Toward a "Local" Approach to Building a Business

As anything scales too effectively – from restaurants and ad agencies to social networks and search engines – the market opens for more non-scalable alternatives. Once Starbucks opens on every block, we crave the artisanal coffee shop. There's the identity piece of it, where we want some degree of distinctiveness. But there's a practical side too: ... See more

What’s Google’s motive for providing free email? Is it that they just want people to be able to communicate easily with one another, or is it that a major advertising conglomerate with a twelve-figure annual revenue stands to benefit tremendously by consuming and using all of your inbound and outbound communication? In comparison, Fastmail is a com... See more

Famously, when Gmail came along, Google told us to stop trying to organize (and delete) our email and instead just rely on search to find what we’re looking for. Broadly I’d say that approach has worked well, and in the vast majority of cases, I err on the side of risking losing track of something later instead of spending the time to organize it n

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