The Slow Hunch

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 & intro
00:02:26 What being "independent" actually means
00:05:23 What a record label really does (and why they Lawrence do it themselves)
00:07:17 Where the money is now: touring vs streaming
00:11:55 Starting scrappy: touring in a van + breaking even
00:13:08 The real “privilege”: funding the first record without giving up equity
00:20:24 College as a growth engine and fan flywheel
00:29:14 Signing (and quickly escaping) a major label deal
00:33:01 How Lawrence runs ops internally: tour, merch, social, accounting
00:34:19 Getting paid correctly is a full-time job
00:48:25 Discovering structural problems in the live music industry
00:53:22 Clyde breaks down the math of a live show 
00:57:21 Aftermath of the Senate testimony
00:01:10:37 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!
Chapters
00:00:00 Curiosity vs. focus; small bets culture
00:02:44 Pre-IPO mock earnings calls & learning to take hard questions
00:04:48 Matthew’s slow hunch
00:05:54 The Unspam origin story: legal mindset meets early internet problems
00:11:16 Passing trademark legislation in Utah
00:13:39 Meeting Lee (via Arthur Keller)
00:18:00 Lee moves to Utah; building from a basement
00:20:02 From Unspam to Cloudflare
00:20:25 Enter Michelle
00:28:19 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 business
00:31:44 Making encryption free
00:33:26 From brittle deploys to Workers
00:36:00 Cost curve obsession & why lowest cost to serve always wins
00:38:00 Running 2 of the 13 internet root servers
00:41:31 Pakistan Telecom story: local demand opens networks
00:43:32 Principled decisions > spreadsheets
00:44:40 Shift from search engines to answer engines
00:48:00 Longing for a quirkier web
00:52:56 Incentivizing creators to fill LLM knowledge gaps
00:56:05 Designing an open, fair market (price by scale/MAU, not tokens)
01:01:15 Scarcity switch flips; next-gen models hit a plateau
01:04:00 Google’s role: should AI overviews fund creators?
01:06:35 GPUs & researchers commoditize; content becomes the moat
01:09:00 Reddit vs. NYT: the value of original/local/quirky content
01:10:49 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 transformers
00:03:32 Why emergence is so powerful
00:08:49 Alex’s early influences 
00:10:35 The emergent dynamics of Wikipedia
00:13:15 The role of “folksonomies”
00:17:33 Concave systems vs convex systems
00:20:41 Alex’s time at Google
00:24:27 How small signals scale
00:28:58 Evolutionary algorithms in AI
00:30:52 Understanding data bias and rethinking how AI is architected
00:41:02 The same-origin trap and the limits of app-centric software
00:47:42 The future of contextual apps
00:49:03 Aggregators and the tyranny of the marginal user
00:52:08 Why prompt injection is so dangerous
00:55:23 The inherent security risks of MCP and vibe coding
00:59:32 A new constitution for AI: policies attached to data
01:03:17 The promise of confidential compute
01:11:00 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 Gensler
00:05:50 Their shared slow hunch: technology as a force for redistributing power
00:14:47 Winning the net neutrality fight
00:18:36 First encounters with Bitcoin
00:21:14 Parallels between the open internet and DeF
00:22:58 Spotting early policy threats and forming the DeFi Education Fund
00:23:34 Marvin recruits MC to Uniswap Labs
00:29:27 Scaling Uniswap from a tiny team to a full-stack protocol
00:34:36 Navigating growth amid SEC opposition
00:39:11 Gary Gensler’s impact on US crypto entrepreneurship
00:40:45 Stablecoins as the “lily pad” for mainstream adoption
00:43:20 Shifting perceptions on Wall Street
00:46:12 What’s next: stablecoins, tokenized markets, and on-chain identity
00:47:00 Building open, permissionless financial infrastructure
00:51:52 Potential risks: fraud, systemic stability, surveillance
00:55:45 Stablecoins vs. the fragility of traditional banks
00:57:53 Privacy, regulation, and zero-knowledge proofs
01:00:00 From DeFi to AllFi: what moves on-chain first?
01:04:11 Building for consumers versus institutions
01:06:03 Making money feel more human
01:08:49 Access to capital as a pillar of opportunity

In this episode of The Slow Hunch, I spoke with Dan Romero and Varun Srinivasan, the co-founders of Farcaster. Farcaster is a social app and protocol that is open, programmable, and crypto-native. 
Before starting Farcaster, both Dan and Varun spent a few years at Coinbase. That experience deeply shaped their perspective on crypto infrastructure, user behavior, and what it takes to build a “sufficiently decentralized” experience at scale.
In this conversation we trace their slow hunch: the idea that social networks needed to be rebuilt from the ground up, as decentralized protocols with credible neutrality, shared state, and a design space open to builders. 
We talked about what they got wrong early on (too much focus on architecture, not enough on user acquisition), how crypto enables new interaction primitives like tipping and token-based identity, and why open programmability (not just ideology) is Farcaster’s biggest edge.
Hope you enjoy!

Chapters: 
00:00:00 Cold open
00:02:20 What makes Farcaster different
00:06:45 Early crypto days at Coinbase
00:10:30 Discovering a shared vision for decentralized protocols
00:16:07 Why the infrastructure is ready now
00:20:55 The social landscape in 2020: Twitter, Mastodon, Bluesky
00:23:00 Elon acquires Twitter, FTX, and the narrative shift in decentralized social
00:24:53 Designing for "sufficient decentralization"
00:29:26 Why the obsession over pure decentralization is a distraction
00:32:05 The Farcaster launch story - how they got their first users
00:34:30 Why social protocols take time to grow
00:36:28 Inventing new content primitives instead of choosing political sides
00:41:00 What crypto rails enable: Wallets, tipping, and programmable social UX
00:42:38 Reframing money as social interaction
00:43:56 Why crypto feels contrarian
00:45:59 Crypto as the last frontier of indie building
00:47:01 AI vs crypto as platforms for small creators
00:49:40 Hiding vs embracing crypto in UX
00:50:55 Dan and Varun’s evolving view on abstracting away the chain
00:54:00 The adjacent possible: mini-apps, embedded wallets, AI video
00:59:00 Using AI to surface context + trending content
01:00:54 What big platforms won’t do: programmable money
01:03:57 Crowdsourced Q&A – early Farcaster days
01:06:53 Why mobile UX is everything
01:07:00 The surprising difficulty of building other clients
01:08:43 Varun on shifting from text to video
01:13:00 Why they cut encrypted messaging
01:15:00 Closing thoughts