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I’ve always been drawn to solving problems at the intersection of risk, technology, and…
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Greg Kidd shared thisPeople know Nevada excels at mining, gambling, and sex. But one of our most powerful historical innovations actually came from processing divorces. Early on, our population was declining rapidly. We risked losing our statehood status entirely because there were simply too few people living within our borders. The state needed a dramatic survival strategy to bring people back. So the state engaged in a little regulatory arbitrage to solve the population crisis. We established a remarkably short six-week residency requirement and became the first place in the United States to offer quick divorces. As a result, people relocated to Nevada in droves specifically to end their marriages. Changing the rules is a profound form of innovation. The state recognized a massive market inefficiency and adjusted its regulations to capture the demand. We capitalized on an unglamorous market to drive population growth and secure our permanent place in the union. Innovation requires finding the exact things you execute better than anyone else and leaning heavily into those specific advantages.
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Greg Kidd shared thisCalifornia lost 1.3 million residents while simultaneously pushing its GDP past Germany. The state is undeniably a high-cost environment with a messy political landscape. At the same time, the sheer density of talent combined with a fantastic quality of life forces the ecosystem to succeed in spite of itself. The underlying productivity of the workforce simply overrides the systemic dysfunction. We are watching this exact dynamic play out across the broader US economy right now. Our national landscape is currently navigating tariffs, political unrest, and widening income disparity. Those severe headwinds are accompanied by a declining population. Despite these challenges, our national GDP continues to heavily outperform expectations. This resilience comes directly from California’s approach to emerging technology. We decided to take the shackles off AI and crypto, and that decision triggered a massive boom in overall productivity. Concentrating elite talent and removing the barriers to building new technology creates a growth engine powerful enough to push right through the political friction.
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Greg Kidd posted thisGov inefficiency in CA is actually great. It creates pain for citizens, strong enough to be a catalyst to try extreme innovation. Look at Waymo. Fleets of autonomous cars roaming the streets, largely because the regional mass transit planners completely ignored the airports. During the initial development of California's rail system, the designers somehow managed to exclude the major flight hubs in Oakland, San Francisco, and San Jose from the routes. You have one of the world's most prominent metropolitan areas functioning without any logical connection between its municipal trains and its runways. That level of disjointed urban planning creates a massive void in basic mobility. When bad politics and poor infrastructure coordination leave people stranded, we get bleeding-edge innovation simply because government planners dropped the ball. People are hungry for anything else.
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Greg Kidd shared thisThe highest hidden tax businesses pay in jurisdictions like New York and California is the cost of educating generalist judges during litigation. When companies in these states face legal disputes, founders end up footing the bill for their legal teams to teach the court the basic mechanics of business law. Delaware avoids this friction entirely by maintaining a highly specialized judicial system called a Chancery Court. Their judges are dedicated business experts who focus exclusively on corporate disputes, leaving capital crimes and divorce cases to other courts. Businesses naturally gravitate to jurisdictions where the legal system already understands the nuances of corporate organization and commerce. We are pushing to bring this exact model to Nevada. Establishing a Chancery Court creates a system of dedicated business experts and allows Nevada to actively compete as the premier state to organize a company. Lowering the friction of an unspecialized legal framework directly accelerates economic growth for founders and builders.
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Greg Kidd posted thisOne of the big initiatives I'm pushing for in Nevada is the establishment of a Chancery Court. There are many reasons that so many companies choose to incorporate in Delaware. One of those reasons is its Chancery Court. Delaware built a deep body of corporate law and paired it with judges who specialize exclusively in business disputes. These judges do not handle divorce cases or criminal trials. They focus on corporate governance, fiduciary duties, shareholder disputes, and complex commercial litigation. When businesses end up in court, they want predictability, expertise, and efficiency. The Chancery Court of Delaware delivers that. So why not Nevada too? Nevada already ranks among the top states for business formation. Many consider it second only to Delaware, but we can go further. By establishing a Chancery Court, Nevada can strengthen its legal infrastructure and give companies confidence that, if disputes arise, they will be resolved by judges who understand business at a sophisticated level. Therefore, I will be sponsoring legislation, alongside Joe Dalia, candidate for Treasurer of Nevada, to bring a Chancery Court to Nevada. The goals are simple: Build a system where specialized judges handle specialized business disputes. Strengthen our body of law. Increase certainty and make Nevada even more competitive. Competition among states is great for business. If we believe in fair access to opportunity and economic growth, we should also believe in building the legal infrastructure that supports it.
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Greg Kidd shared thisWhy run for Congress in Nevada while building USBC? How do the two connect? I'm glad people have been asking me this, because it's important. The mission of USBC is simple: fair access. Fair access to banking. Fair access to payments. Fair access to financial security. It would be naïve to pretend those issues are not political. Legislators play a central role in shaping the rules that determine who gets access and who does not. So rather than standing on the outside pushing against the system, I believe in stepping into the room, meeting with policymakers, opening real dialogue, and building relationships that can drive change. Throughout this process, I have met leaders who genuinely care about expanding access. They also carry legitimate concerns around safety and risk management. Progress only happens when those perspectives meet and when thoughtful debate can turn into proactive next steps. Win or lose, those relationships endure. And that is how lasting change is built.
