8 years old when I first obtained Confederate Notes from each civil war era southern state – long before I understood the atrocities of that war, or why it was fought, or that the notes were counterfeit 😀

I was fascinated by the differences in how notes were marked with serial numbers, the special designations, the mint’s insignia, the intricate artwork of the people and the buildings and the pastoral scenes depicted on both, and especially the badges, the rosettes and the guilloche. And, in later designs, the security mechanisms: I might’ve pulled the little plastic strip out of a few bills to see how they work.

Silver certificates were an enigmatic and strikingly beautiful expression in my collection – with their blue badges, and the subtle differences in wording about in whom we trust, and how the note is valued. But I was too young at the time to grasp what their existence meant – that at one time our money had been backed by something real and tangible, whereas by the time I was collecting money instruments, the notes were only legal tender.

I would count coins and recount, and try to devise new ways of counting the coins using volumetric means like stack height. I would build from cardboard, glue, craft sticks and newspaper wrappers elaborate villages with banks and hidden vaults to store the coins.

My grandpas would give me interesting coins for my birthday. Family would take me to coin & precious metal shops, where I’d nearly melt from excitement. I once received a guide showing the worth of various coins out of circulation, and would spend hours figuring out the relative worths of my collection, and which coins I absolutely had to have someday.

The passion extended to precious metals. While I didn’t have much money growing up I did receive small amounts of silver and gold as gifts I cherished. I would track the commodities prices daily in the local newspaper.

You could say I didn’t get out much when I was young lol. But later in life I would keep this fascination with coins and currencies and the general ideas of money. I’d start a company that tried to make a digital version of bearer bonds, not dissimilar to what Szabo had described. I’ve since collected hundreds of legacy financial instruments from around the world.

Base Digital Money

I first heard about bitcoin in convos while visiting MIT 2009, but didn’t pay much attention then, since there wasn’t a form factor to digital money. I put off reading Satoshi’s paper until 2010. At the time I was struggling financially and with depression, trying to build a company while trying to pay off student loans – it was a very bitter time, and it didn’t help having recently watched the bank bailouts.

Satoshi’s paper was a major “aha” moment for me. It beautifully solved so many problems in not many pages. I was struck by the eight decimal precision. Though not “Sats” at that time, the unit it represented seemed significant. I wanted to think Satoshi intended some use for that number of decimals. At any rate, the decision to make a “coin” – almost every base analog currency worldwide stopped at two decimals – to make a coin that has 8 decimals of precision surely meant something. It meant there would be 2 quadrillion of what we now call Satoshis – which happens to be the same order of magnitude of all money it all its forms worldwide.

Perhaps the day would come when the unit now known as Satoshi would be worth a penny ($1 million / bitcoin). Or perhaps a dollar ($100,000,000 a bitcoin!). It seemed plausible, however outlandish at that time. But the current all time high reached 6.4% the way to my initial lower bound projection.

The biggest financial mistake I’ve made so far in life is putting that paper down in 2010, thoroughly convinced that bitcoin is going to become a viable digital currency, and doing absolutely nothing about it for a year. But the smartest financial decision I’ve yet made was to start investing mid 2011. I didn’t have much to invest, but I did manage to keep a small portion of that bitcoin for a decade. I’m surprised that 10 years have gone by – that was fast! — but not at all surprised by the current price of bitcoin. It seems to fit with Satoshi’s decimal precision design.

Having sold most bitcoins I had from those days, and having paid what felt like a lifetime’s worth of taxes in a few years as punishment for doing so, I will never again sell another bitcoin. Not because I want to hoard them, but because now I think bitcoin could be a great fiat debasement hedge. Back then I, like most Americans, thought the US Dollar was the permanent global reserve currency. But 2020 showed us that even the world’s reserve currency can be debased. Mnuchin directed the single greatest expansion of money supply in the history of humankind. Yes printer going “BRRRR” sought to avoid the COVID Recession becoming the COVID Depression. Or was it the other way around? Given that Event 201 happened exactly 1 year prior to the start of the real COVID outbreak, it remains unclear to me which was cause and which was intended effect.

