Seed: A series about tech startup careers. Issue #1.

In the Spring and Summer of 2022, I was underemployed in a job that was sucking the life force out of me. I had virtually zero challenges, a minuscule impact on the business at large, and I just wasn't connected to the work. Some may be happy making just over $100k and only working my 5–10 hour weeks, but I wasn't. I fantasized about using my extra time for writing, growing an audience, building startups, etc. But I found myself wasting it instead because this job was so misaligned with my needs.

So, after years in that job, I finally decided it was time for something new. After what ended up being almost a year of soul-searching (and a five-month sabbatical), I realized what I was looking for: an engineering role at a seed-stage startup.

This is the company I joined in January of this year (scroll down to see me in the list of team members as the second Founding Software Engineer — yes, I was employee #2).

Choosing the startup route over a more established tech company comes with some sacrifices. I would estimate that I'm sacrificing approximately $80k/year in compensation and 5–10 hours/week of extra work (or 250–400ish hours/year) by working at a seed-stage startup vs. working at a larger tech company (and I think I may well be on the low end).

That’s a steep cost, but the benefits are worth it. At the end of the list, I'll share my valuation of what I considered these benefits to be worth (with explicit numbers), so stick around for that.

1. I Wanted to Feel Empowered at Work.

I felt so siloed and unimportant in my last job (and the one before that), and in this job, as one of just seven people working here, my impact is considerable. For instance, one of the first things I did at this company was build our whole sign-up and welcome experience. I get to completely own that experience, from design through execution, and that's just never something I could have done at my last job.

This kind of autonomy and ownership is invigorating, especially for someone coming from a huge organization with a lot more cooks in the proverbial kitchen. But this can also be a tough thing to adjust to. I know I had to go through a few months of adjustment as I learned to work better without rails, remove my ego from my work, and flex my skill set across more disciplines.

Ultimately though, I'm probably a 2-3x better engineer today than I was just four months ago when I joined my current company. And that's what I was hoping for.

2. I Had My Sights Set on Starting My Own Business Someday.

I’ve always known I would start my own business(es) someday, and I figured that working for an early-stage company was the best way for me to get some related experience and exposure that could facilitate those dreams.

Working here, I'm exposed to essentially any aspect of the business I want, from finding product-market fit to marketing/sales to fundraising and more. This experience will be invaluable when I start my own companies.

And it’s not just the exposure to building a business. It’s also the connections I get to make with both my fellow early employees (who share some of my values, given we both ended up in a startup) and my company's founders. And given my experience so far, I think my founders will be more than happy to help me out in the future, with investor introductions and other professional introductions, that may be critically important to starting/building my own business when my time at this company is coming to its end.

3. I Wanted to Be More Than Just an Engineer.

This is related to the previous point, but I wanted to experience a broader set of responsibilities and job types than just being an engineer. Specifically, in recent years, I've considered making a career change to Product Management and working at this startup is giving me exposure to aspects of that job while still letting me remain an engineer.

And as I continue to grow with the company and embed myself more and more into our product, I suspect I’ll get more and more opportunities to take on Product responsibilities in addition to my engineering responsibilities. This means I can try out a new role without committing to it.

4. I Wanted to Advance To Leadership Quickly.

I was a little over five years into my career when I joined this company, and I felt that I still had several gaps in advancing to a senior-level engineer, let alone reaching for a leadership position where I want to be. I also wasn't getting any closer or closing any of those gaps at my last company, and because of that stagnation, I felt like I would never level up and meet my true potential.

Now, though, I feel very differently. Leveling up feels inevitable, as my pace of learning and growth is several orders of magnitude greater than before. And in a place like this, as the company grows through its first few funding rounds, I think I can even end up finding a higher-level leadership position opened up for me if I advocate for it and keep showing up as best as I can.

Putting Numbers to It

Earlier, I said that I was sacrificing about $80k/year in compensation and an extra 5-10 hours/week of work by choosing to work for a startup vs working for a bigger tech company. For the sake of simplicity, let’s boil that down to $110k/year in lost value on comp and work/life balance, combined.

Obviously, I did the math and decided that the benefits of startup life were worth more than that, but I’m going to put some hard numbers to each of the above benefits as a point of comparison. This is not scientific: it’s purely my gut instinct, but it’s also fun.

1. Empowerment: $60k/year. That’s roughly the amount I would trade for my level of empowerment now.

2. Startup environment/business lessons: $90k/year. I highly value this experience as I think it’ll pay many, many orders of magnitude more dividends in the future.

3. Getting to explore other roles: $30k/year.

4. Leveling up quicker: $50k/year. The value of the time saved in leveling up, in terms of additional future earnings and better inner alignment with my career.

5. Equity: $15k/year. What I feel my level of equity is worth in terms of being a lottery ticket. [I didn't talk about equity in this story, but you can read more about my take on startup equity in the second issue of Seed].

Total: $245k/year, which means a net of $135k/year benefit vs. working for a larger tech company (for me).

What About You?

If you’ve been thinking about a career change lately and have been considering working for an early-stage company, I want to hear about it. Drop a comment on this story with your own numbers for the above criteria.

Crypto investing is a wild ride to say the least. The best way I would describe the crypto investing space is this: think of a stock exchange where every company in the exchange is a seed-stage or series-A startup with unproven fundamentals and even less proven financials. Then allow anyone to invest with relatively small amounts of $$ and expertise and open the markets 24/7/365.

Crypto is still an extremely early-stage industry. This is like the internet industry pre-search engines. The very nature of the industry is built on hype and potential. I’ve already written previously about how I believe blockchain technology can potentially change the world, so you know I’m bullish on crypto in the long-run. But crypto has some serious hurdles in the short-run that it will need to overcome in order to really take its place on the world stage, upending traditional markets like it’s supposed to.

But high-level discussions of the potential of crypto and the state of the market are best left to another article. For now, I wanted to discuss what I see as the three different kinds of crypto investors and talk their pros/cons in terms of investing methodology so that you can adapt parts of their styles to create your own investing methodology and hopefully turn a profit.

1. The “Hodler”

The term “Hodler” was coined some time in crypto days past on Reddit or 4Chan or 8Chan or some other place where crypto nerds come together to commiserate. Basically, a “Hodler” is someone who’s in this for the long-game. They span the range of, “I’m always buying cause these assets will be worth a lot in the future” to “I take profits from time to time, but I’m always keeping some assets for the future in case they 100 or 1000x.”

“Hodlers” are defined by their faith in the crypto ecosystem and its long-term financial viability. Some are motivated by money, seeking 100x or greater returns over the next 10–20 years, while some are motivated by ideology: simply put, they believe that the fundamentals of crypto are revolutionary, and they want to be a part of that.

Strengths of “Hodling”

Historically speaking, the “Hodlers” who didn’t get so-called “paper hands” (aka, sold their assets) in market downturns are the ones who are the most in the green on crypto if they invested even in the midst of the historic 2017 bull run.

If you’re patient, “Hodling” is likely to be a lucrative investment methodology for you. You’re just going to be waiting for that bull run before you’ll see those beautiful green $$ in your portfolio. And it’s a good idea to take profits on the way up, lest you fall into another crash and lose out on all that paper profit you were too greedy to exercise.

This methodology is also perfect for those who believe in the long-term potential of crypto and its fundamentals.