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Greg Kidd posted thisWhen people ask, “How do you make sense of a world this chaotic?” my answer is simple: I'm tracking prediction platforms. Prediction platforms like Polymarket and Kalshi are turning into parallel intelligence system. We get live probability curves, priced by people who are backing their beliefs with real dollars. And it's proving way more accurate than a pundit’s take or a poll with soft opinions. During the uprising in Iran, I was watching as the chances of regime change would move in real time as new information hit and risk was reassessed. Are prediction markets perfect? Of course not. That’s why you see 69%, 23%, 18%. They explicitly acknowledge uncertainty. The point is that the crowd, under real incentive pressure, often spots turning points earlier than any single expert. For policymakers, investors, and voters, this creates a new kind of early-warning radar.
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Greg Kidd posted thisOne of the biggest mistakes founders make is confusing a good business with a good venture business. They are not the same thing. If you take VC money, understand what you are signing up for. Those investors are not looking to double or triple their money. They need 10x, 100x, sometimes 1,000x. If your business is really a solid 2x or 3x outcome, you are setting up permanent misalignment and pressure. For example, I invested in a bank. I expect it to do well. But I’m not expecting a 1,000x return from a bank. I invest in things like Coinbase or Bitso very differently. Those are go big or go bust bets. The key thing is being honest about which game you are actually playing before you choose your capital.
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Greg Kidd shared thisThere are two types of FOMO. One is herd FOMO. Everyone else is piling in and you don’t want to be the last one left out. That kind of FOMO is not interesting to me. The other type of FOMO is fear of missing something foundational. Or missing the chance to understand why it did not work. That kind of FOMO I don’t mind falling victim to. One recent example of this is Hard Yaka's investment in Gonka. Gonka is a distributed network that runs on the same principle as Bitcoin. But instead of doing worthless computing, it relies on useful computing as its consensus mechanism. I don’t know if AI compute ends up centralized or decentralized. But if decentralized AI works at scale and I chose not to engage with it early, that would be a failure of judgment. And even if it fails, I want to know why. Learning is a form of ROI to me as well. ___ (Disclaimer: my investment in Gonka was from my venture fund, Hard Yaka. Not related to USBC).
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Greg Kidd liked thisGreg Kidd liked thisLet me tell you the story of the worst day of my life. November 7, 1997. I was in London, trying to secure funding to take Dispatch Management Services public on the NASDAQ. We had been building toward this for years. Then the phone rang. It was the managing director from Smith Barney. Our lead bank. He told me they were pulling out. Just like that, everything was at risk. Our funding, listing, and our future that we had spent 10 years building. I freaked out. Greg Kidd, my co-founder, freaked out. That same day, my American Express card was declined. It had gone over its limit. As if things couldn't get worse, they did. I crossed the road, looked the wrong way, and got hit by a taxi. I broke my back in three places. My pelvis too. Lying there, I thought: We lost our bank. I have no money. And now I might not walk. I was back to work a few days later, welcome to entrepreneurship! With some strong painkillers, I reviewed everything that Smith Barney had concerns about. They thought our vision was too bold. So I rewrote the story. I simplified the model. Then I went to two other banks and asked them to take over. They said yes. Because I couldn’t walk, the bankers rented a private jet for the roadshow. We flew to 20 cities where I showed up in a wheelchair with stage makeup covering the bruises. But we made it fun too. On every flight, we played Indian poker. When the bankers sat in front of a window, we could see their cards in the reflection. Easiest $5,000 I ever made. (They made more than $10 million from the IPO. Trust me, it was fair.) Then came the final meeting in New York. With three days left, we still had not secured enough investors. A lot was riding on this one As we walked in, one man was playing with a computer. Another, in a red bow tie, tossed a report on the table and said, “This study says women CEOs don’t perform well. Why should I invest in a company run by a woman?” Greg and I looked at each other and thought: What do we have to lose? We gave them everything. Why it would work. Why we were the team. What we had on the line. Greg and I had both left consulting partnerships. We had been building for a decade. I had literally broken my back for this. They pushed hard, showing us every company like ours that had failed. It was a test. They wanted to know if we could survive the hard stuff. We walked out thinking we had lost. Thirty floors down, we stood in the lobby with the bankers, wondering how we were going to find the money in three days. Then the man in the red bow tie came out of the elevator. He put his arm around me and said: “Really good job. We just put in an order for the whole company.” We went public the next day.
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Craigslist By the Numbers
www.3taps.com/advocacy
See publicationRecent history of Craigslist practices
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