Real Time 2.0...Exponential Everything (For Now) and The Water Cooler Is Back - Sunday Reads and Listens

Good morning from Phoenix.

I have gone to bed at 8 pm two nights in a row. I love my bed in Phoenix with our heavy blanket and obviously am exhausted from two weeks on the road. I am feeling my age.

Yesterday I got on the bike for 26 miles on a perfect Phoenix winter morning.

Max is in town with a buddy and I plan to play some golf with them today. I have not played in months.

I am so grateful that as much as I like seeing the world I am always excited to get home. Phoenix and Coronado are top of the food chain for calling home.

My brain is on overload as I process what I saw and heard the last two weeks meeting with so many great founders and investors in the media, crypto and fintech sectors. The pace of everything feels up and the mood is better. Obviously, I am seeing the data and prices all day long from Stocktwits and we have been sharing this pickup each week on ‘Trends With Friends’ and ‘Momentum Monday’.

While I love writing here everyday, it is my two weekly podcasts where I ramble with my smart friends, mostly unprepared, where I can really flesh out all my ideas and obviously hear ideas from my smart friends.

It feels like we are in a moment of ‘exponential everything’. I have no idea how long it lasts. Maybe it is just the beginning. I am calling it Real Time 2.0. Here are some quick examples:

I rarely used Uber eats or Doordash a year ago. I thought it was for the yoots. Now I think it is genius. I laughed at the idea of self driving a few years ago, now I see Waymos everywhere in Phoenix. I could not imagine living without Google Search or Google Maps a year ago, but I use Apple Maps a lot, my son Max uses chat GPT and I use Perplexity often. I was not using YouTube TV a year ago and now it is my go for end of day content, ahead of Netflix. The WSJ says ‘Everyone is Watching Podcasts On YouTube’. (use archive.ph to read it in full). Longevity chatter is everywhere. I take creatine now (it is said to have wide benefits) and many vitamins. I went from 0 to 60 on this new habit over the last year. I am considering a weight vest even though all I think about is losing weight! We went from smoking to vaping and Zyn pretty damn fast and are surrounded by sports betting seemingly overnight.

Crypto is a beast unto it’s own in this exponential and real time 2.0 moment. Here is a great explainer of what is unfolding from one of our crypto managers quarterly letters (Social Leverage’s Emerging Manager Fund) I received/read this morning:

• Americans elected crypto-friendly Donald Trump as 47th POTUS and handed both the Senate and House to Republicans with a clear crypto-friendly mandate on November 7, 2024

• SEC Chairman Gary Gensler, a thorn in the side of crypto companies, investors and market participants since April 2021, announced he will resign from office, effective January 20, 2025

• Global fintech leader Stripe agreed to purchase stablecoin orchestration firm Bridge for more than $1.1B in its largest acquisition ever, signaling broader business and consumer crypto adoption is upon us

• Bitcoin blew past all time highs, achieving a peak price above $99K, representing more than $2T in total BTC value

• Solana also blew past all time highs, recovering from a low of $8 in December 2022 to a peak price above $262 in November 2024

• Speculative and fun crypto use cases found product-market fit in the form of memecoins, with Trump supporter Elon Musk’s favorite coin $DOGE increasing nearly 5x to $67B in value during the past 3 months and 6MV portfolio company Pump.fun logging a cumulative total of $248M in revenue since March. And of course Polymarket was the center of attention during the election cycle

Look at the Solana ecosystem numbers:

BACK TO ME…

It was only a month ago I pointed out how I saw this change coming in media (Reddit, Netflix, Spotify, YouTube) from seeing the data on our Stocktwits traffic and engagement. Reddit was $11 billion and to most seemed overvalued. In just a month it is now $27 billion.

Last week I fleshed it out further in a Stocktwits post…

Netflix went from a streaming service to being a real-time global television event channel by airing an old man Tyson fighting a younger influencer.

Twitter invented real-time, but YouTube, Netflix, and Spotify will reap most of the profits from real time 2.0.

I have been working with the Stocktwits team 24/7 the last five months since returning as CEO to launch features and programming to take advantage of our position in this ‘real time 2.0’ economy. We have launched polls, live earnings calls and events and shows like ‘Ben and Emil’…

Of course, all this exponential change is stressful and dangerous and will need self correction along the way (see work from home post COVID), but there is no going back to most things in this exponential era of everything.

Most people spend too much time focused on the ‘why’ in order to take victory laps or dig on on being wrong. Ego traps.

The best investors just pounce when they see prices/markets do certain things. They do not worry about why. Their ‘risk management’ deals with the inevitable head fakes. These moments are a great reminder that you do not have to be ‘first’ in.

I plan to dive deeply into this exponential moment and ‘real time 2.0’ on Tuesday’s ‘Trends With Friends’.

Have a great Sunday.