Decentralised.co

On The Publication

Decentralised.co publishes three articles each week for people that like to stay updated on Web3 without being glued to Twitter. Senior executives from 140+ enterprises trust us to keep them updated on what's going on in crypto. You should subscribe, if you like stories with depth, insight & numbers on how the internet is evolving. 

We write from the perspective of participants from emerging markets. (India). And have a bias to cover the stories of founders that often go unnoticed till they become big. The team consists of three people, each bringing their unique views. 

1. Saurabh Deshpande was a former researcher with The Block. He leads the bulk of our market commentary & the paid pieces that go out on Mondays and Fridays.

2. Siddharth Jain was an early Polygon employee and founded DefiDollar. He heads our portfolio and network of venture relationships. 

3. Joel John used to work with LedgerPrime as a Principal focused on venture investments, handling a portfolio of 80 companies.

Our writings are usually a distilled version of conversations between a founder, researcher and VC. We all juggle our hats to produce stories that can guide our readers. We do not shill tokens. Have no affiliations with get-rich-quick schemes. And take pride in the dull job of writing till our heads hurt. 

Subscribe if you would like to read from us.

There's a breakdown of how we think about the world further below. 

What Guides Us

A couple months back, we had an internal discussion about what we are trying to do. The note below is what came of it.

Decentralised.co is a holding company with minority stakes in a network of associated ventures. We do not have external investors and have no plans to raise money. Our ownership stakes in external businesses are a mix of advisory and proprietary capital facilitated through the newsletter’s cash flow. It allows us to play the long game with founders we believe in without the necessity to sell by force or liquidation.

We are not in the business of opining, eyeballs or running a media brand. The newsletter is run by operators whose mission is to surface signals for founders, investors and decision-makers at growth-stage ventures. There are a few guiding principles we work with.

We are in the business of thought in a mindless world.

We aim to provide direction and insight at a time marked by noise. We put in the time to better understand the markets we participate in. Our content trades eyeballs for depth to help better navigate the ever-changing landscape of the internet. Our KPI is the depth of our writing & the actions they inspire.

We do not want to go viral, as much as we want to be understood, debated & collaborated with by people that inspire us. Our writing should be a conduit for collaborative growth.

We write for the solo, bootstrapped founder, wondering how to take his venture from 0 to 1 and the investors or executives that may help him. That founder is our core audience subset. The curious, hungry person, with the pressure of failure atop his head, is who we put in the hours for.

We rather ship a well-cooked, full-course meal to that founder’s inbox instead of content for the sake of content. The strategy is to create content we’d like to consume ourselves. No notifications without us putting in the effort to justify a person spending time consuming our content.

We are owners

Words have no meaning unless they can drive action. We direct action by owning firms that can use our research and insight. It requires having the faith and confidence of founders better at executing than us. This is why breaking the trust of our audience or the founders we collaborate with harms anything we do.

Working with founders and owning the outcome removes the pressure of commoditising our reader’s attention and helps us focus on what truly matters to us: Long-term, steady, compounding growth through startups, marked by points of creative destruction over the years. We do not spend time on matters where an outcome cannot be influenced for the better.

This is likely why we will avoid requests to pick our brains, hop on a call, or find synergies where there are none. Life is too short to add value, where you do not own what you are adding value into.

We are here to have fun.

There is the romantic image of the founder or entrepreneur who struggles for decades. We do not believe in the struggle. Our endeavours are capitalistic, with an obsession with growth. Every venture is a time-bound experiment that may fail over time. Failure is an acceptable outcome. Ruining one’s life in the process is not.

It takes a village to raise a child—a maniac, to break the child as a grown man. We do not want to work with maniacs as we respect the efforts of the people that make a person who they are over the decades.

Having fun, even when spending weeks breaking one’s head over the next hot theme, is paramount to sustainable creativity. We are here for the long grind, which wouldn’t be possible if we were not having fun.