Weaknesses of “Hodling”

You could end up in a pool of regret if you never took profits in a bull run and saw your accumulated portfolio take a dive in another crash like the one we just saw on 5/18–19/2021.

Aside from potentially being vulnerable to paper losses, the biggest weakness of the “Hodler” is that they can be tunnel-visioned and dismiss legitimately bad news or trends that point to a bear market or that undermine their favorite crypto projects. Because you essentially need to be coated in a thick layer of optimism at all times to survive, emotionally, as a “Hodler” — shoving off the ups and downs of the markets cause you’re not selling — you can easily dismiss bad news that could expose you to serious losses.

This is obviously bad if you dismiss signs of an overheated market and suffer large paper losses across your portfolio, but this is much worse if you ignore signs that your favorite project is not living up to its potential and is running out of steam. You may stubbornly hold onto that asset longer and longer, watching the value drop lower and lower over time as the project runs out of steam. This is how you end up with duds in your portfolio: assets that essentially dropped to zero where you sustained heavy losses and never sold.

Keep an open mind about the market, however, and you can mitigate these issues.

2. Meme-coin Mike

The second type of crypto investor is the one who follows the hype. For simplicity’s sake, we’ll refer to this investor as Meme-coin Mike cause I like alliteration as much as the next guy.

Mike makes his investment decisions on a cacophonous mix of trending Reddit posts, soaring asset prices, and Elon Musk’s tweets. He wants to get in on the sick profits he keeps hearing about, hoping to turn his $1,000 into $1M in just a few years.

All jokes aside, this is obviously a caricature, but there are many retail investors who are buying into crypto with relatively little regard for learning the fundamentals or understanding what they’re investing in. They hear stories of people making millions of dollars with a fairly small initial investment and want to take a shot at it themselves. Unfortunately, that’s basically like playing the lottery.

Mike’s strengths

If it feels like I’m dumping on Mike a bit, that’s because, well, I am. But there are some legitimate strengths to Mike’s investment “thesis” as well.

A smart investor could do short-term trades based on hype alone. This kind of investing would not be seeking life-changing returns, but a savvy investor with the time to keep up with the space could easily chase short-term trades (where they only hold the asset a few days to a few weeks) where the goal is to net a clean 5–20% gain in a very short window and get out.

Given the volatility of the crypto space, this kind of hype investing is likely to continue to be potentially profitable for years to come. However, this kind of investing is only likely to remain profitable as long as plenty of other Mikes still exist in the space. As crypto gets more sophisticated, this type of trading will become a lot less profitable.

Mike’s weaknesses

The obvious weakness is that if you’re only buying on the up-swing, you’re opening yourself up to huge losses in a pull-back. Plus, Elon could tweet something pumping a worthless coin where you’re left holding the bag if you didn’t get out quick enough.

The problem with hype is that it’s ethereal. And eventually fundamentals will always overtake hype and reality will come crashing in like the Kool-Aid Man.

Also, if you were chasing those short-term 5–20% gains, you would need to be investing with a more substantial amount of money to be able to make a decent living, as you’ll have a limited number of opportunities to profit on hype.

3. Mr. Volatility

Mr. Volatility is like the antithesis of Mike. Mr. Volatility likes to play the market, taking advantage of crypto’s often 5+% daily swings to pull profits off of short-term trades. In many ways, this kind of investor takes the strengths from Mike and turns those up to 11.

Mr. Volatility isn’t afraid of riskier trades, betting on finding those big pumps and avoiding (or better yet, shorting) the big dips. Rather than trading purely on hype, Mr. Volatility looks for a combination of hype, applications, and news cycles to make his investment decisions, but he’s always trying to trade favorably on the volatility in either direction.

Photo credit: Behnam Norouzi.

Mr. Volatility’s strengths

If you have a steely constitution and high tolerance for the emotional ups and downs of crypto’s volatility, you can make some good money playing that volatility for profit.

Mr. Volatility is basically characterized by his high-risk attitude, and as with most things in life: high risk can often come with high reward. You just have to be very careful and avoid making emotional decisions.

Mr. Volatility’s weaknesses

The crux of Mr. Volatility’s weaknesses basically come down to whether or not you end up making emotional decisions. Because this investing strategy is so risky, you have to be extra careful to act as emotion-less as possible.

If you invest like Mr. Volatility, you could be in for healthy profit or disastrous losses. If you over-leverage yourself, make a bad short, or make a move a little too quickly without doing the right due diligence, you can easily end up on the losing end of an expensive trade. And if you don’t spread out your risk over a larger amount of capital, you’re really exposing yourself to potentially catastrophic losses.

That brings us to Mr. Volatility’s other big weakness: in order to make enough money to make the effort worth it, you need a larger amount of capital to invest with, just like Meme-coin Mike.

What kind of investing should I do?

You may be wondering now, what kind of investing is right for me? How can I make money in crypto?

The answer for the overwhelming majority of people will be some variation on “The Hodler”. This is because “hodling” is the most consistent long-term strategy for building wealth, not just in crypto but in basically every kind of investing. And especially if you’re only working with a few thousand $$, or really anything less than $100k, then the strategies involved in chasing hype like Meme-coin Mike or playing volatility like Mr. Volatility are going to have a lot less potential upside while still having a lot of risk.

Remember that investing in crypto is a lot like investing in promising early stage startups. This technology is still very early in its development, and we likely haven’t even seen the projects that will revolutionize the world yet (which means there will be plenty more time to find that next moon-coin).

In the meantime, start your crypto investing journey by learning about the space and dipping your toe in. And always only invest what you can afford to lose and take your time in deciding how to invest. It’s okay to be conservative here, and get more adventurous as you learn more about the crypto world. Here are some articles I’ve written/will be writing soon that can get you started:

1. (Introduction to crypto) Blockchain is the future of digital infrastructure

2. (Coming soon) There’s one undervalued crypto project — LUNA

3. (Coming soon) Bitcoin is worthless; crypto is not

4. (Coming soon) NFTs: so much more than art

5. And more to come…

If you enjoyed this article, consider following me here on Medium so you can see my future crypto articles in your feed.

Thanks for reading!

Important legal note: I am in no way a financial advisor or fiduciary agent. My words should not be construed as individual financial advice but rather my own opinions and speculations about the future. Always, always, always do your own research and learn about something before investing your money in it. I intend for my articles to simply act as a starting point in your investment research process.

But what if your homemade food looked like this?

Pasta carbonara with bacon, mushrooms, and lots of yummy freshly shredded cheeses. And a side of roasted broccoli cause health.

Okay, pasta carbonara may not be the most healthy dish to make, but if making something like pasta carbonara gets you excited to be in the kitchen whipping up your own food, that’s miles better than getting take-out every night. Plus, I bet my pasta carbonara is at least a little healthier than what I would get at a restaurant.

Without further ado, here are 5 simple and practical things that have made me a better home chef.

1. Utilize food from your favorite restaurants, *especially their sauces*.

This may seem counter to the thesis of this article, but you don’t need to make everything from scratch to be a good home cook. In fact, there’s a different kind of art to being able to revive restaurant leftovers or utilize other ingredients and expanding them into a full meal.

The fries were from restaurant leftovers and the BBQ sauce from a different restaurant.

