the things that actually changed how i work are small and unglamorous, a tmux config, a control script, the git setup my agents live in, and i open every one of them daily. build something you come back to.

In the wake of its blockbuster $2.2 billion IPO, Larry Geis’ Madison Industries is proving that even the most unglamorous companies can deliver outsized returns. (Photo: Michael Nagle via Bloomberg)

We just wrapped @consensus2026. The shift towards RWA is clearer, and institutional sentiment is at its highest in years. Some core takeaways we're taking home with us 👇 1. Tokenization is mainstream now. Institutional capital is actively bringing billions onchain, and conversations are no longer about "if" but "when and how". Our dinner with @WisdomTreePrime validated this thesis. 2. Stablecoins are the new institutional settlement layer. Hosting with @Stablecoin at Nikki Beach's Summer House yielded countless conversations that cemented the reality that stablecoins can no longer be ignored. They're the Trojan Horse for blockchain in global payments. 3. Liquidity infrastructure is catching up to the assets. RWAs are only as useful as the market structure around them. The same room, hosted alongside @Keyrock, was a working conversation on what it takes for tokenized assets to behave like crypto-native ones once they move onchain. 4. The builders worth watching are working on the unglamorous parts of onchain finance. Think: infrastructure that scales under real volume and the plumbing between capital and onchain product. That work doesn't always screenshot well, but it compounds significantly. Consensus was a whirlwind of progress. Plume is built for the version of the industry that showed up in Miami this week, and we couldn't be more bullish on the future of open finance.

In 1990, the World Wide Web was invented on Steve Jobs' computer. Steve ignored it. This is the story I tell in my new book Steve Jobs in Exile. Here is what it should tell the rest of us about the moment we are in now. Steve was running NeXT, an unsuccessful computer company. He had been pushed out of Apple five years earlier and was burning his fortune trying to build a successor to the Macintosh. The machine NeXT sold was a matte-black magnesium cube -- expensive and beautiful and not selling. In October of that year, on the other side of the Atlantic, a British physicist named Tim Berners-Lee took delivery of a NeXT Cube at CERN, the physics laboratory on the Swiss-French border. He used it to invent the World Wide Web. The web ran on the Cube for its first year of existence. The revolution was happening on Steve's hardware, and yet Steve ignored it. Here is the question I keep thinking about from my book. If Steve Jobs, the most visionary tech mind of his generation, missed the Web, the most civilization-shaping tech of his lifetime, how are the rest of us supposed to see anything coming? Berners-Lee had been asking his boss at CERN for a NeXT Cube for months. His boss finally signed off, hoping to test the exotic Cube. "He suggested that I should buy one of these NeXT machines I'd been talking about so enthusiastically," Berners-Lee later told Fresh Air. "And if we needed a sort of test project to run on the NeXT machine ... 'Why not just do this hypertext thing you're talking about?'" The "test project" evolved into the World Wide Web. The problem Berners-Lee was trying to solve was not a glamorous one. CERN employed thousands of scientists from over a hundred countries, most cycling through on short assignments and taking their knowledge with them when they left. Berners-Lee was trying to keep institutional knowledge from walking out the door. He wanted a system that worked the way human memory does, where any piece of information could connect to any other without permission or central control. Through late 1990, he coded in his gray-floored office. The Cube's object-oriented system let him build in months what would have taken a year on anything else. By December, the first website went online. The World Wide Web now existed, running on a single black NeXT Cube in CERN's Building 31. Berners-Lee scrawled a warning on it in red ink: "This machine is a server. DO NOT POWER IT DOWN!!" Underneath the elegant interface he was building HTTP, HTML, and the server software that would deliver web pages. These three inventions would form much of the invisible plumbing of our modern connectivity. When a colleague of Berners-Lee's brought a demo of the Web to NeXT's headquarters in California, he could not get anyone there to pay attention. Nobody even dared show it to Steve, afraid he would dismiss it. NeXT was busy with its own internet plans, which Steve eventually killed. So back to the question. If Steve Jobs missed the web, how are the rest of us supposed to see whatever comes next? The honest answer is that we cannot. Nobody can. The rest of us are not going to outpattern-match Steve Jobs. But here is what I learned writing Steve Jobs in Exile. Transformations almost always begin in obscurity, on the margins, solving boring problems with boring tools. The web did not look revolutionary in 1990. It looked like a tool for sharing physics papers. We are in another such moment now. AI is the obvious changemaker. But the biggest transformations are rarely the obvious ones. The next one is happening somewhere right now, and it is trickier to spot than any sweeping proclamation about AI. We will recognize it, if we recognize it at all, from the unglamorous work few people are focused on. I will not speculate on what Steve would have made of AI today. But if he could miss the Web, the rest of us are going to have to look harder. Photo of the original CERN NeXT Cube courtesy of Robert Scoble.