Jonathan

Many are lean startups with traction before product. Their advantage is proximity. They learn by talking to their audience, experimenting, and watching what resonates. So many startups fail because they make something nobody wants. When “audience-founders” decide to build, there’s already someone waiting for and interested in what they make.

They need help managing their private-domain communities and connecting their ideas across a network of partners and other founders. They need capital that rewards credibility, not follower count. They need tools that automate the repetitive parts of their work, and peers who can share what they’re learning in real time. They need advisors who... See more

We know ideas can scale through methodology, trust, and participation. We’re seeing echoes of that now, and with a lot more opportunity: technology makes it possible for anyone to build communities and systems around what they know. For the past twenty years, we’ve lived in an age of personality and celebrity on social media. But that’s starting to... See more

This new model takes what we have learned from the Aggregation Era and finds a way to blend it with the independence enjoyed by the “sovereign writer”—or, to be appropriately expansive, let’s call it “sovereign creator.” It is, I believe, the natural model of the internet, taking advantage of the web’s massive scale and interconnectivity and... See more

Most people get automation backwards. They see it as a way to do more things, faster. But that misses the deeper insight that automation is a tool for understanding.

When you automate something you're forced to understand it completely. You can't hand-wave away the edge cases or rely on human judgement to fill the gaps. The act of automation reveals... See more