Over the last year, we’ve dedicated a lot of resources to building a unified custody platform for all of our customers. We’re pleased to announce our biggest improvement yet — unifying Paxos Wallet and itBit Wallet accounts. On April 18, customers will have one central account-management page where they can easily oversee their balances and funding activity for currency, crypto and gold. This page can be used to manage funding, withdrawals, transfers, purchases and itBit trading.

This will improve every customer’s experience as all account information and assets will be viewable on one screen. Critical functions that customers rely on…

This is a continuation — to read the first four misconceptions, click here.

It’s been two months since I started at Paxos, and I’m glad I did not let widely-held misconceptions about working in blockchain prevent me from joining the company. Search for the Truth and take a lesson from my book.

Misconception #5: Blockchain is a fringe vertical within fintech

Again, not true! Blockchain is more like the enablement layer for many different fintech companies. Blockchain is a technology within the fintech vertical. Increasingly, companies use the “B-word” only when having very technical conversations. …

Before starting at Paxos, I had a lot of preconceived notions about working at a company that uses words like crypto and blockchain to describe products. These notions caused a lot of hesitancy as I evaluated the opportunity — it almost pushed me away, which would have been a big mistake. This post outlines some of my initial revelations now that I’ve been with Paxos for a few months. While I’m approaching this from a product management perspective, my hope is to dispel general misconceptions anyone might have in joining a company in the crypto/blockchain space.

Misconception #1: Finance is…

This post is mostly driven by the realization that I haven’t made a blog post in more than eighteen months. For some reason I thought I wrote the previous version of this post a year ago, but it turns out it was way back in 2016.

Unlike the previous post, this was created by going backwards through the purchase list in the iOS app store to see everything I downloaded in 2018. What follows are my recommendations based on which apps managed to have staying power for me.

Fun time wasters

Citizen — I’m not sure how helpful this will be to people…

The seemingly sudden proliferation of email newsletters is really interesting to me. First, why email? People have been declaring email dead for years, but now you can’t go a week without seeing overwhelmingly positive coverage about TheSkimm, encountering Nuzzel’s odd newsletter feature or somehow getting subscribed to a company’s list (which isn’t really a newsletter despite what they might say). Specialized tools like TinyLetter and Revue are even popping up. Second, what are the unit economics behind these newsletters? Can a sustainable business be built on top of one? People seem to be trying, but how realistic is it exactly?

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The first industrial revolution was the movement towards new means of manufacturing from the late 1700’s to the mid 1800’s. Inventions like the steam engine dramatically reshaped entire industries ushering in staggering increases in productivity along with significant societal changes. When 90% of the population is no longer needing to tend the fields all day just to produce enough food to for society to eat, that’s a big deal.

This was closely followed by the second industrial revolution which featured the mass adoption of these practices and the refinement of many key inventions which kicked off the initial revolution. These…

Long ago I abandoned Evernote as my primary means of note taking and capturing information. The app had become slow, bloated with unnecessary features and insecure. I moved to Apple Notes because it offered something much closer to what I really wanted: no thrills note taking and reliable syncing across my devices.

At the time (two years ago), there really weren’t any other options available. That situation has drastically changed. Nowadays even Google has a note taking application. …

This is the third and final part of a series of posts about product management, you can read part one here and part two here.

There is this classic Ben Horowitz essay called Good Product Manager, Bad Product Manager which lays out the Product Manager as the CEO of the product. In his original usage of the term, he’s really just saying the PM should take ownership of all aspects of the product the same way the CEO takes ultimate ownership of all parts of a company. …