Back in 2022, when Twitter was sold to Elon Musk, I tweeted this:

Twitter is too important to be owned and controlled by a single person. The opposite should be happening. Twitter should be decentralized as a protocol that powers an ecosystem of communication products and services.

So began my exodus from Twitter, which culminated in a complete departure in May 2024, when I wrote this post.

I've tried all of the decentralized social protocols, Lens, Bluesky, and Farcaster and have been most active on Farcaster, where USV is an investor.

Earlier today, Vitalik Buterin wrote this post using a decentralized social app called Firefly that sends its posts to Lens, Bluesky, Farcaster and Twitter. Vitalik started off his post with this observation:

If we want a better society, we need better mass communication tools. We need mass communication tools that surface the best information and arguments and help people find points of agreement. We need mass communication tools that serve the user's long-term interest, not maximize short-term engagement. There is no simple trick that solves these problems. But there is one important place to start: more competition. Decentralization is the way to enable that: a shared data layer, with anyone being able to build their own client on top.

I could not agree more. I believe in social protocols like Lens, Bluesky, and Farcaster.

Both the Lens protocol and the Farcaster protocol have changed stewards this week.

The Aave team, which founded Lens, has handed it over to the Mask team.

And today, the Farcaster founders announced that they are handing over stewardship of the Farcaster protocol (and app) to the Neynar team.

Some will look at these events and say that decentralized social has failed. However, I see it differently. Protocols don't die so easily. They are resilient. And as Vitalik said in his post:

decentralized social should be run by people who deeply believe in the "social" part, and are motivated first and foremost by solving the problems of social.

I don't know the Mask team but I do know the Neynar team. USV is an investor in Neynar, and we have worked with Rish and Manan for over a year now.

They are the kinds of people that Vitalik was talking about when he wrote that.

If you want to post to X and also decentralized social protocols at the same time, try using the Firefly app like Vitalik does.

I like to listen to music on SoundCloud. For one, I am the Chairman of the Company. For another, I love the unsigned artists, remixes, and mixed tapes that make up more than half of the catalog on the service and mostly don't exist anywhere else. The more I listen on SoundCloud, the better recommendations I get for emerging artists, mixes, and remixes. It's more fun for me than the other services. But most people listen on Spotify or Apple Music. And so when I get a playlist sent to me on Spotify or Apple Music, I have to listen there.

No more.

Last year SoundCloud launched Library Sync. When new users join SoundCloud, they can sync their Spotify or Apple Music library and playlists to SoundCloud. No more cold start problem.

SoundCloud also offers this service, powered by Free Your Music, to longstanding users like me.

I got some great playlists over the holidays, like my friend Steve's annual year-end playlist, the soundtrack to Gus Van Sant's Dead Man's Wire (which we saw last week and loved), the soundtrack to Mark Ronson's book (which I read over the holidays), and some Radiohead (we all need Radiohead). So I sync'd them this morning to my SoundCloud.

Here's what that looked like:

You scroll down to the bottom of your library on the SoundCloud mobile app and select Import:

You choose what other service you want to import from:

You log into that service, I chose Spotify, and you choose the playlists you want to sync:

And they show up in your SoundCloud library in a few minutes:

Now I am off to listen to Steve's Best Tracks of 2025. You should too!!!!

Back in 2014, I wrote a post called The Dentist Office Software Story that outlined the lack of defensibility in enterprise software. Many people have told me how much they appreciated it when I wrote it.

But we now need an additional "chapter" in the story. An over-the-air update, if you will.

So here it is, with the new chapter in italics:

An entrepreneur, tired of the long waits he is experiencing in his dentist’s office, decides that dentist offices are badly managed. So he designs and builds a comprehensive dentist office management system and brings it to market. The software is expensive, at $25,000 per year per dentist office, but it’s a hit anyway as dentists realize significant cost savings after deploying the system. The company, Dentasoft, grows quickly into a $100mm annual revenue business, goes public, and trades up to a billion dollar valuation.

Two young entrepreneurs graduate from college, and go to YC. They pitch PG on a low cost version of Dentasoft, which will be built on a modern software stock and include mobile apps for the dentist to remotely manage their office from the golf course. PG likes the idea and they are accepted into YC. Their company, Dent.io, gets their product in market quickly and prices it at $5,000 per year per office. Dentists like this new entrant and start switching over in droves. Dentasoft misses its quarter, citing competitive pressures, churn, and declining revenues. Dentasoft stock crashes. Meanwhile, Dent.io does a growth round from Sequoia and hires a CEO out of Workday.

Around this time, an open source community crops up to build an open source version of dental office software. This open source project is called DentOps. The project takes on real life as its leader, a former dentist turned socialist blogger and software developer named NitrousOxide, has a real agenda to disrupt the entire dental industry. A hosted version of DentOps called DentHub is launched and becomes very popular with forward thinking dentist offices that don’t want to be hostage to companies like Dentasoft and Dent.io anymore.

Dentasoft is forced to file for bankruptcy protection while they restructure their $100mm debt round they took a year after going public. Dent.io’s board fires its CEO and begs the founders to come back and take control of the struggling company. NitrousOxide is featured on the cover of Wired as the man who disrupted the dental industry.

A decade later, a Dentist, tired of waiting for the latest update from the DentOps community, decides to vibecode her own custom dental office software product using Claude Code. Even though she has never written a line of code in her life, she keeps prompting, deploying, and modifying the software to meet the unique needs of her office that DentOps never could. She rips out DentOps and deploys her own software suite that she calls Dentsure. Her team loves using her software, and so do her patients.