No matter which is which, it doesn’t take a Zimbabwean historian to figure out what happens next.

This is why I’m so thankful that bitcoin is mathematically trustworthy in its finite supply. In addition to operating continuously for over a decade without a single breach, zero double-spend, or any other failure mode problem it could’ve faced along the way, bitcoin hasn’t exceeded its maximum allowable supply, as it simply cannot. There will only ever be 21,000,000 bitcoins, minus the ones on all those hard drives in the landfill, or in wallets with unrecoverable passwords.

(Side note: sometimes I wonder if Elon loves DOGE because as a LTC fork it has many characteristics of bitcoin but without the supply constraint – does he want humankind to have a digital fiat currency rather than a fixed supply?).

By virtue of its trustless design and decentralized architecture, no government can “ban” bitcoin. Every member of the UN could team up to “ban btc” as a group, and it would still be just as fruitless, as long as enough people agree to trust its mathematical trustworthiness, and enough infrastructure exists to facilitate its use in everyday situations.

This is why, to me, bitcoin is more powerful than any gun in humanity’s defense against tyranny. “Give me control of a nation’s money supply and I care not who makes its rules.” – Mayer Amschel Rothschild.

If Rothschild’s startling thought could be remixed for the emerging base digital era, what would it say?: Perhaps something along the lines of: “Give us a money supply that needs no nation, and we care not which ruler tries to control us.”

At this point it seems beyond the skill of central banks stop the inescapable end game: btc becomes humankind’s reserve currency. But I believe they’re smart enough to see that it’s inevitable, and that it’s something that’s sort of going to happen with no magic tipping point moment.

Over the coming decades, BTC and all the crypto projects built on its principles will simply continue to absorb increasing amounts of global liquid value. As more and more people believe in it, as more people and places use it, and more brilliant ambitious engineers build new features and infrastructure for it, monetary value will just continue to transfer from base analog to base digital.

That’s exactly what’s been happening the past decade, right under our noses.

From its initial “big bang,” when bitcoins were worth $0.0000001 / btc (and, infinitesimally small moments before that), to that time 10,000 bitcoins bought two pizzas, to its 2017 intercept of $10^5 / btc ~within one week~ of Tuur DeMeester’s log regression projection (which he made 3 years prior!), to our current run up to $10^6 / btc possibly sometime this year? – there are two thoughts I value even more than the excitement of seeing something so elegant grow up:
1. Bitcoin price isn’t rising. USD is just worth less, so it buys less BTC.
2. Bitcoin and all crypto networks founded on its principles are together enabling the base digital future of money, and these networks are just absorbing the value from the final days of base analog money, like a digital towel.

In this way, BTC will essentially become the de facto global reserve currency, not by mandate of any one government or bank– they cannot decree its legitimacy any more they they can stop it from happening (though El Salvador forcing its acceptance as tender is an important milestone and proof point).

All of this to say I think BTC could hold its own as a fiat currency debasement hedge, and with all of the great projects being built by brilliant minds all over the world, it will make a great reserve currency for humankind.

In God Coin We Trust.

For starters, you’ll make more money.

This open letter originally appeared on Broadband Breakfast.

Greetings Gwynne, Elon, and Team Starlink – 

Thank you for working to connect folks. You’re launching the greatest leap forward in the internet’s 50 year history, and will recast the incumbent structure of U.S. telecom over the next few years. Today’s widespread denial of this fact is a protective slathering of fear, uncertainty and doubt. Disruption can be unpleasant business for oligopolies. 

Please make the most of your shot. Don’t become the world’s largest ISP by going direct-to-consumer. For the sake of Starlink’s shareholders, for Americans, and for our nation’s thousands of local ISPs: 

Please offer Starlink as open access, wholesale backhaul for America’s local ISPs. 

