Building bicycles for our minds

The next wave of innovation is going to decentralize the network; however, that change doesn’t address many of the societal issues above. What we need is a vision, a compass for the future we want for the new software we want to build.

In 1980, Steve Jobs was discussing computing and used a simple yet powerful metaphor for how computers can be bicycles for the mind. Technology amplifies our capabilities — and computing can now do the same thing for our minds. Here are two versions of the same talk by Jobs — one in 1980 and another ten years later, both around a min

This is how technology should work: starting with a human need, and a purpose, technology should extend outwards with the intent of expanding the human, not confining or reducing.

Bill taught me a lot about design. He believed that design isn’t just about the surface of a building or the pixels or an interface — rather it’s about the end-to-end experience of a building or a product, and its about its purpose. Design is the first signal of intent that a founder brings to an idea. Intent is important to consider as a bui

We tell entrepreneurs to find a need, test, and trial until they find a solution to that need, move fast, and break things. Yes, betas work; our method is a process of induction, right out of the playbook of the scientific method. Yet we need to insert a framework of intentionality into that process so that at the end of our experiments, we have a

Coupled with this stemming of developer space for innovation, the place for startups to “ship” things and users to find new things — the app store — has atrophied. Maybe we have reached a natural apex for innovation on the UX of this device, or maybe discovery was badly implemented. Regardless, as the chart below illustrates, getting

The social platforms of web 2.0 are broken. On the path to mass scale and attention-based monetization, they compromised much of their usefulness to users. I think back to the early days of the social web and how much interesting stuff I would find each day and how connected it made me feel. Today fake accounts and fake posts d

Outside of the open web, email, and text, there isn’t a scaled D2C channel that is not controlled by a major platform. So the primary way that startups have to reach customers today is via paid acquisition. That’s why the question an investor asks today to a startup that is scaling is: where are you buying audience and what are your customer acqui

Today’s platforms have prioritized their ability to behaviourally target and gamify the experience to keep users hooked, over enhancing peer-to-peer connections. The consequence is that today I wake up many a day and ask myself why am I bothering to use this?