Agalia Tan

our now-adult schedules get in the way of that level of spontaneity and togetherness. After entering the workforce, it can feel like everyone you care about is living their lives alongside their co-workers and partners, and then working hard to find a time to simply keep you in the loop. This trap is what people are calling “catch-up culture”.

When you’re genuinely curious about the world, when you let that curiosity guide your reading, your thinking, and your creating, you become a magnet for ideas, conversations, and opportunities. When you’re interested, you’re never boring. And when you’re interesting, the world can’t help but pay attention.

there’s a certain intractable uneasiness we all feel about being alive, and that flits between feelings of loneliness and feelings over being totally overwhelmed and feeling nothing and feeling scared and none of those things present in the same way each individual time we feel them, and the great trick friend.com and its ilk is attempting to do... See more

The number of people who are willing to start something is MUCH smaller than the number of people willing to contribute once someone else starts something.

Some areas of life reward your best day. Others punish your worst day. Know which situation you're in, and you can better decide when to be risky and when to play it safe."

. If we can do that - if we can actually create the space, take the time, and exercise the discipline to properly step into an idea - I’d contend that the chances of us actually being able to then contribute to the development and improvement of it will be vastly improved.

TL;DR: Just sit with it for a while.

It’s not either/or. It’s:

Closed models → fast experimentation

Proprietary models → scalable differentiation

Because while plug-and-play power is seductive, strategic sovereignty is priceless.

Don’t run headfirst into an enterprise solution and shackle your company’s goldmine—your data, your insights, your competitive advantage—to a big provider who... See more

The more people who buy a product, the further the product’s message spreads, the more money the company makes, the more they can invest in their projects. It's a virtuous cycle of creation and consumption. By making scale—the number of people who use or see the creation—an explicit part of the art’s statement, they naturally marry the business’s... See more