When you go to a restaurant, there’s a reason you love their food, so why not utilize it in your own cooking. In particular, 99/100 times, the thing that makes that restaurant’s food so good is their sauce, and it never hurts to ask if you can get some of their sauce, or even pay for a larger container to go.

In time, as you gain confidence, you can attempt to re-create those sauces yourself to save money and maybe make them a bit healthier too. For instance, I made my own teriyaki sauce recently from scratch which was super delicious and healthier than what you’d find at a restaurant!

Aside from sauces, another good route to go is to get some of your favorite restaurants’ component foods they use in their meals. Go for something you can incorporate into something else: slaws, roasted veggies, marinated meats, side dishes, etc. You can use these to build off of to make your own meals. Again, this is an art form that you’ll get better at over time.

Here are some hypothetical examples:

1. You love the Korean steak tacos from a local family restaurant. The next time you go, you ask if you can get some of their gochujang aioli they use on those tacos that makes them so damn good (or get some of their kimchi to go). Then you can make your own marinated meat or veggies and make your own tacos, or use the aioli on a protein bowl, or maybe on a sandwich. You get the idea.

2. There’s a local sandwich shop that has a killer Reuben sandwich with a special coleslaw mix they make from scratch. Next time you go, ask if you can buy a large side of the slaw to take home. Then you can make your own Reuben with pastrami from the grocery store, or put it into some tacos, etc.

3. Your favorite BBQ spot has amazing pulled pork and you (like me) don’t have a smoker or the means to re-create it, so you buy some of that pork by itself and make stuff with it or simply make your own sides to create a classic BBQ plate meal.

4. You love a local restaurant’s roasted brussels sprouts appetizer. Get one to go next time and make your own main dish to go with it.

5. Buy your favorite restaurants’ salad dressings. These can be very versatile and will help you make great salads at home.

This isn’t using restaurant food per say, but the fermented slaw is from a brand called Olive My Pickle. It was a great sandwich too!

2. Dish lacking flavor? You probably need more salt or acid.

There’s a book called Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat (not an affiliate link) which postulates that the foundations of flavor comes down to those four elements. When making food at home, usually if the dish just isn’t hitting right, it’s because it’s lacking one of these ingredients, and for rookie chefs, salt and acid are the most likely culprits.

Oh yea, and it’s also a Netflix show now.

I’ve seen this trend play out in my own cooking. Often when the flavor of my dish is lacking, it’s because I need to add more acid or salt (or sometimes it’s because I’ve added too much salt and need to balance it with more acid).

Try to keep some limes, lemons, oranges, grapefruits, and/or vinegars on hand to be able to add a dash of acid to whatever you’re cooking. You’d be surprised how much of a difference a half a lime can make.

And sometimes all you need is a dash of salt.

3. Build a wide array of staples.

One of the most important things I’ve learned about cooking is that it’s really useful to become good at a few staple kinds of dishes. These form a reliable back-bone to your cooking arsenal that you can confidently rely on any time. My staples, for example, are:

1. Tacos. BBQ tacos, fajita tacos, Indian tacos, etc, etc, etc. Tacos are so versatile, and learning how to balance 2–4 flavors against each other to make a great taco will take you far and make you a better chef. Bonus points if you make your own tortillas.

2. Pasta. I love pasta, and one of the biggest reasons I love it is because pasta is so flexible. I’ve made traditional Italian pastas, Indian-infused pastas, Asian-flavored noodles, and more. Again, learning how to balance a few key flavors is all it takes to make great pasta.

3. Sandwiches. This is basically the same as tacos but with a different bread. Almost anything you would make as a taco would also be good as a sandwich. Bonus points if you make your own bread. I also make a mean burger which I count as a type of sandwich.

4. Rice bowls. Sub out rice for quinoa, couscous, etc if you like, but a good rice bowl with protein and veggies is a reliably healthy and tasty meal.

5. Indian food. I’m half Indian (as you might have guessed given my name), and my mom (ironically the non-Indian parent) taught me the basics of making good Indian food and furnished me with a great array of staple Indian spices. I can now cook this kind of food or infuse these kinds of flavors in other foods whenever I want. You could apply this with your own cultural food heritage too.

There are plenty of other kinds of staple foods you could add to your arsenal. Follow your heart and the kinds of foods you typically gravitate towards naturally. For instance, if you love tacos and learn how to make killer tacos, it will do wonders for your confidence in the kitchen (have I talked about tacos enough haha)!

A wonderful teriyaki steak I made recently with the sauce I mentioned earlier. A great example of a healthy rice bowl that’s delicious,

4. Print out your recipes.

This one is more self-explanatory. Trust me. Printed recipes are 100x easier to follow than looking them up on your phone. Being able to mark off completed steps and see everything at a glance will save you a surprising amount of time, and you will be much more likely to end up with a faithful attempt at the recipe rather than disappointment. Just do it, please.

5. It’s okay to start with meal kits.

Meal kit companies like Hello Fresh, Blue Apron, Home Chef, etc are all pretty decent meals. In my experience, the portion sizes tend to be on the small side (so you may want to up the portions), but just the recipe cards you get are worth the price of a few boxes. And you can always get additional groceries to add to these to bulk them up (or to infuse some of your own flavors/ingredients into the mix).

I wouldn’t use them for long, however, as they are far pricier than getting your own groceries (and you get less food with them), but if you churn out promos, you can build up a little recipe book to help with putting meals together. Particularly, I’ve found that these meal kit services often have good sauces which as I mentioned before, often make good meals.

Just make sure you don’t just re-create these recipes after the fact. Use them as a creative base from which to innovate your own culinary creations.

As you can see, I churned quite a few promos for these services…

Bonus Tip: If you mess something up, it’s okay to not eat it.

This is from a recent personal experience. I tried to make a balsamic glaze sauce using balsamic vinegar, jam, and bouillon as the base flavors. Thing is, I added too much bouillon, and it basically ruined it. No amount of extra jam, vinegar, or lime was cutting it. In the end, I used a bit of the sauce for the meal I made it for (and it was okay, definitely not great), but I ended up throwing the rest away after a few days had passed and I just had no desire to use it anymore.

If you made something, and you just don’t want to eat it or don’t want to eat it a second time after a few days, it’s okay to throw it out and try something else. Or just get take-out tonight and try cooking again tomorrow. We’re human after all.

Finally, just start cooking.

And take it slow. Instead of jumping into the deep end with a super complicated recipe, build on your skills. Start small and keep trying more and more complicated recipes over time. Find ways to mix and match recipes, or use a part of one recipe and make something else to go with it. Before you know it, you’ll have enough confidence to take on some kitchen challenges that are currently intimidating to you. And the real learning is going to come when you try to make something original or mix and match recipes. Cooking can be a very creative pursuit if you want it to be.

If you enjoyed reading this, I’d really appreciate a follow here on Medium. I write about things like crypto and popular media, but I’m also trying to write more about cooking and other personal explorations and discoveries. I’d love to have you on this journey.

Till next time!

But crypto is far more than just Bitcoin. Blockchain technology has opened a door for retail investors like you and me to be the owners of the internet infrastructure of the future.

I have just launched a new publication that covers technology and how we can use it to better our lives, including crypto. Come check it out: https://medium.com/digital-native-citizen

These aren’t the only two players in the crypto game. Image credit: Pierre Borthiry.

