Differentiation

The world will be a richer, more colorful place when more people are freed up to learn, create, and build novel things that only they can. This might be technology’s greatest gift to humanity. By making the competition to be better at someone else’s game practically futile, it frees us up to play different games.

Follow curiosities down deep rabbit holes and emerge with unique ideas. Partake in vivid and varied adventures to build up a set of experiences that is unique to you. Run away from the areas in which you are average and towards those where you might be special. Start a company because the world needs it, and because if you don’t start that specific... See more

The Gene: An Intimate History

As the value of things you can teach or copy trends towards zero, the value of fresh new ideas increases.

In the current state of the art, models are only as good as the data they’re trained on and the models can’t generate new training data themselves. AI-generated output is based on the data that trained the AI in the first place, so any data it creates will be a regurgitation of the data it already has. That means that humans will need to create fre... See more

AI is exceptional at average . If something can be taught, it can learn it better. If it can be copied, it can copy it faster.

“The things that are going to be valuable are the things you can’t teach or copy.”

Average at scale is no longer a profitable strategy, and differentiation within a smaller niche becomes necessary. Things like Replit, Urbit, APIs, and generative AI are only going to accelerate the ease with which people can build something , and exacerbate the challenges for startups building undifferentiated products.

The ultimate goal of writing online is to build a Personal Monopoly. It’s your unique intersection of skills, interests, and personality traits where you can be known as the best thinker on a topic and open yourself up to the serendipity that makes writing online so special.

The Internet uniquely rewards people with Personal Monopolies because it

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