Alex Wittenberg

The trajectory of very recent history often tells a distorted story. Making this even harder, in the short-term, assuming an accelerating growth rate might make you look silly or lose money. The progression isn’t smooth. A period of rapid growth might give way to a period of slower growth. Progress happens in S-Curves -- similar to the Gartner Hype... See more

The only real question about all this finitude is whether we’re willing to confront it or not. And this, for Heidegger, is the central challenge of human existence: since finitude defines our lives, he argues that living a truly authentic life—becoming fully human—means facing up to that fact. We must live out our lives, to whatever extent we can,... See more

Headlines that try to be clever almost always end up falling short. The point doesn't get through to the reader. The joke or pun falls flat. And as a result, readers end up confused—and if the reader is confused, their default answer is, "No," as they scroll past your content and move on to someone else's.Instead, it's far more effective to... See more

Incrementalism is squandering Silicon Valley’s potential. Many of the nation’s most talented people are iterating on a tiny product surface area. First principles thinking is being replaced by shortcuts like NPS optimization and bookings-to-burn ratios. 

So how do you prepare?

The fundamental tension of narrative control in the networked era is that most companies impose a hierarchical brand management model onto what has effectively become a distributed, permissionless process. And when the emergent meme-space of networked media meets censorship-resistant infrastructures, brands take on a life of their own. 

Unlike older millennials and GenXers like me, they joined the workforce late enough that their thinking was not too influenced (contaminated?) by the baggage of traditional industrial organizations. Unlike Zoomers, they already have experience of workplaces — but crucially workplaces that have already been transformed by the internet in a way that... See more

By changing your avatar to an NFT that you own, you are conveying your enthusiasm for that project, and in turn, the creativity, community, technology, and values that underpin it. A simple PFP change means a lot in the crypto space. 

But the crucial point isn’t that it’s wrong to choose to spend your time relaxing, whether at the beach or on BuzzFeed. It’s that the distracted person isn’t really choosing at all. Their attention has been commandeered by forces that don’t have their highest interests at heart.