I have spent a ton of time diving into the crypto space, and I’m hooked. But I have to admit: crypto is naturally pretty confusing to most people who don’t have much tech savvy. So I want to make this space more approachable for others who haven’t really gotten into it yet.

To that end, I’m planning on writing several articles about crypto in the near future. As these articles come out, I’ll add the links here too, and this list is repeated on the bottom of the article. Follow me here on Medium to get those future articles recommended to you.

My Crypto Thoughts:

1. (This article) Blockchain is the future of digital infrastructure

2. (Coming soon) Building your first crypto portfolio

3. (Coming soon) How the De-Fi movement could upend a $100T market

4. (Coming soon) NFTs: a new frontier in digital copyright

5. And more to come…

Bitcoin may have been the first, but it definitely will not be the last

Bitcoin was revolutionary in that it pioneered the concept of blockchain technology. But using blockchain to create a currency was just the beginning of this technology.

Block chain technology is the internet of the future. Photo credit: Hitesh Choudhary.

Without diving into the nerdy details, blockchain technology enables decentralizing huge digital markets and services that currently rely on large middle-men companies. This makes things more secure (since there’s not just a single point of failure in a blockchain network), cheaper (no middle men skimming huge profits), and more accessible (blockchains are global by default). This is an opportunity for retail investors to redistribute wealth and become the new supply back-bone of the digital economy, upending the current centralized monopolies run by comic book villains like Jeff Bezos.

Blockchain won’t displace every industry, but it will displace many of the biggest and most important, carving out large percentages of those markets. And you’ll want to be there when it does.

One more time for the folks in the back: “Crypto is so much more than Bitcoin.”

De-Fi: The first real-world use case of crypto

Blockchain technology has the potential to re-define most digital markets in the world. The first application of this technology is something called De-Fi — which stands for Decentralized Finance. I’ll be writing a more in-depth article on De-Fi later, but I’ll give you some highlights now.

De-Fi is global digital financial tools that let you take control of the financial system.

Blockchain developers are creating decentralized financial tools, like investing platforms, exchanges, lending programs, banking tools, and more. These platforms provide financial tools that are often unavailable to many people around the world, and it does so without having costly middle-men.

The traditional financial services market is on the order of 10s of trillions of $$ globally today, and the total assets-under-management (assets currently being invested by investment firms) is over $100T globally. For comparison, the total market cap of the entire crypto space is about $1.6–1.7T right now (early June 2021). De-Fi projects only make up a portion of that, less than $100B right now. And if we consider how big the traditional financial sector is, the De-Fi space could easily reach a market cap of $10T or more in the next 5–10 years, while keeping the traditional financial services market significantly larger than the decentralized market still (which means $10T is a conservative estimate).

That’s a 100x increase in market cap. Meaning if you invested broadly across the space, you could turn $1,000 into $100,000 in 5–10 years.

Again, more on De-Fi in another article, but this is some really promising stuff where you could make a *ton* of money with some smart investing. And this is just the first big crypto technology movement of what I believe will be many more.

So how do you actually buy crypto?

For a long time, buying crypto was a somewhat esoteric process. These days, it has become much easier, but it can still be intimidating for newcomers. Allow me to break it down for you (for US residents).

The first step: turning fiat money (USD) into crypto assets

Photo credit: Austin Distel.

The first step is to find an exchange that allows you to deposit fiat money and buy crypto on their exchange with it. In the US, the big players are Coinbase, Coinbase Pro, Crypto.com, and Binance.us.

My recommendation here is Binance.us. They have the lowest fees: 0% to deposit via ACH bank transfer, and just 0.1% for trades. Now, the interface can be somewhat intimidating, and if it’s too much for you, you can always use Coinbase instead which has a simpler interface (where fees are more like 1.5–4%, depending on the size of transaction). But if you go with Binance.us, it is actually fairly easy to place a simple market buy or sell order on the exchange for whatever crypto you’re interested in. And they have excellent liquidity and are very safe to use.

That’s basically all you need to do to get into crypto. Deposit some money on an exchange and buy some crypto with it. Don’t know what coins to buy? I’m going to write another article soon that will help you decide, but in the meantime, you can start with a simple 50–50 split between Bitcoin and Ethereum and diversify as you learn more. Follow me here on Medium to see it when that article is published.

Becoming a true crypto master (optional for newcomers, feel free to skim or skip this section if this world is already intimidating to you)

Consider this a little bit of a sneak peak of some of the things I’ll be writing about in the future.

One of the many options for crypto passive income is called PancakeSwap. Look it up if you’re feeling adventurous, but I’ll be talking about liquidity pools in a future article too.

Once you’ve purchased crypto assets on a fiat exchange and have gained some comfortability with the space and exposure to the assets, you can start to look into the next steps for your portfolio which involves withdrawing your crypto assets to other places.

The first thing you may want to do is look into other exchanges. There are other exchanges out there that offer access to many more tokens than those found on Coinbase or Binance.us, for instance Kucoin. The catch is that these exchanges don’t have a way to deposit fiat money — you have to trade cryptos for other cryptos.

Without going deep into this (as I’ll save it for another article), you can move some of your crypto from Binance.us to Kucoin (for instance, you could move some Bitcoin), then trade that crypto for other cryptos like LUNA or XRP or CAKE or THETA, etc, etc (none of those are available on Binance.us). This is key for gaining access to a wide array of coins including many of the projects that are a little riskier but have way more return potential. And friendly tip, use a crypto asset called XLM (Stellar Lumens) to move money between exchanges, as the fees are basically zero.

These exchanges may not provide for USD trading, but they do use a concept called stablecoins which are crypto assets whose value is pegged to the value of a fiat currency. For example there’s USDT (Tether) which is designed such that 1 USDT roughly equals 1 USD. This allows you to sell other tokens into stable assets, essentially the equivalent of selling Bitcoin for USD on Binance.us.

Stablecoins are like the bridge between fiat money and crypto. They will likely play an important role in your crypto journey.

The next thing you could do is find ways to use your crypto assets that you purchased to earn more crypto. Many crypto projects offer things like staking, lending programs, and liquidity pools that give you ways to earn interest on your crypto holdings, often in the same token you’re already holding. So you can stake Cardano (token name is ADA) for example and earn 5–6% APY in more Cardano. So your 100 ADA could be 106–107 ADA in a year (depending on the rates and how they compound). You’re getting interest, but also still benefiting from appreciation of the underlying asset too and your interest is paid out in said appreciating asset.

There are even higher yields available when providing liquidity for liquidity pools and participating in lending protocols, but I will write more about that in a separate article. I will link that here when it’s published.

Final thoughts

I hope I was able to help you understand this new digital frontier a bit more and give you more confidence in becoming a crypto investor. We are in the early days of crypto still, and it is not too late to get in and get huge returns on your investments.

Investing in crypto means investing in the digital infrastructure of the future. I believe, very strongly, that this technology is going to revolutionize the world, and that everyone who becomes a part of it today and stays in the game for the long-haul is going to stake out their slice of the supply-side of the market and make a lot of money from doing so. I firmly believe that if you invested as little as $20,000 (intelligently) over the next two to three years in crypto, that your assets will eventually be worth north of $1M, probably within 10 years.

