A Framework for Solving Hard Problems in Web3

Originally a thread on X/Twitter:

After spending 2 months in the web3 world, I’m convinced the community is tackling some of the biggest and most foundational problems of our generation.

But solving these problems isn’t simple nor is success guaranteed.

A short thread on “solving challenging problems”:

Whenever I think of solving a challenging problem, I can’t help but remember my younger days when everything was new and doing small things felt very big.

Everything was a “first” which meant everything required first principles thinking to solve.

And like many children who grew up in the early 1980s, one of my goals was to be able to solve a Rubik’s Cube. I could have bought a book that mapped out various solutions but I wasn’t that type of kid. I had to do it on my own. Nothing else would make me happy.

I thought it was going to be incredibly easy because of the progress I made in the first few days after owning my first cube. Trial and error taught me a lot about how the cube worked and how pieces could be relocated from one position on the cube to another.

I realized that the center squares never moved. I figured out how to complete one side with all the adjacent edges the same color as their center squares. And I figured out how to fill in the second layer so that only 8 pieces needed re-positioning to complete the cube.

And then guess what happened? I stalled out and made zero progress for months. All my attempts to figure out what I thought were “just a few moves to finish the damn thing” failed. The cube soon became a paperweight and went untouched for months.

The reality was that I didn’t know how to figure out the last movements because I didn’t have a framework for advancing my understanding of the cube. The early steps were easy to figure out and didn’t require more than a basic understanding of how the cube worked.

What I needed was a much deeper understanding about how to move the pieces and for that I needed to put in some real work. I eventually picked the cube back up but this time with determination and focus.

I did end up solving the cube but only after I treated it as a mathematical puzzle vs. a simple toy. My big breakthrough came once I set “foundational goals” and mapped out solutions (i.e. – rotate a corner piece in position or move an inside piece to a different side).

It required solving a series of smaller problems on the way to solving the bigger problem. And it required not stopping until everything was in its perfect position. There was real work involved but in the end it was worth it.

This same concept applies to the web3 space. I’ve met quite a few Founders who celebrate solving the “easy 80%”. Many haven’t put frameworks and learning agendas around the “necessary but hard bits” of the business they’re building.

Too many business models that I’ve reviewed feel like they’re Rubik’s Cubes with one side and two rows completed. They feel “nearly complete” but in reality they’re not. They represent unsolved problems that might never get solved.

And in the startup world, incomplete solutions usually have extinction risk associated with them that should be internalized. It’s entirely possible that the one thing that hasn’t been solved is a critical driver of the business’s ultimate success or failure.

To be clear, startups are about taking on the risk of unknowns, but there’s no reason to build a business using an incomplete framework/learning agenda.

With this in mind, my very strong suggestion is for Founding teams to seek as much sage advice as they can get from people who can help them see around corners and avoid land mines.

Many people in the ecosystem might not like this advice because the ethos of the community is to “blow up the old and replace it with the new”. But who better to help plant the dynamite than those who know the weaknesses and the strengths of the institutions under attack?