Make money doing the work you believe in
I responded to the below article by Balaji (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B… ) , who was the former CTO of Coinbase and general partner at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. The article is not good - he comes across as aggressive and defensive, with a strong victim mentality and a total denial that he has done anything wrong as he got chased out of Malaysia - and he deleted my reasonable comment which was otherwise well received by his readership, which is why I am reposting it as follows for posterity:
“Balaji, you've laid out the problem clearly: America is declining, millions are leaving, the WSJ's framing is hypocritical. I don't have the resources or platform to do what you're doing - I'm just observing from a much smaller vantage point - but reading this, I noticed a few things that seem worth naming.
The narrative structure. Every external constraint reads as a form of persecution - the hoax, the swatting, the mugging metaphor, the 'shaking down' frame. The regulatory pushback from Malaysia gets treated as a bad faith attack rather than a sovereign state exercising its own laws. I don't doubt that some of the opposition was malicious, but the frame doesn't leave room for the possibility that a host community might have legitimate reasons to resist an influx of foreign tech outsiders or that they might simply have a right to say no. From the outside, the way the story resolves every ambiguity in favor of the project reads less like confidence and more like a kind of theological certainty, which might be part of why these projects provoke the backlash they do.
The thing I notice most: the local communities don't really appear in the piece as agents with their own histories, rights, or boundaries. They appear as infrastructure - cheap land, favorable regulations, willing governments. The second-order effects such as displacement, real estate inflation, imported cultural conflicts, the erosion of trust aren't really on the frame. I don't assume you're indifferent to them; it just seems like they're not part of the operating model. And the piece reads differently when you notice that absence.
You've identified a real problem and built something real in response. The gap I'm noticing is between the 'decentralized community' framing and the reality of negotiating with sovereign states from a position of immense privilege and mobility - a gap I'm aware I could never cross myself. It's just something that seems worth saying, from someone watching from outside the bubble.”