I am going to write a lot more about this topic, so please follow me here on Medium so you will get those articles recommended to you when they get published.

And in the meantime, buy some crypto. Just don’t buy DOGE or some other memecoin please. If you’re just getting started, start with a 50–50 split between Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH). We can expand your portfolio later, but this is a safe start. And please don’t panic sell if they drop by 10, 20, 30, or even 50% or more. Just hold on for the long-term, cause that’s how you make money.

My Crypto Thoughts:

1. (This article) Blockchain is the future of digital infrastructure

2. (Coming soon) Building your first crypto portfolio

3. (Coming soon) How the De-Fi movement could upend a $100T market

4. (Coming soon) NFTs: a new frontier in digital copyright

5. And more to come…

Thanks for reading!

Important legal note: I am in no way a financial advisor or fiduciary agent. My words should not be construed as individual financial advice but rather my own opinions and speculations about the future. Always, always, always do your own research and learn about something before investing your money in it. I intend for my articles to simply act as a starting point in your investment research process.

I’ve been pondering this question lately: are writers obligated to tell a complete story?

While there’s a place for ambiguity, in this writer’s personal opinion, writers trying to be ambiguous more often end up just telling an incomplete plot, and their story lacks the satisfaction they were likely going for. This latest George Clooney film, based on the novel by Lily Brooks-Dalton and adapted by Mark L. Smith, is a perfect example of that phenomenon — and as such fails to deliver emotional punch — because it doesn’t tell you what’s really going on.

Before we dive in, this isn’t a movie review. In this case, The Midnight Sky is simply a catalyst for writing about something that’s been on my mind. So, let’s drop a couple definitions.

1. When I say plot, I’m referring to the events and actions the writer puts together to pull us through the experience.
2. When I say story, I’m referring to the meaning conveyed by the writing; it’s basically the intersection of the characters and their journeys colliding into the plot.

Now allow me to get on my soap box.

In my opinion, it’s our job as writers to tell a complete plot at a bare minimum. I think it’s fine, and can add some intrigue, to sprinkle in some ambiguity to the story or character arcs. Hell, ambiguity can still be satisfying, but in my opinion, that’s such a difficult feat to pull off that it isn’t even worth risking undercutting the satisfaction of your entire story.

As writers, we came up with our plot, our characters, our world, and how those all come together as a story. We should have a clear opinion of how it all goes, and therefor all the constituent parts of our story should be complete.

Beginning with the ending

Often times, when I’ve felt most let down by ambiguous stories, it was because the writer had created an interesting world and plot, and I’d gotten very invested in it. Then, when the writer leaves me hanging at the end, I just feel like I’ve been tricked, like they’re hiding the ending from me. Again, sometimes it works, but more than often it doesn’t. In my opinion, it’s our job as writers to take a stand and have an opinion about how the ending of our story is supposed to take place, not just leave it completely open for the audience to do our jobs for us.

This experience is different in movies vs TV, but I’m just talking movies for this article.

But first, let’s drill down into an ambiguous ending that actually feels satisfying: Inception.

Ambiguous vs. open to interpretation, or why Inception’s ending is good where others are not

I think moviegoers, almost universally, enjoyed Christopher Nolan’s Inception, including its ambiguous ending. I know I loved it and have watched it at least five times over the years.

Only I would argue Inception’s ending is not actually ambiguous, but rather it’s open to interpretation. This all comes down to the fact that the ending, and how you interpret it, will be based on the opinions you formed through the movie, specifically around how totems work, a small but important detail in the plot.

The ambiguity in this case doesn’t feel arbitrary at all, because it’s actually putting the power back into your hands as the audience. This ending expertly weaves in elements of the plot in order to tie the ending to the story and the plot and leave us feeling satisfied. Also, the little detail that the totem wobbles right before cutting to black is that little cherry on top: it makes us as an audience feel smart for remembering that’s how his totem works, and it gives us a clear indication of what the totem is going to do, leaving it to us to determine what that actually means, rather than leaving us without any clue as to what happened.

The key to this ending is that Nolan leaves us just enough information and details so that we can easily construct a satisfying ending for ourselves, in a way where we feel smart/good for doing so. We don’t have to go to great lengths to find meaning in this ending; likely, by the end of the movie, we already have an idea or opinion of what the relevant details mean. The ending leaves a few possibilities, but based on your perceptions/opinions during the movie, only one of those possibilities is likely to stand out to you. Hence, you don’t actually have to choose your ending when Inception cuts to black, rather you’ve already chosen it by the end. This is why it works.

This is just my opinion, and if you think there are other good ambiguous endings, drop them in the comments.

Looping back around to the beginning

Let’s bring it back to the movie that sparked this article in the first place: The Midnight Sky. Should be obvious, but spoiler alert starting now.

Another common place writers like to insert ambiguity is in the backstory, or the story before the story. The Midnight Sky starts exactly like this, only unlike many stories that start on an ambiguous note, this one fails to actually make it any clearer by the end. This is the cornerstone of why the movie falls flat — in my opinion — and why I wanted to write this article.

Generally, we writers like to drop you into the action as soon as possible, and in doing so, we’ll often start without any details so we can pull the audience in right away. But usually, we’ll explain at least some, if not all, of the things we skipped over once we’re firmly in the story.

The Midnight Sky is set in 2049 during/immediately after a cataclysmic event that renders Earth uninhabitable through radiation. In the story this is simply referred to as “The Event” and not once is it actually explained at all.

Here’s why this is a problem in this story.

There’s no reason not to tell the audience what happened. There’s nothing in the story that relies on the ambiguity of this event. Ambiguity needs to have purpose in order to work, otherwise it feels lazy and unsatisfying, hence the title of this article.

It’s also not a complicated thing to explain. Writers are legitimately wary of the dreaded “exposition dump” which is often a good enough reason to leave some things ambiguous, at least enough so that you can dole out the information over the course of the story. But in this case, this event isn’t complicated enough to be legitimately worried about an exposition dump. One or two lines of dialogue, and it’s explained.

Finally, there are real stakes that aren’t given any weight, because the writer refuses to give us any information. At the beginning of the movie, all the people are supposedly evacuating somewhere at the beginning of “The Event” while the main character, played by Clooney, stays behind. Eventually, we learn that they’ve evacuated underground to a “temporary” living space (that’s the exact word they used in the movie). So, when two of the crew members aboard the Aether spaceship (that we’ve been following for half the movie) decide to disembark back to Earth instead of staying on the ship and going back to the livable moon they found before the story began — and they decide to do so to supposedly try to find their families — we have virtually no investment in their journey at this point. Because we have no idea of the real state of the surface of the planet or how the “survivors” are supposed to be living, it’s hard to feel much of anything for these two people who, as far as we can tell, are basically just committing suicide with little real justification.

Okay, those were some long sentences, so kudos to you for sticking through it.

Let’s put a bow on this

The main reason I wanted to write this article was how The Midnight Sky handled ambiguity throughout its story. While we often think of ambiguous endings when we think of ambiguous storytelling, the way stories handle ambiguity throughout their plots is also important. The Midnight Sky, in my opinion, tells an incomplete plot, and therefor an incomplete and unsatisfying story.

The movie is also hampered by the fact that it’s incredibly bleak which means the audience need satisfaction even more than usual, and the ambiguity just further sucks out any satisfaction that could be had.

