Notes on scale + quality

Artisanal software

In a speech delivered years ago, Ev Williams used agriculture as a metaphor to understand what’s possible on the Internet.

Agriculture was a tremendous invention – it got people fed and freed them to do many things. But agriculture – taken to the extreme in the pursuit of profit leads to a sick and obese population and industrial... See more

All this to say, email has soaked up many of the great things about the current web. It's pretty. It's convenient. Algorithms work over the raw feed to simplify the flow of information. Email, generally, is mobile-friendly and renders beautifully on all devices. These are the things that the current generation of web companies strive to accomplish.... See more

While email's continued evolution is significant, what it has retained from the old web sets it apart from the other pretty, convenient apps. Email is an open, interoperable protocol. Someone can use Google's service, spin up a server of her own, or send messages through Microsoft's enterprise software. And yet all of these people can communicate s... See more

As anything scales too effectively - from fashion to restaurants to music - the market opens for more non-scalable alternatives. Once Starbucks opens on every block, many of us crave the artisanal coffee shop. Once our favorite Italian restaurant becomes a chain of three, we grow tired of it. Why? First, so much of what we buy and do is tied up in ... See more

Scalability is everything with internet scale businesses. An internet scale business is one with audiences around the world and focus on reducing friction. Look at 1. Scale of users (retention), 2. Time spent per day, 3. Supply: quality of tools to onboard advertisers.

Vertical Search Aggregators

Google is a great example of how the internet enabled scale and speed: every page on the web returned in an instant. But increasingly, we’re seeing this scale is at odds with a fundamental human need: relevance. Someone who wants to find the best freelance designer, or the best sushi restaurant, or the best NFT to buy wi... See more

For most queries, Google search is pretty underwhelming these days. Google is great at answering questions with an objective answer, like “# of billionaires in the world” or “What is the population of Iceland”. It’s pretty bad at answering questions that require judgment and context like “What do NFT collectors think about NFTs?”.

The evidence is ev... See more