Agalia Tan

Develop a keen sense of what you love . Be devoted to the art of finding great and small loves, of nurturing old loves, and kindling new ones.

Search engines — the window into the web for many people — top their results with pages containing thousands of words of auto-generated nothingness, perfectly optimized for search engine prominence and to pull in money via ads and affiliate links while simultaneously devoid of any useful information.

Social networks have become “the web” for many... See more

The data uncanny valley: how overoptimisation leads us to the loss of more human, more beautiful emotional things.

This is the ultimate trapdoor in the hall of fame; to become a prisoner of one's own persona. The desire for recognition in an increasingly atomized world lures us to be who strangers wish us to be. And with personal development so arduous and lonely, there is ease and comfort in crowdsourcing your identity. But amid such temptations, it's worth... See more

We see a younger generation eschewing traditional careers in lieu of more unpredictable work with higher potential upside. The risk-return calculus has shifted. A number of startups underpin these new forms of work. The first iteration, of course, was the creator economy: remember the stats around 60%+ kids wanting to be influencers? We saw... See more

"Questions are answered as you move , not before you move. Moving forward with an answer that is partially correct will usually fill in the gaps faster than waiting until you come up with a plan that is perfectly correct."

Find a way to slow down absorption and increase the savoring. In our increasingly digitized and seamless world, this is hard. But less is more. Make mysteries to be solved. Scatter breadcrumbs. Keep secrets. The “fidelity” of information needs to be so low that people spend more time making sense of things by filling in the gaps on their own, or by... See more

Absolutely. The social network is the first product, not the vision. What we’re really building is a new information primitive. We call it a “memory”: a piece of content that is geotemporally grounded, unfiltered and carries its own economic value. It’s a building block, not a post built for engagement.

The blockchain is there because we know what... See more

Digital gardens have largely been understood as websites that allow users to explore and publish thoughts in more fluid and unpolished ways. The term “digital garden” is not new. It’s been shaped by almost two decades of pondering, from early tinkerings in Mark Bernstein’s 1998 essay “Hypertext Gardens” to Mike Caulfield’s 2015 talk “The Garden and... See more