As writers, I strongly believe it’s our responsibility — really our job description — to provide complete plot-lines (and, by extension, worlds) at a minimum, because it’s really impossible to have a satisfying and complete story when key elements of your plot or world are unexplained. It’s our job to come up with and tell a complete plot and world/backstory without falling into exposition dumps or other story-telling techniques that are lazy on the other side of the spectrum. The plot, characters, and story we create are ours, and we should own 100% of them by making sure they’re complete.

Failing to do that is just lazy.

Thoughts? Disagree with me? Let me have it in the comments. ;)

Come along with me as I build a SaaS product and turn it into a (hopefully) successful business.

In early March 2019, I decided I wanted to make a SaaS product. I had an idea that I hadn’t seen anyone else tackle yet that has some utility for an audience I was familiar with: my fellow web designers and developers. Plus, it solved a problem I ran into myself when designing my own site.

My product is called KolorKit. It’s a color palette design and organization tool, basically taking Adobe Color and re-organizing it so that it’s actually useful for creating production color palettes. KolorKit is still in an MVP prototype stage, but you can check it out at app.kolorkit.co if you’d like to get an idea of what I’m describing.

This is what KolorKit looks like today, v0.2. Still pretty bare-bones MVP.

I thought it would be an interesting idea to start documenting the process of developing a SaaS product, from the early beginnings to a (hopefully) profitable future business. I hope to put these out on a roughly bi-weekly schedule, and they’ll:

• Document my progress and the challenges I’m working on (technical and otherwise).

• Outline a rough blueprint for people looking to develop their own SaaS product, by documenting the many decisions I’ll have to make while building KolorKit.

• Provide information that I wish I had while developing my SaaS product.

• Share additional insights learned along the way.

• And maybe gain a little exposure for my app too.

I’m inspired by the trend of people/organizations doing behind-the-scenes type content. Particularly, I’m loving the Corridor Crew YouTube channel (a hybrid BTS, personality, and games/challenges channel that gives you a view into what it’s like running a digital media studio and the fun personalities of all the employees and their friends). The SaaS Chronicles is my attempt to create something similar, but for a nascent tech company.

So if you’re interested in building a SaaS start-up, this series will hopefully provide a lot of useful information and third-hand experience for you. And if you’re just curious what it takes to build a SaaS product, then hopefully my story will be interesting enough to keep your attention.

The challenges in starting from scratch

Starting from scratch. Photo by Émile Perron on Unsplash

Now that I’d been working at a company with an established codebase for well over a year, I’d forgotten what it was like to start from scratch. I started by building a front-end prototype version of the app, and it probably took me several weeks just to finish the first “story” on my kanban board due to all the low-level scaffolding that I hadn’t done in a long time.

However, Once I got a little bit of architecture under my feet, progress came quickly. It was easy to get into the zone and finish stories, aside from the moments where I encountered a weird bug. During this phase, I even learned a new piece of tech — Vuex — which turned out to be easier than I expected.

Lesson #1: Use tech you know. There will be many hurdles in the early development stages, and this will make the speed-bumps much smoother.

Progress was quick, because I’m building KolorKit on a Laravel back-end with a Vue.js front-end, both technologies that I know very well. I also avoided making the app a single-page-app (or SPA as all the ‘kool kids’ call it), even though SPAs are the new hotness, because I’m not well-versed in SPAs and trying to figure out how those worked on top of building an app would’ve drowned me in the details.

Lesson #2: Give yourself some kind of map to follow while making your very first v0.1 prototype.

Mapping out my data structure on a whiteboard. Took me maybe 30 minutes but has probably saved me dozens of hours. Some stuff blurred (features I’m not ready to talk about yet).

I started out by creating a basic white-board diagram that mapped out the data structures of the parts that make up my application. This created a natural map and showed me most of what I needed to do to build my MVP. 20–30% of my early stories were still unanticipated, but that’s exponentially better than even 40–50%. The more uncertainty in the early stages, the more friction.

But front-end development is my professional realm and my comfort zone. Once the prototype was done, things became significantly harder.

It was time to face a former nemesis. An as-of-then unconquered beast that is the bane of all web developers. I’m talking, of course, about authentication.

Why is authentication so hard?

That was the question on my mind 24/7 for the first week after I finished my prototype while I researched (read: procrastinated) options for adding the all-important authentication to my app. SaaS apps need a way to store and authenticate users, of course, but this step felt surprisingly hard, perhaps because there’re so many options available.

I spent weeks considering the many ins-and-outs of authentication and multiple options for implementing it, when in reality all I needed was to make sure my users could log in. In the end, I picked the simple (and quick) option which is what I should’ve been looking for in the first place.

In hindsight, implementing authentication wasn’t so bad. But because this was the first time I’d implemented authentication in a production application, I agonized over the decision for far too long and wasted many more hours researching than I needed to.

Lesson #3: For anything that’s ancillary to your application, look for the quick and easy way to do it, not the perfect way.

If you’re like me, the temptation to try to be perfect is almost irresistible, but the truth is that I enjoyed working on my application much more than finding an authentication solution, and even if you end up paying for a service to do some ancillary thing that you could’ve written yourself, the time saved is more than worth the cost. And you’ll appreciate spending more time on your app which will reduce friction and make it easier to keep the momentum going.

Ultimately I landed on using Auth0 as my authentication provider. This meant I could outsource the nuts and bolts of authenticating users to an outside service (and thereby also improve the security of my app, since those guys know what they’re doing more than I do).

But authentication doesn’t live in a vacuum. You need to also store your users and information about them.

Creating the sign up flow: keep it simple.

Lesson #4: I would strongly recommend you keep your app’s connections to its services as one-dimensional as possible.

I needed a way to collect more information about a user when they signed up without doing it in Auth0. It’s technically possible to do this in Auth0, but I chose to keep Auth0 to just authentication in order to decrease overall coupling between it and my application. This makes it easier to swap out Auth0 for another solution in the future if I ever felt that I needed to.

My final solution was to simply create middleware that would determine if I had all the information on the user that I wanted (name and occupation in my case), and if the user didn’t have those items filled out, I could deduce that they had just signed up, so I’d redirect them to a page with a quick form for said information. Once they filled out that form and submitted it, they’d be able to access the app again. This works well, I think, and I’m happy with how it turned out. All told, it took a few weeks to get the signup form page and a (very) basic account dashboard page built out and properly integrated into the signup/login flow.

This is a diagram of how the sign up/log in flow works in KolorKit.

This is where we are: v0.2.0 (live as of 5/27/19)

And this is where the app stands right now if you visit it. This is v0.2.0, and the total feature-set I’ve built thus far is as follows (so you can get an idea of how much work has gone into this):

• You can create/edit/delete individually-named color-sets in your theme.

• You can edit the colors in said color-sets, using either hex, RGB, or HSB values to manipulate the colors. Those values all sync with each other, so if you change the hex, it changes the RGB and HSB values as well and so on.

• Color-sets collapse if you’re not editing them so that you can see more on screen at once.

• You can sign up for an account and login via Auth0.

• When you sign up for an account, you’re first redirected to a page to complete sign up before you can access the app again.

• You can view your account dashboard, which for now just shows your email, provides a button to reset your password (the actual logic is also handled by Auth0), and provides a link to logout.