The Swedes, approaching 95% fiber-to-the-premises, yet half the population density of the U.S., showed us the best model: open access last kilometer, offered wholesale via neutral operator (WNO). ISPs compete to serve subscribers over shared infrastructure, all the way into the homes. 

That model can and should become the default in the United States, available to local ISPs, where today the outmoded vertically-integrated operator model reigns supreme, shackling subscribers to outdated copper that pretends to be more capable than it really is.

Our copper oligopoly does what any rational cartel does to protect profits. They write state and local rules preventing threats like open access from spreading. They hoover up billions of public dollars each year, funneling proceeds into a combination of self-congratulating dividends and marketing campaigns designed to thoroughly suppress honest local ISPs. But they do not waste perfectly good cartel cashflow upgrading our nation’s information infrastructure. 

They are too strong now for local ISPs to do anything about. They fight dirty against local ISPs, and in so doing keep tens of millions of us shackled to shoddy copper, inadvertently preventing our nation from joining the digital services era. 

They are at the time of this writing too big to fail. 

You – Gwynne, Elon, Starlink Leadership – could be the deciding factor between whether we in America remain stuck in the dark era, or if we, too, can enjoy the benefits of the coming Cambrian explosion of digital service innovations.

How? Bring open access to America. Offer Starlink wholesale, open access, delivered to subscribers through competitive local ISPs. 

Even though it looks different from the direct-to-consumer model that works so well over at Tesla, you’re almost certainly already leaning this direction. You have some of the world’s top talent on team, no doubt you’ve already modeled all possible approaches. So you likely saw that wholesale neutral open access offers the path to global maximum ROI for you, the infrastructure owner. The accretive economics of multiple service providers competing to deliver price-discriminated digital services over your infrastructure, minus the outsourced cost structure of service delivery, maximizes the value of your asset. 

But, just in case: here are three reasons to please be an open access, wholesale neutral operator in the U.S.

#1: It’s best for Starlink

You’ll generate more profit. It might take slightly longer than the near-instant retail gratification of turning on the one ISP to rule them all, but wholesale neutral open access offers the path to achieving global maximum ROI. 

Just as important as maximizing profit is your culture and legacy. Like all Elon Musk companies, Starlink exemplifies definite optimism. You incite imaginations, and summon the full brilliance of smart people working hard within a culture of innovation. If you join the U.S. telecom oligopoly, or – more likely, given the devastating potency of Starlink’s tech and team – become their dank meme overlord, you’ll lose your innovative edge. 

With Tesla, Boring Co, Hyperloop and every prior endeavor, you’ve shown that it’s possible to do exceedingly well financially by doing good in the world. As the world’s largest ISP, you’re just the new asshat to blame when WHY THE F*C&K WON’T THIS F&%ING WEBSITE LOAD — F&^K YOU STARLINK!!!! ! 

At least in the context of U.S. broadband, direct-to-consumer is both financially sub-optimal, and at odds with the ethos of all other Elon Musk endeavors.

#2: It’s best for American subscribers

Open access, wholesale Starlink offered via local ISPs helps all Americans.

Once you’re fully launched – 2022? – high speed broadband will be everywhere in America.  With game-changing latency and speed, Starlink holds great potential to accelerate America’s entry into the digital services era. In Sweden, where they are already advancing into digital distributed healthcare, in which many forms of care are administered in-home, now that the information infrastructure is in place.

Digital services will save America hundreds of billions of dollars per year in healthcare and transportation costs, and profoundly enhance the quality of life for millions of Americans. Such digital services that cannot properly flow through copper, nor many of today’s fixed wireless networks. Most such services can easily flow through your global infrastructure. 

As wholesale backhaul for local ISPs, local ISPs can upsell and cross-sell such digital services to subscribers. And you don’t put folks in the awkward place where they need to leave their local ISP –  especially in remote America, often someone they hold long ties with, bonded by the ocean of uninhabited terrain separating their community from the rest of the world. Subscribers have someone local to talk to when things go wrong. 

