Alden Huschle

“Craft is fractal. It begins as a flat, broad idea—a rough sketch, raw and unformed. But as you dive deeper, you sculpt and fine-tune, peeling back layers to reveal hidden worlds in the crevices. A piece starts ‘ugly,’ then transforms through selective beautification.” —Dev Valladares on the fractal

When we focus excessively on scaling, on profit margins, on hiring, we miss the point of founding—and life, really. Which is to find meaning in our daily tasks.

Yet fiction sales are surging, up 31 percent in India, 21 percent in Mexico, and 16 percent in Brazil. What's with the disparity? I think it’s because great fiction refuses to be compressed. You can’t neatly summarize Dostoevsky ’s suffering or package up Cormac McCarthy ’s moral ambiguity into bullet points. Fiction is valuable precisely because i... See more

One very common pitfall for naive implementations of discovery, ranking or status is to inadvertently stop newcomers from “breaking in”.Any social experience will typically have attention or display mechanisms that need to take relative status into account. A naive implementation of a “suggestions” feed or a “top users” might be to rank content bas... See more

We need to use these new tools in a truly creative way. And that’s why the really powerful inputs will continue to be human – empathy, observation, humour and cultural understanding. These are things that help us break through the creative ceiling.

But also, social media has gone from connecting friends to stealing people’s time. Between all the ads, it’s hard to know what’s actually a good productin online shopping.

Here's the counterintuitive truth: users tend to embrace features they discover on their own.

When Airtable forced a "New Automation" pop-up, adoption crawled to 9%. When repositioned as a subtle "+" menu for natural discovery, adoption jumped to 41%.

Why? Self-discovered features trigger dopamine releases that create ownership. I experienced this wh... See more

What is really interesting is considering the second-order effects of the ability to create software 10 times faster than just a few years ago.

Discovery is a fascinating topic that is extremely difficult to nail in any industry. Countless failed start-ups attempted to enable Discovery in the Travel industry. Shopify has tried 4 times to step in the Discovery business with no success. Discovery in Communities and the Passion Economy makes no exception.