In fact, just listing all that out reminded me of just how much work I’ve done so far and how far I’ve come as a developer since I first started and wouldn’t have had half a clue how to do all the stuff I’ve done for KolorKit.

I’m about two and a half months into this project so far, and it’s been an enjoyable, if at times frustrating, ride. I’ve recently been grappling with a new problem of how to get my users’ accounts synced up with contact records in a CRM (specifically Keap (formerly Infusionsoft), since I work there and have a free account). I’ve tried to figure out a solution for well over two weeks and all I’ve gotten is frustration. But I’ll save that topic for another entry of The SaaS Chronicles, probably once I figure out a solution so I can give you that instead of just venting.

What’s coming up next

Right now, I’m working on defining what v1.0 of KolorKit will look like and trying to plot the course from where I am today to v1.0. I’ll tackle this subject of deciding what features need to be in v1.0 (including architecture and support features that you don’t immediately think about like billing) and the intricacies of planning in the next chapter of The SaaS Chronicles.

If you found this an interesting read and/or interesting concept for a blog series, leave me a note in the comments on what kinds of topics you’d be interested in reading about when it comes to creating a SaaS product.

Till next time.

Hollywood is missing the mark with its Tom Holland Uncharted prequel. Or at least, I think so. To be fair, I’d probably go watch any Uncharted adaptation, but the recent fan short film starring Nathan Fillion as the witty, sarcastic Nathan Drake immediately made me envision what that movie could be, and it’s a lot more exciting.

But first, if you haven’t seen the film yet, please, do yourself a favor.

Directed by Allan Ungar; starring Nathan Fillion, Stephen Lang, Mircea Monroe, Geno Segers, and Ernie Reyes Jr.

While the film certainly has its shortcomings, there is so much potential it’s not even funny (okay, maybe it’s a little funny). While watching some of the reaction videos, however, I noticed some trends that I feel are worth pointing out.

Nathan Fillion is too old to star in a new franchise.

Let’s address this properly. Fillion is 47. He’s no spring chicken, certainly, but he’s far from out of his prime. Male actors typically are in their “prime” between 35 and 60 (Liam Neeson is 66 and still kicking ass). Realistically, you could (and should) probably only get 2–3 Uncharted movies with Fillion if you started development right now (so he’d be 50 or so when the first one hits screens), but that’s a respectable number.

The fixation seems to be on the idea that Hollywood won’t cast him because of age which is then totally ignoring his potential for the role. 2–3 movies is a healthy little franchise (and of course, you can easily expand past that with other actors carrying on the franchise, like Drake’s daughter whom we meet at the end of Uncharted 4 after they skip ahead a bunch of years), but people are pretending that Hollywood is only interested in 5+ movie franchises. While I’m sure Hollywood would prefer someone who could do a 5+ movie franchise, they would be pretty happy with Fillion’s franchise if those 2–3 movies were really good. After all, that’s what would draw people to the theater.

Further, the timeline actually makes sense. Nathan Drake is 38/39 in Uncharted 4, so Fillion would be the right age for Drake’s last couple adventures before he retires for good. We all know that Hollywood can easily make you +- 15 years old which would mean Fillion could stretch as young as 32 right now which seems reasonable. Technically, they could even start sometime between Uncharted 2 and 3 or between 3 and 4.

Plus, when you’re going to be making 7 figures on a major movie deal, you’re going to get in really great shape for it. I’m sure Fillion would be up for the challenge.

Fillion isn’t a box-office draw.

Once the naysayers are done with their ageism, they usually move onto yet another doubt about my main man Fillion which is that he isn’t a box-office draw. And they’re actually right about this one, but it isn’t a good reason not to make the movie.

Fillion is a TV actor for the most part. He certainly has a fan base, but it would be fair to say that he alone will not likely get many people to come to see the movie except for those in the nerd community.

But that doesn’t matter.

Uncharted is the box office draw. This is like saying “why cast Tom Holland (who was relatively unknown) as Spiderman?” They casted Holland as Spiderman, because he’s a good actor, and Spiderman was the box office draw, not Holland. Plus, Fillion would likely be a great deal cheaper than other more well-known film names.

Similarly, Fillion is a great actor, with the perfect kind of charm for a character like Drake. The games are immensely popular, selling millions of copies, and a good adaptation of the franchise would bring potentially millions of people to see the movie in the theater (not counting any new faces who hadn’t seen or played the games). So Fillion doesn’t need to carry the movie on his back; his character and the series will do that for him. He just needs to kill it in the role, and if we’re being honest, he probably would (call me opinionated).

Video game movies always suck.

This one is probably the most relevant critique, but that’s down to the quality of the adaptation rather than the quality of the source material. Yes, it’s entirely possible that Hollywood might screw up an Uncharted movie with Fillion, but it’s equally possible that Hollywood might screw up the Tom Holland Uncharted prequel.

This is a topic that I actually want to write another article on, something like “Why Can’t Hollywood Make a Good Video Game Movie?” Look for that coming soon.

So what would a Fillion Uncharted movie look like?

Ungar’s fan film lays out some really interesting aspects that shed light on what a good Fillion Uncharted might look like.

Fillion’s interpretation of Drake

The most obvious thing in the short film is Fillion’s take on Drake. It’s clearly the focal point of the short film, as most of the runtime is spent on his interactions with other characters, from the antagonists to Sully and Elena.

Now, admittedly, I’ve only seen the most recent Uncharted games (though I plan to play all of them once I can afford a PS4). But from what I’ve seen, Fillion does a great job translating Drake’s mannerisms and dialogue from the game to the screen, and that was based on a script that didn’t get any feedback from anyone at Naughty Dog. Also, apparently Nathan Drake’s personality and appearance were at least partially based on Nathan Fillion.

And of course, Fillion has a reputation for being charming. Just look at Castle.

Nathan Drake is known as a charming, sarcastic, and irreverent character which is a natural fit for Fillion.

Nathan: “Holy shit, Sully, do you know what this means?”

Sully: “Kid, whenever you start doing this, nobody knows what you mean.”

Classic.

The script obviously wasn’t perfect, but it gave us enough nuggets that pay homage to the games and enough original lines that are true to Drake’s character that we can get a really good idea of what Nathan Fillion’s Drake would be like. And I for one, am pretty stoked about that idea.

The character dynamics

Of course, Uncharted isn’t just about Drake. It’s also got a pretty great cast of side-characters and villains. This short film doesn’t really have much in the way of villains, as the main antagonist is just the “muscle” for a much more important character, so I won’t go into that aspect.

But this short film does have Sully and Elena in it. I saw a lot of conflicting opinions on Stephen Lang’s Sully. I thought he did an admirable job as Sully, and he’s the right age for Sully post-Uncharted 4. It’s implied in an earlier Uncharted that Sully is 25 years older than Drake, which would make him almost 65 years old at the time of Uncharted 4, so Stephen Lang looks the part, certainly. And he has the gravitas that Sully requires as a character, with the ability to be a little humorous.

The other guy I heard multiple times for Sully’s role is Bruce Campbell, and he would be great too. I’m a huge fan of Campbell, and his role on Burn Notice as Sam is actually pretty similar to Sully’s role in Uncharted. So in that way, it actually feels like a very natural choice, and to be honest, if a movie, ANY movie, came out starring both Fillion and Campbell, I’d be first in line to watch it.

