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Greetings all,

In this week’s episode of Ventures, my guest Jairus Morris and I discuss his entrepreneurial journey starting and growing SUPLMNT (https://suplmnt.com/, ← if you are looking for a beautifully designed water bottle, check these out). We discuss his background, early validation experiments, team recruitment strategy, fundraising tactics, vision for his company, and advice for fellow entrepreneurs.

Check it out: The SUPLMNT story: a vision for urban wellness :: with Jairus Morris

Web 3 & productivity

I’m frustrated by the various notes and ToDos apps out there. Over the last twenty years I’ve tried pretty much everything under the sun, from analog notebook/paper/pen/sticky-notes to an extremely dialed-in Evernote + Asana + Calendar system, but all have fallen considerably short of what I’d like them to facilitate and accomplish across work and personal life.

So, I’ve recently asked myself (and my partners/community) what their Notes/ToDo game looks like, and the variety of answers is overwhelming. Almost everyone out there is using a completely unique and hacked-together system based on their own work situation and personal life nuances.

Certainly one of these productivity gurus out there has built an app that works for large swaths of people? Or - at least - there should be some set of time-blocking, pomodoro, kanban, frog-eating, getting-things-done, Eisenhower matrix, responsibility roster, etc.. tactics that have “won the day” for at least knowledge/creator-economy workers? (For background, I’d recommend Sophie Blane’s article: Which Productivity Method is Right For You?)

I think part of the problem here is that we don’t understand why notes and ToDos are important. For me, personal systems for accomplishing tasks and recalling details from meetings/brainstorming/etc… are all about establishing, maintaining, and growing trust with fellow human beings. 

If that is the case, then two interesting topics come to mind:

1. Why don’t ToDo/Notes apps focus more on relationships with people?
2. Web 3 is all about scaling trust

For (1), I’m working on this with my colleagues at Prota Ventures (stay tuned, and let me know if you’d like to be an early tester in an upcoming private alpha in Q1 next year).

For (2), it’s exciting to think about a vision where self-sovereign ownership of data, identity, and notes relates to the ability to get things done with people in your life across work and personal things. Combine this with new networks of decentralized ownership and governance, and we have a completely new world. The Internet is going to be flipped upside down and change everything (again).

I’m looking forward to writing about this more in future articles/newsletters, but for now - if you haven’t yet - I’d love to learn how you keep track of notes/ToDos. What is your productivity stack? What apps/methods do you love/hate?

Have a great rest of your week!

~Will