The Butterfly Effect
Fred Wilson quoted a blog post of mine at his blog in 2009. That blog post became his most popular that year. In my blog post I had said, when you are at the FourSquare website, it feels like you are sitting in a bus that is not moving. (Click here) And here’s Paul Grahm, Brad Feld, and me in the same BBC article. (Click here)
Almost a decade ago I wrote a blog post where I compared the Blockchain to be as fundamental as the Internet, only times 100 or times 1,000. What the Internet did to media, democratized it, the Blockchain will do to money.
I have been studying the tech startup like it were some exotic biological specimen since the first dot com boom. The past quarter-century has been but prologue. The real action is only now beginning. The Covid vaccine is the bio Netscape.
I was the top student in class at the top school in Nepal for seven of the 10 years I was there in Kathmandu. The school has sent alumni to all top colleges and universities and companies across the US. I showed up at the top liberal arts college in the US South whose endowment per student matches that of Harvard. Within six months of landing, I got myself elected student body president. They had to change the constitution so I could run as a freshman, the first time that had happened since the time of Lincoln when the college was founded as an anti-slavery institution. Before you needed to have been at least a Junior. I won an election in the US South almost a decade before Bobby Jindal.
A month after 9/11 I hit the road in an 18-wheeler and went to all 48 states in the continental US on and off for two years. The savings from that trucking came in handy. In 2005 and 2006 I was the only full-timer Nepali across the US to have worked for Nepal’s democracy movement. The king of Nepal had pulled a coup. I toppled a Third World dictator without the trillions. My methods were 100% digital. All my moves are archived and in the public domain. I am 100% confident I could do the same for Afghanistan, and for Ukraine, given the support and resources. And for Russia, for that matter.
There is a concrete mathematical theory called the butterfly effect. A butterfly flapping its wings in the Amazon forest could be the reason a cyclone hit Bangladesh. What happened in Nepal in April 2006, January-February 2007, and February 2008 were political cyclones. I was the butterfly flapping my wings in New York City. In April 2006, over a period of 19 days, about eight million people out of the country's 27 million came out into the streets to shut the country down completely to force a dictator out. My methods were 100% digital. German Radio called me Robin Hood On The Internet. (Click here)
I became Barack Obama’s first full-time volunteer in all of New York City. I actually just finished reading his newest book, A Promised Land, a few week ago. (March 2022)
I have the equivalent of an Oscar in digital marketing. Adobe declared me Top Influencer during Social Media Week 2012, the top global event in the space happening simultaneously in 16 major cities around the world. (Click here)
I am a Top Photographer at Google Maps with over 34 million views. That is more than the population of my native Nepal. I am an Indian in Nepal the way there are Russians in Ukraine.
I have been an active blogger since 2004 and am active on most major social media platforms. I am one of the top people on Twitter in NYC. But don’t get impressed. People follow and forget.
I am a born leader with a tremendous feel for group dynamics. I am raw talent. I believe I could execute tremendous marketing campaigns. I would bring a lot of out-of-the-box thinking to the table. During my Grade 10 year I was House Captain. A British teacher of mine wrote: “I have never seen morale raised this high in any boarding house anywhere ever!”
My marketing will not only spread the name of the brand far and wide, but I would also build a tremendous digital listening tool, a feedback loop that would feed the product development process itself. Because, ultimately, the best product is the best marketing. You don’t market hot air.
I dare you to find a better combination of political instincts and feel for the ways of tech startups in any other person. I could sit down across the table from any head of state on the planet, democrat to dictator, and hold my own. I could sit across the table from any tech CEO and if not answer all her questions, at least ask many questions that will help clarify her thought processes.
My motivation is not to get rich. I have happily lived like a monk for much of my time in the US. The material does not move my needle. And many have wondered over the years if you care so much about Nepal, why not just go back? Except there is no going back, there is only going forward. Nepal does not lack people running for public office (and winning), many of whom I personally know and stay in touch with.
For me it is not just about Nepal but the dollar a day people everywhere. I could have easily pulled a Sadiq Khan in New York City long before Sadiq Khan pulled one in London if a political career were my intent. But that is not my intent. I look for ways to make the maximum impact on behalf of the dollar a day people around the world. And the Blockchain is where it is at, and more broadly tech entrepreneurship.
I just spent five years as of March 2022 spending 1,000 times as many hours with my niece as her either parent, my sister, and her now ex. I have had to face gender up close and personal, and I have come to see democratic rights, and ethnic rights, all of them pale in comparison to issues in gender. Coming face to face with the social structures behind sexism is the best way to polish up on your instincts for group dynamics that can even be taken to all-male teams.
And I am Jesus come back as promised and my identity is verified through prophecies fulfilled, miracles performed and well-recorded, and the clarity of my mission which is the answer to the 2,000-year-old prayer Thy Kingdom Come.
All of your are God's children. What makes you think I am not? I just happen to be the firstborn.
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