Then there’s Elena, played by Mircea Monroe in the short film. I wasn’t wholly convinced by her in the role, though she certainly didn’t do a bad job. I saw a number of comments suggest that Emily Rose, the voice/mocap actor for Elena in Uncharted, could easily play the role in a feature film. While I certainly agree that she could, and would probably do a good job, I think Elena represents an opportunity to pick up a more mainstream film star to complement Fillion.

In fact, I think the smart thing would be to cast two film stars in the roles of Sully and Elena in order to offset Fillion a bit, kind of like how Sony casted Michael Keaton and Marissa Tomei in Spiderman: Homecoming to add some film stars alongside the relatively unknown Tom Holland.

As for who I would pick, I’m not sure. You can let me know in the comments who you’d cast as Elena.

The action sequences

This is the one thing that the short film couldn’t really accomplish at a proper scale, cause, you know, it’s a small-budget short film. However, we did get a glimpse into what the action would be like with the fist-fight between Drake and the goons post-interrogation.

I actually have to give a lot of props to this section. The fighting style is fun, frenetic, and very Uncharted, particularly Uncharted 4 (which really upped the melee fighting systems).

There’s a healthy mix of using enemies against each other, grabbing Drake to hold him down while another goon tries to punch him (huge part of Uncharted 4), and some signature Uncharted moves. The only thing we’re missing here is a dual-protagonist fight (like Drake and Sully fighting guys at the same time) which makes sense cause the filmmakers were on a limited budget.

But the haymaker punches, big sweeping kicks, grabs, and Drake’s reaction to it all are so on-point.

Paying homage to the gameplay

Perhaps the moment that’s most strongly reacted to, the unique and interesting cinematic-to-gameplay transition in the final fight of the film shed light on what kind of unique elements could be brought to an Uncharted movie to really set it apart from all the other movies out there.

This moment screams Uncharted. I could be wrong, but I’m fairly certain that Uncharted was the game that popularized the seamless transition from cutscene to gameplay like this moment depicts. It’s damn near iconic for the franchise:

Drake does some crazy ridiculous thing (like jumping out of the second story window), the camera goes out of the third person viewpoint to show the audience more context to what’s going on, and he manages to face-plant. Then, as he’s getting up and saying some pithy response, the camera comes around and seamlessly transitions back to the third-person camera position.

Almost every reaction video I watched had people in awe of this moment

And even more interesting than this shot is that it’s also blended with another camera move out to see the car coming in, followed by moving back to third-person, then cutting to a really epic shot of Drake winding up his punch and back to third-person as his fist impacts the goon and he lands on the ground. It’s a really great way to blend the third-person viewpoint with more cinematic shots in a way that’s really unique and would stand to set the Uncharted movie apart from all the other action movies if they used it.

Wrapping up

As you can tell, this short film really hyped me up for what a Nathan Fillion Uncharted movie could be and for what it could look like in paying homage to the games. These are the most critical things, to my mind, to making a great Uncharted adaptation: telling a story that hasn’t been explored in the games, incorporating action elements and world elements from the games, and, of course, Nathan Fillion.

Did you enjoy reading this article? Considering giving it a couple claps and following me here on Medium, or on Twitter. There’s more commentary and content like this coming. Sneak peak at some future articles: What Happened to Mirror’s Edge?, Why Can’t Hollywood Make a Good Video Game Movie?, and My Pitch for a Fillion Uncharted Movie.

Sourcefed is a long-standing YouTube channel that came out of YouTube’s funding experiment where they essentially funded a bunch of channels in an attempt to bring more high-quality content to the platform. Sourcefed outlasted most of its siblings in this experiment.

And yet, despite having a 7 figure subscriber count and getting hundreds of thousands of views every day, Group Nine Media, a Discovery (the TV channel)-backed holding company that owns Sourcefed and its related show People Be Like, cancelled Sourcefed, SourcefedNerd, and People Be Like.

Before I go further, I feel it’s worth mentioning that I am not an expert in the field of video content, but I was an avid fan of Sourcefed and felt compelled to put some time into trying to determine what happened.

Prepare to learn. About YouTube and why it’s almost impossible to be profitable on the platform.

The reason this happened seems mostly apparent with some research. Sourcefed has been losing monthly views (and thus revenue) consistently for a long time (Source). Sourcefed’s sister NERD channel has seen more steady numbers, but generally less impressive numbers (Source): Sourcefed peaked at 35M views in May, 2012 and maintained ~20M monthly views through most of 2013; in comparison, NERD’s best month was 10.6M views in July, 2013 and they kept that up till mid-2016 at which point their views started plummeting (coincidentally that’s when Maude Garrett left the show, more on that later).

“Even if you get 1M views in a month, if you’re getting a $5 CPM (which seems to be on the high-end), that’s about $5,000/month in revenue, minus YouTube obscene (in my opinion) 45% cut, and you’re left with a little over $2,500/month or a paltry $30,000 salary.”

So why did Sourcefed get shut down? YouTube is a hard place to make money, and it just couldn’t keep up, largely, in my opinion, due to hosts leaving and taking a portion of the audience with them. But it’s important to note that YouTube networks like this are really more like TV shows than traditional businesses. They really fuse the two. Just like on TV, Sourcefed was cancelled, seemingly, because it wasn’t making money anymore.

Before I get into the business-side of this article, ponder Sourcefed’s situation for a second. Sourcefed became popular largely on the backs of the personalities of its various eclectic and entertaining hosts, but it seems that Sourcefed (or its owning companies) didn’t do enough to retain that talent. And when the hosts left, it made a sizeable dent in the viewership. That is likely the principle reason for Sourcefed’s sagging ratings and eventual cancellation.

Pardon the pixels.

If you know anything about the business end of YouTube, you know that it’s VERY difficult to be profitable on the platform. The CPMs (or the amount of money per 1,000 views a video’s creator gets) are anywhere from an abysmal $0.25 to $7 or so, depending on who you ask (Google it). That means even if you get 1M views in a month, if you’re getting a $5 CPM (which seems to be on the high-end), that’s about $5,000/month in revenue, minus YouTube obscene (in my opinion) 45% cut, and you’re left with a little over $2,500/month or a paltry $30,000 salary. And that’s with 1 million views per month.

Now, think about Sourcefed. Between the main channel and NERD, it was probably netting around 11M views/month by now. That’s an annual revenue (after YouTube’s cut) of ~$363,000. Between the two channels, there was a significant staff, and obviously that $363K in yearly revenue was not even close to enough to break even. There’s no way to know for sure, since we don’t know how many people Sourcefed and NERD employed and what their salaries were, but it’s likely that between Sourcefed and NERD, they would have needed at least 30M monthly views and significant revenue from merchandising and external advertising. And that’s just to break even.

Again, I’m no expert, but next time you read about a YouTuber making lots of money, think twice. And even though YouTube says it has a commitment to high-quality YouTube content, it’s uncertain just how far they’re willing to go to protect that content. Remember, producing quality video content is EXPENSIVE, and the fact that YouTube is mostly ad-supported means that content creators have little consistent revenue. Don’t go into the YouTube ecosystem expecting to make any money.

I’ll miss SourceFed and NERD. Hundreds of thousands of others will too. RIP.