Climbing the Wrong Mountain: When Founders Build Around Familiar Problems (opens in new tab)

The first check I ever wrote into Edward Woodford of ZeroHash went into a company that doesn't exist anymore. He was building an exchange for alternative commodities, futures on markets where some weird regulatory friction had scared everyone else off. My favorite artifact of that world is that it's still illegal to trade onion futures in this country. In the 1950s a couple of guys cornered the onion market, the onion lobby (there was an onion lobby) got Congress to ban the contract, and the ...