Tiago Sada

Notes

I write about life, startups, crypto, and design. Recently, I began posting exclusively here, so feel free to subscribe to get notified whenever I do.

Uniswap Mobile App

Protocol Apps

Introducing MagicJar for India

Crypto and Monetization

Burn the Ships

Chapter 5: Everything Else

Chapter 4: YC Partner Interviews

Appendix: Other Resources for Applying to YC

Chapter 3: Applying to YC

Chapter 2: The YC Admissions Process

Handbook for Applying to Y Combinator

Chapter 1: What YC Looks For In Startups

Premature Celebrations

Thank you Grow

Flinto is joining Grow!

Lessons on Relationships from The Great CEO Within

Uniswap Mobile App

July 2021

Buy, swap, and send crypto tokens.‍ Protocol mobile apps are the next step to take crypto mainstream. I recently dove into the details of why it makes sense for protocols to invest in building them, and why we should embrace them as a community, but I want to take it one step further by exploring how these apps will work and look. I decided to do this with Uniswap as an example...

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Protocol Apps

July 2021

The next step to take crypto mainstream is protocol mobile apps. Crypto protocols are developer platforms; open source, permissionless, and community-governed APIs anyone can mix and match to build novel products or other protocols. Most protocols also offer first-party web apps to give users a basic interface to interact with the protocol. These apps have played a significant role in getting protocols where they are today, yet oddly enough, no major protocol has a mobile app. In a mobile-first world, this has to change.

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Crypto and Monetization

June 2021

Don’t underestimate the ability of crypto protocols and clients to make money. One of the big promises of crypto is that it will significantly lower the fees of financial services by removing middlemen, enabling competition, and giving users a voice on the prices themselves. No more shelling out 3-10% to our payment processor overlords. Perhaps counterintuitively, even if this promise is fulfilled, many crypto protocols and clients will become incredible businesses...

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Burn the Ships

June 2021

Constraints breed creativity, focus, and life.There is a saying in the startup world that no matter how much money you raise, it will always last you around 18 months. When it comes to accomplishing goals, it seems we always find a way to use as many resources — time, money, people — as we have at our disposal. The thing is, when constraints do exist, success is not only possible despite them, but...

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Introducing MagicJar for India

April 2021

What’s happening in India is nothing short of a tragedy, and it’s been incredibly inspiring to see the crypto community rally to help fight this. Anish, Paolo, and I couldn't stand to sit and watch, so we came together to figure out how we could help, and built a new way to donate with crypto: MagicJar...

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Premature Celebrations

November 2020

A friend from South Africa was recently sharing stories about how even though they abolished institutionalized racism in 1994, discrimination remains common day-to-day. The challenge, he explained, is that when anyone brings this up, people’s reaction is usually along the lines of “I’m tired of talking about this, didn’t we already deal with it 30 years ago?”. Didn’t we already deal with this?‍ This line had a familiar ring to it...

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Handbook for Applying to Y Combinator

September 2020

This is a compilation of the advice I got when we applied to YC. The goal is to help you avoid wasting time over-optimizing the process of applying to YC, so that you can focus on what matters: building something people want...

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Lessons on Relationships from The Great CEO Within

June 2020

Building companies, like everything in life, is about connecting with people. Across recruiting teams, selling to customers, pitching to investors, and pretty much any other function, relationships make and break companies. The Great CEO Within by Matt Mochary is already a fantastic compilation of tactical advice around these concrete scenarios, so I won’t get into them here. What I’m interested in is what we can learn about human relationships by applying the book’s apparently startup-specific advice...

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Thank you Grow

April 2020

Some personal news:‍After some time transitioning over, yesterday was my last day at Grow. As difficult as this move is, I'm very excited for what comes next.I’m incredibly grateful for the amazing people I got to meet and work with every day, as well as the sheer amount of learnings and growth that came with the journey. To my fellow Grinners, there is no doubt in my mind that you'll exceed every expectation in this new direction...

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Flinto is joining Grow!

June 2019

We’re excited to share with you that we will be joining forces with Grow (Grin + Yellow), the largest micro-mobility platform in Latin America. We founded Flinto almost two years ago with one goal in mind: to empower everyone in Latin America to pay anything from their phone, even without a bank account. Since then, we’ve made tremendous progress, delivering a world class product used by tens of thousands to send money to friends, pay at merchants, and take care of their bills...

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