Nostr - a big tech perspective

Purple pilling David Nachum (Gmail Product) 🤙💜

In this conversation I discussed Nostr and open protocols with my friend David Nachum who has built products at big tech for many years. Specifically he worked on core communication tools at Google (Gmail), Facebook/Meta, and Apple.

It was interesting to hear about some of the the cultural beliefs at big tech around open versus closed, his rigorous focus on user value props when trying to decide what he believes about Nostr, and how some of what he saw on the Gmail team hints at one of the best reasons to be optimistic about the possibilities of Nostr.

I hope you enjoy our conversation!

0:00 intro

1:38 building Gmail, open versus closed tradeoffs

2:45 centralization concerns around Gmail from engineers working on it

4:00 future of email closed versus open?

5:36 why didn’t SMS/MMS/open standards win at messaging?

8:23 Google employee temperament/culture is pro-open

9:52 Nostr setup - informed technical/eng/product

10:50 Nostr overview

16:40 content moderation

18:25 web3 - language clarification 😬🤙

21:45 skeptical, but agree feed based products to group messengers/Discords

23:38 move from niche to broad via product innovation

27:30 lightning network - product innovation in Damus

29:26 EU passing laws about messaging interop

31:30 question the “better for innovation” argument

32:08 incentives matter, look at evolution of Linux

34:25 businesses to be built on relays

38:52 big tech, AI, nostr

40:27 what’s the pitch to an entrepreneur who’s building a Twitter competitor to consider nostr?

42:37 recommendation algos as AI, Artifact

48:36 centralized platforms can execute rapidly, but…

49:48 build niche apps with features which deeply address specific needs instead of lowest common denominator apps for broad

52:37 less engineering, more design/UX - trend of becoming cheaper+easier continues

55:00 don’t overstate messaging on Nostr

57:00 Gmail team members building new feature/setting that they really liked

1:02:03 hypothesis: the world is less polarized than it appears

1:04:48 Twitter’s community notes feature

1:08:13 game theory of underdogs versus overdoes

1:10:09 how do you create/capture value in a collaborative environment?

1:13:30 in the US we might not feel this pain as acutely

1:16:33 Brian Armstrong, introduction to bitcoin in 2014, has not achieved its vision in 2023

1:20:48 philosophically aligned with bitcoin