The Slow Hunch

My conversation with Jesse Walden, founder and managing partner of Variant. Jesse has spent most of his career pulling on one idea: technology is most interesting when it gives people more agency.That idea first showed up for him in the early internet, through piracy, BitTorrent, and the independent music scene. It later led him to crypto, where ownership, permissionless networks, and composability promised a more open internet. He first tried to put that thesis into practice with Mediachain (which USV invested in back in the day) and later built Variant around a version of the same idea: that ownership could give users more control, access, and agency online.Not all of that played out the way he expected. Ownership proved incredibly powerful in some parts of crypto, but much harder to generalize across the rest of the internet.Today, Jesse thinks AI agents may supply some of what was missing - making it far easier to move between systems, compose different tools, and give users more control over how they interact with the internet.0:00 Preview01:15 Variant's new thesis02:20 Automation ≠ Autonomy 06:50 How piracy shaped Jesse's worldview09:00 How the internet went from open to closed15:45 How BTC inspired Jesse’s startup MediaChain21:00 Why breaking the rules drives innovation24:00 The Variant founding story 29:30 Why crypto's ownership thesis didn’t fully play out34:00 Could AI agents deliver on crypto’s original promise? 37:00 Will AI become another walled garden?39:00 “You can just do things” 46:15 Will AI give us more agency or take it away?

In this episode of The Slow Hunch, I spoke with Clyde Lawrence, co-founder and co-band leader of Lawrence, about what it really means to build an independent career in music.Our conversation traces how Lawrence slowly evolved into one of the most DIY operations at their level: handling touring, merch, accounting, and fan engagement in-house. We talk about how that hands-on approach led Clyde to uncover structural problems in the music industry, ultimately pushing him to testify before the Senate and publicly challenge industry norms.I found this conversation especially interesting as someone who spends most of his time thinking about founders, incentives, and market structure. The music industry offers a clear case study in how misaligned incentives compound over time, and how different the system can look when incentives are actually aligned with participants.Hope you enjoy!Chapters:00:00:00 Cold open & intro00:02:26 What being "independent" actually means00:05:23 What a record label really does (and why they Lawrence do it themselves)00:07:17 Where the money is now: touring vs streaming00:11:55 Starting scrappy: touring in a van + breaking even00:13:08 The real “privilege”: funding the first record without giving up equity00:20:24 College as a growth engine and fan flywheel00:29:14 Signing (and quickly escaping) a major label deal00:33:01 How Lawrence runs ops internally: tour, merch, social, accounting00:34:19 Getting paid correctly is a full-time job00:48:25 Discovering structural problems in the live music industry00:53:22 Clyde breaks down the math of a live show 00:57:21 Aftermath of the Senate testimony00:01:10:37 Clyde's take on AI in music: will there be a human premium?  

In this episode of The Slow Hunch, I spoke with Matthew Prince, the co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare. Since 2010, Matthew and his team have built Cloudflare into one of the most important companies on the internet: powering and protecting vast portions of global traffic. Our conversation explores the through-line from Matthew’s initial hunch about fixing the flaws of the early internet, to Cloudflare’s present role as a foundational infrastructure provider.  We talk about the early experiments and risks that have shaped Cloudflare’s culture, and how those small bets compounded into a truly iconic company today. Matthew shares stories from the company’s pre-IPO days, the decision to make encryption free, and how Cloudflare’s infrastructure ended up running two of the internet’s thirteen root servers. Toward the end, we dive deep into the transition from a search-driven internet to an answer-driven one, and what that means for publishers, creators, and the future business model of the web.It was especially fun to record this one with Matthew, who I’ve known since USV’s investment in Cloudflare’s Series C back in 2013. Hope you enjoy!Chapters00:00:00 Curiosity vs. focus; small bets culture00:02:44 Pre-IPO mock earnings calls & learning to take hard questions00:04:48 Matthew’s slow hunch00:05:54 The Unspam origin story: legal mindset meets early internet problems00:11:16 Passing trademark legislation in Utah00:13:39 Meeting Lee (via Arthur Keller)00:18:00 Lee moves to Utah; building from a basement00:20:02 From Unspam to Cloudflare00:20:25 Enter Michelle00:28:19 Realizing how critical Clouflare’s role was (the 2017 outage)00:29:07 Conducting experiments at scale: how small bets can become big lines of business00:31:44 Making encryption free00:33:26 From brittle deploys to Workers00:36:00 Cost curve obsession & why lowest cost to serve always wins00:38:00 Running 2 of the 13 internet root servers00:41:31 Pakistan Telecom story: local demand opens networks00:43:32 Principled decisions > spreadsheets00:44:40 Shift from search engines to answer engines00:48:00 Longing for a quirkier web00:52:56 Incentivizing creators to fill LLM knowledge gaps00:56:05 Designing an open, fair market (price by scale/MAU, not tokens)01:01:15 Scarcity switch flips; next-gen models hit a plateau01:04:00 Google’s role: should AI overviews fund creators?01:06:35 GPUs & researchers commoditize; content becomes the moat01:09:00 Reddit vs. NYT: the value of original/local/quirky content01:10:49 Toward a golden age of content (less rage, more knowledge)01:13:17 Counterintuitive optimism for human-made content

