The Power of Defaults

Decentralized protocols would make very interesting base layers and I’m particularly excited about web3 in the context of identity. Does crypto solve the problem of suboptimal defaults? Well, that’s a different question and I’m honestly not sure. Just because you have decentralized base layers doesn’t mean you won’t see centralization, aggregation ... See more

What’s so striking about these examples is the discrepancy between market cap and NPS score. It would be amazing if we lived in a world where companies with terrible UX did badly in the stock market, but that is clearly not the case. The fact that you can build a successful business without a truly great product is a real testament to how strong of... See more

If you have ever worked in a revenue organization, there’s a good chance that you have heard the following sentence before: “If it’s not in Salesforce, it doesn’t exist”

In contrast to Google and Apple, Facebook doesn’t own an operating system and, thus, doesn’t enjoy the defensibility of a pre-installed default. But because Facebook is the de-facto online identity layer for so many people, it is almost guaranteed to secure some of that limited pixel real estate on the user’s home screen.

Unsurprisingly, in their attempts to become defaults, other companies have tried to create their own identity base layers. One of them is Facebook.

The fascinating thing about identity is that it’s kind of a stack of its own. When you sign up to a new app or service, you almost always use an existing identity. Until recently, that identity was typically your email address or phone number. Both email and phone numbers are great base layers for online identity because they are (sort of open) sta... See more

The beautiful thing about defaults is that they beat almost any competing product – even if that competitor has strong network effects or is technically superior.

Apple realized that it owns some of the most valuable pixel real estate in tech: The home screen. And the best way to monetize that real estate is by occupying as much as possible of it yourself.

Apple is an interesting case study because its stack strategy has been so reciprocal to Google’s. It started with the base layer and then worked its way up the stack.