11 controversial lessons I learned from my father on running a small business.

While these lessons are not the gold standard.
At times I've seen these to be true.

A Thread.⤵️

It's endlessly fascinating how economic datapoints get interpreted.

When I was in charge of a P&L, the guy who ran Finance for us and I had what we called the 'shelf plan.'

There were maybe 3-4 of us who knew it existed.

What's a shelf plan?
1/

Well it's a plan you keep on the shelf (full FP&A model), that you hope you never have to use.

It reduces forward hires, cuts back various line items (typically ad spend, travel, that sort of thing).

Oh, it also has a big fat RIF in there.

That's why we don't talk about it.
2/

Why have a plan instead of winging it?

Because this is where companies (particularly young companies) sometimes err. They do little cuts - 2-3% here and there, preserving as much headcount as they can, that sort of thing.

This is incorrect.
3/

If you're at the point where you need to make material changes to your forward P&L, at 2-3% RIF will be followed by another.

And another.

And this series of progressive cuts will cripple morale, incrementally reducing the productivity of the staff you retain to survive.
4/

And so the shelf plan cuts deep.

Your goal is to go from being a peacetime machine to a wartime machine, so you gotta lean out quick. Can't do that without a plan, hence the need to have one.

~30% cut is what you need.

And then you need to tell everyone left they're safe.
5/

Thanks to the growing number of people who @getMaiar & engage with the @ElrondNetwork ecosystem, the number of accounts doubled to over 320k & we’re over 2.5M TXs, an unprecedented adoption level for a 6 months-young mainnet.
#hypergrowth100 Day 40
Weekly #elrondtech ⬇️

1/ The Delegation Manager toolset has been released for testnet integrations, ahead of our imminent mainnet upgrade. It enables staking providers to set up & manage staking pools, nodes, fees & other parameters for their

2/ We updated the libp2p libraries to the latest release & found out that they work seamlessly with their old counterparts. Congrats @libp2p team for the effort put in backward compatibility. We know how complex that is.

3/ Redesigned the async call & token transfer syntax in our Arwen WASM VM. Interactions between contracts are now “return types”, which makes execution flow more intuitive. Callbacks have also been

4/ Arwen WASM VM updates continued:
- Integrated new Arwen and new features of Arwen into elrond-go. Added a set of integration tests for different scenarios.
- Fixed a bug in Arwen VM which did not let one contract to deploy multiple contracts.

Big congrats to @nonfungibles on releasing their 2020 Annual Non-Fungible Tokens Report! @NathalieBcht, @latelier & I thoroughly enjoyed partnering with them on it: https://t.co/uNvX18GcQV.
Some key takeaways from the report & my personal observations a/t #NFTs. A long-ish 🧵👇:

MARKET SIZE: The NFT market had a historic 2020 - tripled in value, reaching $250m (in terms of value of all #Ethereum transactions on chain, so actual market size is even bigger). This is rapid growth for a space that’s just a few years old.

Market is still volatile & prone to speculation but more sophisticated use cases are emerging based on utility, community, competitive elements. All are prerequisites for a more mature market. For all the hype around crypto, it is #NFTs that offer some of the more promising uses.

USERS: # of users transacting NFTs is up. So is interest in NFTs more broadly - using Twitter activity as a proxy, the uptick in interest is clear & rose 5x in Nov 2017- Sept 2020 (similar trajectory for #DeFi btw). BUT it's important to remember this is still a niche ecosystem.

PROFIT: Some NFT #Traders are commanding profits in the 100s of thousands. Again, this is still a niche activity. There are high barriers to entry (incl. technological) for non-crypto enthusiasts + asset prices are going up very fast. It's still hard to price and value NFTs.

At about 19:00 hrs local time on January 26, 2021, Peoples Gazette's website (https://t.co/wkUFy0ZN63) was hit by a coordinated disruption of service across all telecommunication networks in Nigeria.

This disruption, we are increasingly learning from top federal sources, was based on a directive, from the Nigerian government to MTN, Glo Mobile and other telecom firms, that sought an immediate blacklist of our web address as well as all other alternative domain names.

Our internal assessments and notes from our readers indicate a total restriction on our website for people connecting via MTN, Glo Mobile and Airtel, i.e.: a vast majority of Nigerian Internet users.

Since our inception, we have diligently carried out our sole duty of bringing to public awareness, the rot that exists in our public and private institutions.

We have exposed the abuse of power by government officials, agencies, and cronies; corrupt practices in the public and private sectors and flagrant abuse of human rights and the rule of law by security agencies.