I’m Justin Kan, former co-founder of Twitch, co-founder of Fractal, and now co-founder of Rye! AMA!

@joshdance NFTs are going to be an important way that we determine ownership of things online. Crypto is here to stay.

@joshdance It is here to stay and will impact our society in ways we don't even understand now. But we will always find more things for humans to do, don't worry.

@daniel_friis we were very inspired by my friends at Braintrust, who built a protocol that enables freelance engineers and designers to work for companies. If you are like I was initially, you probably are asking yourself: doesn't Upwork do that? Why does this need to be on the blockchain? But Braintrust realized that the next wave in marketplace is giving control and ownership to the people who actually make the market. By doing this, they were able to onboard >100k freelancers in under a year, as workers realized it was a fundamentally better deal that other work marketplaces. Our goal at Rye is to reward the people who create applications and sell products with control of the protocol. We also want to robustify the protocol as a truly open protocol that cannot be controlled by a central authority. I could promise all day that I never will sell it, etc, but what if Amazon comes and says here's 10 billion dollars? By making this an open protocol project, it makes it impossible for us to sell it and sell out our vision of a network that is controlled by the participants.

@aleksanshrestha Rye is an API for e-commerce entrepreneurs to search and get inventory data from a global product catalog, and allow their customers to check out. Our goal is to make the true open marketplace for e-commerce, and reward the merchants and developers who make that marketplace with ownership in and governance of the protocol. I think VC investment into e-commerce infrastructure will continue as it was pre-pandemic, and e-commerce will continue to take market share from offline retail slowly but steadily.

@bhaskerkode we haven't fully decided what chain to build on yet. Not clear what you mean by secondary sales?

@wade_burrell our customer is the developer building an e-commerce experience (and they in turn market to the end buyer). Our goal is to be a great API that makes it super simple to build something, and make content around how to build e-commerce apps.

@sebastiensikorski it's the same vision (and mostly the same branding). We liked the shorter domain.

thanks a lot @justinkan

@sefi_k Some Gen Z kids

@justinkan tell them they can save a ton of time with gling.ai :D

@aaronoleary I wanted to create a marketplace in crypto and e-commerce is the biggest and made the most sense

@cindyqiu8 WAGMI attitude

@jun_gong I'm back to obsessing about product. I was wrong. Product always is most important in the stories of the biggest companies out there (Google, Facebook, Apple etc).

@5harath Gratitude Journal, Meditation, Exercise, every day

@shubham_dhawan I think COVID has actually been a huge boon to YC, as it was forced to go remote only, which really unlocked YC's potential to be the #1 startup accelerator globally. Previously founders had to choose whether they really wanted to move to California to do YC. The pro argument was that it unlocked access to Silicon Valley investors, gave you access to a global community of other founders, and helped you build the DNA of discovering Product-Market Fit. The anti argument was that often these founders' businesses were local to their country and very difficult to run remotely for 3+ months. Now, founders don't have to make that choice, because they can attend YC from India or Africa or any other time zone and get all the advantages. I think this will lock in YC as THE place to go for entrepreneurs forever. As an angel investing in YC companies, the trends follow this: the companies are much more global, the founders are more dispersed all over the world. Lots of founders becoming interested in starting climate change related companies, which is top of mind for many younger founders. My investing approach remains the same as always: invest in founders who look like they will run through walls and are constantly learning, in areas that are interesting to me personally.

@rempact it could be smart! Creators are going to be the main way people discover products now... and tiktok is part of that.

@joshua_logan just apply to YC. The beauty is you don't need to have any connection there.

@rrhoover I work on what I am good at: sales, recruiting, evangelism, fundraising, and partner with a cofounder who is the CEO and focuses on product. I like working so I find I have a deep well of energy to do the activities I love, and time has never been a problem for me.

@justinkan how dare you *like* work. 🙌🏼