Curation is so deeply under-explored on the Internet in my opinion. It sits right in between consumption and creation and is the perfect bridge between the two, allowing us to actively engage with what we consume to then produce work from this saved knowledge.

The most important role in a social network is the vibe designer, because the big questions are sociological, not technological.

Problem solving is about taking an action to make something go away. Creating is about taking an action to bring something to life. Both can achieve success, but if you look around, some of the most interesting consumer products of our era weren’t solving clearly defined problems, they were bringing creative visions to the world.

The people I find most interesting on social media are using it as a sort of diary/note to self, not broadcasting to an audience.

seeming has become more important than doing.

I would go as far as to say our greatness depends on the intensity of our focus. The thing is - long stretches of focused thought don’t yield overnight results. It takes years to make things that seemingly manifest in days.

Words and language play an incredibly important role in our culture. Some examples I like:

1. Remote servers vs. The cloud. Remote servers are a bunch of physical servers stored in a data center somewhere in the world. “The cloud” sounds like a magic place with unlimited storage.

2. The entire technology industry uses the word “user” to describe it... See more

Most of the social internet has become about building an audience and connecting people to brands and influencers. It’s better understood as a performance by the top 1%, not as a way to exchange knowledge or connect people to one another.

The classic “ideas are worthless, execution is everything” adage is flawed.

Six+ months into an intense software build, I can attest that the little execution details make all the difference. But the constraint on executing well is not operational. It’s more often about having good ideas about how to resolve challenges.

In other words, good execution... See more