3x Fintech Founder. 2 Exits. Investor. Operator. Engineer. Rational Optimist. 🇰🇾 🇨🇦 🇺🇸
Cayman Islands
Joined October 2012
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Derek Manuge retweeted
Few poems describe a gentleman's character better than Kipling's "If—," and few men read it better than Sir Michael Caine.
Have a great Friday.
Derek Manuge retweeted
You can’t use reason to talk people out of positions that they didn’t use reason to get into.
Insurance. If a consumer does not want to bear the full cost of private healthcare when they need the service they would purchase private insurance in advance when they don't need the service. The reality is, healthcare is not free and is not a right. A free market provides the conditions for the lowest aggregate cost to the consumer. If you want the same standard of care for everyone regardless of price, you change the incentives, and thus this inevitably leads to a lower aggregate standard of care and higher aggregate costs...however, it's an interesting thought experiment to consider how one could achieve a hybrid (mixed) system while not introducing "sufficiently more adverse" outcomes than a free system.
You stay competitively priced for normal people. How do all the “not normal” people pay for their care ? And if they can’t pay for their care, how do all the hospitals and doctors stay in business when everyone that is poor can’t pay for their care ?
Old people need the most care. And the don’t have much money. Let em get sick, stay sick, and die, so normal people get cheaper insurance ?
Derek Manuge retweeted
Self recommending must-read for Canadians.
“The path Canada is on, economically and culturally, is no longer sufficient to make us a flourishing world class nation.”
say the thing!
it will help save Canada
buildcanada.com/memos/say-it
Derek Manuge retweeted
“A people that has forgotten its traditions, its ancestors, and the sacrifices that bought its freedom is a people already conquered. For the man without memory is easily ruled, and the man without roots is easily led.”
—Hilaire Belloc
The key to X Money's success will be if they can offer a truly "global" card with no FX fees and near-market exchange rates. The problem with many of the market-leading cards today is that they are only open to US residents (or those with a valid TIN) and the non-US fees make them unusable when travelling... I'm sure this is the focus of @nikitabier @elonmusk . Excited for it to happen.
X Money just went live in beta and it’s gotta be the single best financial product on the market today
These numbers don't even make sense:
- 6% APY on deposits
- Insured up to $250,000 = $15,000/yr in interest, $1,250/mo when maxed
- The metal card gives 3% cashback on all purchases matching Robinhood gold
Also equipped with direct deposit support from your day job and creator payout support from your posting
Everything flows into one account.
Earning 6% APY on the way in, and 3% on the way out.
I'm not sure how sustainable this is but man is it compelling.
images from @REDWRITER who's been sharing some great stuff
We pay for the privilege to increase our dependency on others until there is nothing left to pay.
Game theory will become more important than ever. Humans over index on trust, but AI won't. In other words, "reputation" will become exploitable in the early stages of AI-to-AI commerce. Even if formal reputation systems exist, commerce flows must be designed to handle trustlessness throughout the buying journey to minimize the attack surface -negotiating terms (e.g. prices), facilitating payments, delivering goods, managing returns and disputes, etc.
The optimal genius-to-idiot ratio is different for everyone, but if you're not feeling like an idiot enough, you're not pursuing audacious-enough goals.
Dream bigger. Be idiotmaxxing.
Derek Manuge retweeted
elon is the man of the millennium and most people still don't understand why
it's not the money. bezos has money. it's not the companies. plenty of founders have companies.
it's that he's the only one treating civilizational survival as an engineering problem instead of a talking point
Derek Manuge retweeted
I'm just gonna say this much about the Aave situation, something I have repeated in many other contexs: token/equity dual structures are fundamentally unworkable. Not just hard to structure, but fundamentally broken.
Investing in businesses inherently requires trust in the projects management, in spite of legal rules that may officially exist on paper, those management have in practice an unlimited mandate to run the business into the ground. But once you add in the adverse incentives from equity sidecars, the difficulty flips to impossible.
Of course in the cases where token-equity structures exist, they evolved this way for a reason - usually to survive in an extremely hostile regulatory environment that made the people working on these protocols heroes to begin with. We shouldn't forget that.
During these times, the mismatch was worth it just to survive as a fringe asset. Many sophisticated investors who bought tokens in the 2019-2024 era did so not because they thought the equity + "worthless governance token" structures were acceptable but rather that we would move past them once that is remotely possible.
As a long-time investor in Aave, I hope all parties can come to the table and design a solution that aligns everything either under a singular token or equity structure, similar to Uniswap's UNIfication proposal. Given the importance of governing Aave's smart contracts, 99% that should be the token.
Derek Manuge retweeted
“A people that has forgotten its traditions, its ancestors, and the sacrifices that bought its freedom is a people already conquered. For the man without memory is easily ruled, and the man without roots is easily led.”
— Hilaire Belloc
Derek Manuge retweeted
“In the end, it’s all pattern recognition. And mathematics is the ultimate pattern-recognition machine.”
- Jim Simons
Derek Manuge retweeted
And with all due respect to my Canadian friends, whose politics focus obsessively on the United States: your stagnating living standards have nothing to do with Donald Trump or whatever bogeyman the CBC tells you to blame.
The fault lies with your leadership, elected by you.