In this episode of The Slow Hunch, I spoke with Alex Komoroske, the co-founder and CEO of Common Tools. Alex has spent his career thinking about how individual incentives can add up to significant collective outcomes. Before starting Common Tools, he spent more than a decade at Google leading product management for the Chrome web platform, ambient computing, AR, and Search, and later served as Head of Corporate Strategy at Stripe.We traced his slow (emergent) hunch from an early fascination with Wikipedia, through his years building internet-scale systems at Google, to his current work rethinking how AI is architected.A big part of our conversation centered on emergence: why the most durable systems grow from the bottom up, and what that means for product design, org culture, and the future of technology - especially AI. We also spoke about the hidden security risks in today’s AI ecosystem: why “chat” may not be the defining paradigm for complex work, how fusing data to apps risks locking us into an AI monoculture, and why policies should travel with data if we want healthier emergent effects.It’s always fun catching up with Alex. Hope you enjoy!Chapters:00:00:00 Cold open: the inevitability of transformers00:03:32 Why emergence is so powerful00:08:49 Alex’s early influences 00:10:35 The emergent dynamics of Wikipedia00:13:15 The role of “folksonomies”00:17:33 Concave systems vs convex systems00:20:41 Alex’s time at Google00:24:27 How small signals scale00:28:58 Evolutionary algorithms in AI00:30:52 Understanding data bias and rethinking how AI is architected00:41:02 The same-origin trap and the limits of app-centric software00:47:42 The future of contextual apps00:49:03 Aggregators and the tyranny of the marginal user00:52:08 Why prompt injection is so dangerous00:55:23 The inherent security risks of MCP and vibe coding00:59:32 A new constitution for AI: policies attached to data01:03:17 The promise of confidential compute01:11:00 Why Alex is optimistic about AI's Future

In this episode of The Slow Hunch, I spoke with MC Lader and Marvin Ammori, who spent four years together helping build Uniswap into one of the most important companies in decentralized finance. MC was President and COO; Marvin served as Chief Legal Officer after a long career as one of the internet’s leading policy lawyers.We traced their shared slow hunch that technology can shift power: first through the open internet, and later through open financial systems.We also spoke about the parallels between the net neutrality battles of the 2000s and the present-day struggle over how crypto is regulated, the challenge of building in the face of policy headwinds, and why stablecoins, programmable markets, and open protocols are placed to be the next rails for global finance.This was a fun conversation, recorded at a moment when the policy climate for crypto is starting to thaw. Hope you enjoy!Chapters:00:00:00 Cold open - policy headwinds under Gary Gensler00:05:50 Their shared slow hunch: technology as a force for redistributing power00:14:47 Winning the net neutrality fight00:18:36 First encounters with Bitcoin00:21:14 Parallels between the open internet and DeF00:22:58 Spotting early policy threats and forming the DeFi Education Fund00:23:34 Marvin recruits MC to Uniswap Labs00:29:27 Scaling Uniswap from a tiny team to a full-stack protocol00:34:36 Navigating growth amid SEC opposition00:39:11 Gary Gensler’s impact on US crypto entrepreneurship00:40:45 Stablecoins as the “lily pad” for mainstream adoption00:43:20 Shifting perceptions on Wall Street00:46:12 What’s next: stablecoins, tokenized markets, and on-chain identity00:47:00 Building open, permissionless financial infrastructure00:51:52 Potential risks: fraud, systemic stability, surveillance00:55:45 Stablecoins vs. the fragility of traditional banks00:57:53 Privacy, regulation, and zero-knowledge proofs01:00:00 From DeFi to AllFi: what moves on-chain first?01:04:11 Building for consumers versus institutions01:06:03 Making money feel more human01:08:49 Access to capital as a pillar of opportunity