#3: It’s best for America’s Local ISPs, and the communities they serve

The potential reality just ahead is sobering for those who dare to look. The fate of the local ISP remains to be seen in the Starlink era of internet access. The amount of challenges local ISPs take on every day means most are unaware of the profound change you’re about to unleash. Of those aware, most I’ve spoken with at Ready.net seem in denial. A small but growing number are understandably worried that the end is near.

There are nearly 3,000 ISPs in the U.S. When they realize the eminent threat, when your shadow passes overhead, when adrenaline sharpens their eyes and their minds and they pause the hard work of keeping their community connected long enough to react, which question would you rather they ask? 

“Is Starlink the end of my business?” 

Sure, you could wipe most of them off the face of the earth, after they’ve worked for years or decades to get folks connected.

“How can I grow my business through Starlink to serve more subscribers?” 

Or, you could give them a potent tool with which to compete against the cable incumbents.

By empowering local ISPs, you’ll help human-scale ISPs win their constant battle against the copper oligopoly. Local ISPs are the ones fighting mediocrity in telecom infrastructure. They’re the ones working to solve difficult problems, with limited resources. They’re the ones physically, socially, economically tied to their community. If you’re wholesale open access, you help them win. In turn, they’re your built-in salesforce and customer service, capable of thoroughly ensuring access for all.

You could empower thousands of small businesses, cooperatives, municipalities, and nonprofits who’ve worked for years to get folks ready for the digital services. Here are just a few examples among the nation’s thousands of local ISPs: 

1. Aroostook Technologies, the fixed-wireless ISP in far northern Maine, a locally-owned IT business operating since before the internet was born. They’ve connected thousands of Mainers, but routinely turn away prospective customers due to physics constraints of their slice of spectrum within Maine’s heavily forested, hilly terrain. What if they could activate thousands more of their neighbors with always-on, any-line-of-sight via Starlink backhaul? 

2. Innovators like Althea, working to bring new P2P models of access to life on the ground for community-owned networks. What if the creative problem-solvers of the WISP and mesh network communities could serve over your infrastructure, consuming it as a resource, as software startups today utilize AWS? You might enable the Cambrian explosion of all-new distributed digital services. 

3. Our nation’s 800+ Rural Electric Cooperatives – the same unsung heroes who’ve worked to ensure continuous access to electricity for millions of rural Americans since the early 20th century. Now, many RECs offer broadband to their members, like United Electric (where my Ol’ Man worked for decades!), which now serves United Fiber to 11,000 subscribers and growing. They’re the reason you can get superior internet in my rural hometown Maryville, Missouri, than anything I can get living in San Francisco. There are over 100 RECs today with active fiber services, and many more in the works. RECs make exceptionalISPs, and offering internet service helps them serve their members. Some RECs who were looking to implement internet service are reluctant to proceed with their plans to deploy fiber, awaiting whether Starlink will potentially strand tens or hundreds of millions of dollars of their assets.

Conclusion

You’re about to massively upgrade the internet. Americans want to work with their local ISPs. Local ISPs can help you connect more folks and deliver more digital services. Please offer Starlink as wholesale backhaul to our nation’s thousands of local ISPs. 

You’ll unleash the full potential of the internet in America, once and for all. Since we now live in the connected economy, at the dawn of the digital services era, that means open access Starlink unleashes the full potential of America. 

By way of background, Ready.net helps local ISPs grow. There is extremely high demand for Starlink backhaul. We’d love to work with you to make that a reality. 

With or without us. Please use your superpowers for good. 

No matter what, thank you again for connecting folks.

Jase Wilson
Founder, Ready.net
Twitter: @jase 

Thank you Mike Faloon, Drew Clark, Darren Farnan, Zhuangyuan Fan, Deborah Simpier, Jess Masse, my parents Steve and Traci, my girlfriend Xueying, and cats Jackson and Franklin for contributing to this letter, as well as America’s thousands of local ISPs for keeping folks connected. #ThankYourLocalISP

Your local ISP is the only thing keeping you and your community adequately connected to the global economy. And they do it with one metaphorical hand tied behind the back, while blindfolded and barefoot.

