Very Nostr Meet You

Tldr

• I’m Rod
• I’m going down the Nostr rabbit hole
• I’m a startup founder, former listco CEO, NED, Bitcoin Miner, New Zealander, Dad
• I value community
• I was white-pilled by the free and interoperable internet and am ready to chip in

Nice to meet you

Today I am getting started creating a profile for my real self on Nostr. I am going to share what I learn.

Your average new Nostr user probably shouldn’t follow my lead here. The “main flow” onboarding for Nostr is becoming very smooth. Download Damus or Primal or Amethyst, then click “create account,” and be up and running in seconds.

For me though, I want to go off-road. I think Nostr is a fundamental reimagining of the internet where power resides with users rather than platforms. I want to work on it and with it. I think it has a chance to bring back the internet of my youth where people could be "internet" users rather than "corporate internet brandname" users.

So I plan to go on a tour of the weird and wonderful side quests that Nostr can offer—in order to really have some fun with it and write about it as I go.

I hope the writing will add some value.

Nostr is being driven forward by passionate and prolific devs who are creating wild new proofs of concept everywhere. These primatives are amazing, and also for a regular pleb, sometimes inaccessible and confusing.

I think I can add value by highlighting some of the “why” of fun and useful Nostr rabbit holes. If I can document what I do as a user, what I managed to make work, how I made it work, and why it was important, then I may encourage others to join and have a go.

Not a how to guide. Rather a “what I did and how and why” journal of sorts.

I can do a better intro than that

My name is Rod, and I am non-technical startup founder, former listco CEO, and company director.

Foremost in recent times, I am the founder of Jayride Group, which is a travel e-commerce marketplace that helps travelers to find and book rides around the world. I launched Jayride in January 2012 and grew it for six years to public listing on the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX:JAY) in January 2018, then ran it as a public company for six more years before stepping back from Managing Director to the role of Non-Exec Director around August 2023.

I am also a Non-Exec Director of Fishburners, Australia’s foremost technology startup founder community (and co-working space). Fishburners helps startup founders to get started. I was an early Fishburners resident, and being involved in that community was instrumental to my early startup success.

I have been flirting with Bitcoin mining since 697532 or thereabouts with 3.5Ph of hash rate, which was briefly about 1/100,000th of the network.

I’m a Nostr pleb, happily married, rational optimist, expat New Zealander living in Australia, and dad.

I will post about all of these things too.

Two key lessons led me to Nostr today

I learned the importance of community from Fishburners.

In the early days of a startup, you don’t know what you don’t know. Community helps you to learn those things simply by being amongst it. And when you find something specific which you know you need to know, community is there for you then too.

The more time I spend on Nostr, the more aware I am that this is a an awesome community of builders with the potential to add some real and lasting value to the internet and world. I want to do whatever small things I can to help and be part of that.

I learned the importance of resilience from the world's reaction to COVID.

Travel businesses and co-working businesses were smashed by lockdowns. To chart the path through it all, it became my full-time job to study the disaster of fake narratives and regulatory capture and bad policy responses, in order to try to navigate it. I learned that if you pay attention long enough then you can see behind the curtain–and it’s not a good look.

On Nostr, I find myself gradually returning to a rationally optimistic outlook. No amount of propaganda and greed and bureaucracy will ever be as fast and powerful and resilient as a free and interoperable internet.

We can build systems which leverage these strengths. If built, these systems will naturally outcompete and win on their merits, because they will be faster, freer, more powerful marketplaces for ideas and capital, more resistant to capture, and more resilient to external shocks.

Better systems means better aligned and fairer outcomes for everyone. These systems are a must-have and need to succeed. So I’m going to chip in.

I’m not sure exactly how yet!

But I’m up for it.

In summary

Hi. It’s nice to meet you all, and I hope to share something of value!

Because:

• Nostr is becoming an incredible community of builders that will make its mark on the world, and
• Nostr can become a true reimagining of the internet and contribute to a powerful, free and resilient world.

Up next

To start, I've learned a few things about setting up a new profile and I can share what I learned in future posts:

• Mining a branded vanity pubkey with Rana
• Setting up a self-custody lightning wallet to make zaps on Nostr with Phoenixd and Albyhub
• Setting up Nostr and lightning addresses at your own domain with Sveltekit and Vercel

Looking forward to it.