CHEF | sphere

.@tikhbana on why founders should spend on designers before they think they can afford it: Your first designer should cost 3-4X the median, says the former Stripe designer who built @AcctualTeam "In the earliest days, you're thinking about other things beyond that, getting the PMF, finding the first investors, finding the first customers." "Design can feel like an unimportant part of that process, but it's on you to make that choice." "It's making that choice to hire that designer that might cost 3-4X what the median might be." "It might not make sense financially." "It might not feel like it'll have some immediate outcome, but that's okay." "That's the choice that founders need to make and be okay making, that they would prioritize feeling proud about the work."

A friend told me he used a 12-button mouse for WoW, and I laughed, thought he was being a massive nerd. Cut to me playing for a few hours: I total get it. Now I need one ASAP!

The world doesn't change because people accept the rules. It changes because someone breaks them. The token supercycle is rewiring capital markets, and this November the people building it meet in London.

Europe's largest telecom operator and the parent company of T-Mobile has joined the Sphere ecosystem and network as a validator partner. More than two trillion dollars moved through mobile money accounts last year, spread across 2.3 billion registered accounts. In many parts of the world, the largest retail payment network is a phone company. Telegraph operators were among the earliest money transmitters, wiring funds across the U.S. as far back as the 1870s; and the bank messaging layer that eventually became SWIFT was built to replace Telex, a telecommunications standard. And so it makes sense that the companies running those networks would want to have a hand in shaping what global money movement looks like next. Stablecoins and other blockchain-based payments are moving money onto rails that are real-time and programmable, and increasingly the thing initiating a payment is a device or an agent rather than a person. Compliance has always leaned on being able to retroactively freeze or claw back a payment after the fact, and so the combination of instant, irreversible rails and machines acting on their own present key challenges for the future of our financial system. To be future-proof, the screenings have to happen before the money changes hands, which I suspect is a harder problem than most of the agentic payments conversation is currently working on. That’s the layer @sphere is built for. Deutsche Telekom @mms_Blockchain runs the networks those machines will live on, and I'm grateful for their trust as one of our earliest validator partners among a growing group of licensed institutions onboarding ahead of a public launch.