Nonsense? Consider this: without competition from your local ISP, the incumbent provider whose slice of the telecom oligopoly’s territory covers your community would raise prices, reduce investment in already-inadequate infrastructure, directly harm your community in subtle ways, and, worst of all, prevent you and your community from accessing the coming wave of life-enhancing digital services.

Your local ISP quietly keeps order in your community, though you might not even know they exist. They are the Rangers on the border of your Shire, every day fighting copper monsters, safeguarding you from evils you know not.

Even if you don’t use their services – and statistically you almost certainly don’t, though maybe you should? – your local ISP’s willingness to work hard to serve your community is the only thing keeping your access to the internet reasonably good.

Your local ISP, which could be a local business, a Rural Electric Cooperative, a broadband coop, or even your town itself, is the caped hero saving your ass from the digital dark ages.

Today, there are just over 2,700 ISPs in America, up 20% from 5 years ago. That roughs out to one ISP for every 50,000 homes. But greater than half of connected American households use one of two cable companies for internet service at home. And more Americans than ever access the internet through outdated copper connections, legacies of the cable and landline phone era, owned and operated by a shrinking pool of giant companies.

Today, it’s easier than ever to start a local ISP. Equipment prices have fallen dramatically. Ingenious startups like Althea work to enable anyone to become an ISP. There’s even a thoughtful guide for starting your own ISP, emerging b2b solutions for small ISPs, powerful mapping tools for planning networks, and a flourishing community of WISPs (wireless internet service providers) working to connect folks using wireless technologies. Common is a personal favorite example here in the Bay Area. I expect they’ll be very big someday, and that their ascent will set a good example, and that they’ll keep incumbents on their toes wherever they decide to go.

Today, incumbent telecom ISPs hold the distinction of having the lowest Net Promoter Scores of any kind of business. Even lower than banks. Yet people still choose the incumbent, for many perfectly sensible reasons. Many do so because that is the only choice they know. Others do so out of desire to access television. Others still are lured away from local providers by introductory offers, even when the local ISP offers measurably better service, which is very often the case.

It’s a puzzle until you look closely at the subtle structural disadvantages designed to hold your local ISP down.

The internet is the largest thing we’ve ever created, and almost certainly the most transformative technology in the history of humankind. It turned 50 a few months ago. There is a digital transformation well underway in every industry thanks to the internet’s global connective tissue.

But there is a problem in America, one that will soon escalate into a full-scale crisis, as the sun rises on the digital services era. As we head in to 2020, Microsoft estimates that 160 million Americans still lack access to even the lowest acceptable quality of broadband.

It’s vital we ensure access for all. Because we now live in the connected economy. There is a new economic operating system, one that will enable remote work, distributed healthcare, immersive entertainment, rural prosperity, and many great outcomes enabled by digital services in ways I’m not creative enough to think up. But the next wave of digital service providers will.

The abysmal state of U.S. information infrastructure will grow very painfully obvious over the next few years, as life-enhancing digital services begin to thrive in today’s very small, very fortunate connected enclaves. Meanwhile, connected people and places will continue racing ahead.

Despite their colossal size and unprecedented power, there are many surprising structural reasons why large incumbent ISPs are not able to install America’s next-gen information infrastructure, even if they wanted to. Even if we assume they will. Even if we believe they already are. They aren’t. And they won’t. Because they can’t. And no amount of government subsidy will change that fact.

Only your local ISP, properly empowered, holds the key to connecting you and your community to the future. Together, local ISPs wielding the right tools can solve America’s emergent broadband crisis.

Local ISPs reading this: keep fighting the good fight. And thank you for keeping us connected. I’d also love to hear your experiences with keeping your community connected. Ping me anytime.