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Greetings all,

In this week’s episode of Ventures, my guest Veronica Sagastume and I talk about all-things startup finance and accounting. From the perspective of what founders need to know, this episode ended up being a crash course in the various high-level aspects of bookkeeping, accounting, controller work, fractional CFO work, tax prep, legal considerations, and finance operating suggestions. Veronica’s firm (https://www.fortifiedaccounting.com/) works with funded, early stage startups and she makes a compelling pitch for why you should seriously consider hiring a firm rather than individuals in the early stages of your funded business.

Check it out: Startup Finance & Accounting 101: A crash course for founders :: with Veronica Sagastume

Ryan Selkis' Crypto Theses for 2022: Brief summary and reflections

Over the holidays I had a chance to sit down and carefully reread Ryan Selkis’ Crypto Theses for 2022. Regarding Web3, Balaji Srinivasan said of this PDF: “If you understand everything in here, you are up to speed.” While I certainly agree, this 165 page paper is not for the faint of heart. Ryan covers narratives and investment themes, people to watch, thoughts on Bitcoin, American crypto policy, market infrastructure, NFTs, Web3 plumbing, DeFi 2.0, Ethereum layers & bridges, and DAOs. I’ve been reasonably following and investing in this space for 5+ years, and I still had to read many sections multiple times to wrap my head around it. Overall, I’m super impressed with the thoroughness of the document. He wrote this up in Oct/Nov 2021 and many of the predictions/theses have already become reality just a few months later.

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Alexandra Sims' PhD Thesis on DAOs: Brief Summary and Reflections

Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs), enabled in the past decade by blockchain technology to manage transparent treasuries and governance, have considerable promise to accelerate human coordination to accomplish important goals in the coming decade and beyond. New “no code / low code” solutions for creating and maintaining DAOs have facilitated a rapid growth in both interest and experimentation with new DAO structures. I was recently referred to Alexandra Sims’ PhD Thesis on DAOs: Governance, Dispute Resolution and Regulation (https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3971228, published May 31, 2021), and I was delighted to read it over the holidays. While I won’t pretend to fully represent the work presented by Dr. Sims (and instead refer you to the PDF linked above), in this article I will attempt to share a brief summary of its content and my own personal reflections.

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Mental & physical health

I was reflecting recently about how much bad advice we got in the 80s and 90s about all aspects of health. We gave ourselves diabetes by eating way too many carbs and avoiding fat/salt, we paid way too much attention to cardiovascular exercise and not enough to strength training, mobility, and flexibility, and we flat-out ignored (or worse) addressing our mental health.

This all needs to change. Unfortunately, I still hear tons of vestigates from the 1900s in advice/marketing today on nutrition and exercise, and it’s still not yet a cultural norm to take mental health seriously.

I’ve written a fair amount about all these things, and I’m planning to write more. If you haven’t seen my past work on it, check out:

• Leveraging science and wearables to improve your health and fitness
• Heart disease, fasting, and cholesterol: An introduction to basic lipidology :: with Dave Feldman
• How to prepare for (and participate in) biology eating the world
• Cholesterol, lipidology, ketogenic diets, N=1 experiments, and the future of health technology :: with Dave Feldman
• Whoop vs. Oura Ring vs. Apple Watch for Optimizing Sleep and Workout Performance with Continuous Glucose Monitoring and One Meal a Day (Part 1 & Part 2)
• The Science of Healthy Fats
• The science of salt and electrolytes (are we consuming enough?)
• The 43+ health benefits of ketogenic dieting (in addition to weight loss)
• Practical Nutritional Biochemistry (Part 1, 2, 3, 4, & 5)
• Summarizing the science behind ketogenic (low-carb) diets
• The Science Behind Fat Metabolism

And more articles and podcasts are coming soon. Stay tuned.

Fun fact, the “43+ health benefits of ketogenic dieting (in addition to weight loss)”  article - written in 2016 - received tons of traffic in the late part of the 2010s as ketogenic dieting and became super popular (to the point where almost everyone searching for scientific answers/research behind the diet found my article). I chuckle at this because in the 2000s, I cut my teeth in the online entrepreneurial world by building tons of content for SEO purposes and spent a LOT of energy monetizing it. Fast forward a decade, I didn’t even bother to put a single affiliate link in it, which - yes - now makes me smile :).

Have a great rest of your week!

~Will