First I’d argue that the digital world and the physical world are already deeply interconnected and getting more so everyday. The internet is a global brain that increasingly orchestrates the global body. One of the myths around Jetsons-like robots is that automation happens visibly, with a 1:1 correspondence between the thing replaced and the... See more

First, I believe VR will be a major computing platform, as or more significant than the phone and PC were. Facebook should sell about 10 million Oculus Quests this year. The headset will continue to get smaller, lighter, higher res, more powerful, and with many more and better apps. This will drive exponential growth the same way it did with PCs... See more

Let’s talk about advertising. First, it’s helpful to distinguish two types of advertising: direct response and brand advertising. Direct response is advertising where the user has already indicated some purchasing intent that the ad simply tries to satisfy. You have a lawnmower shop in Newark and are looking for new customers; a person in Newark... See more

The other major kind of advertising is brand advertising. The biggest brand advertisers sell the most generic products like cleaning supplies and processed food. They take commodity products and try to create brand loyalty through emotion-driven advertising. Hence the importance of running repetitive TV and internet ads.

The other big factor for me is, when I start to get interested in a topic, I try to go talk to the smartest enthusiasts and smartest critics. Sometimes as you do this you discover the critics are really well informed and have strong arguments. Other times you discover the opposite. I specifically decided to devote my career to crypto/web3 a few... See more

I don’t think anyone really likes these ads. The pro argument is that they subsidize free products. But where is this money coming from? Internet advertisers closely track the return on their ad spend. In aggregate, in the steady state, when an advertiser spends $1, they are getting back more than $1 from the targeted users. So the money is... See more

A few numbers. Online advertising averages 1% of US GDP — roughly $200B out of a $20T economy— important, but not critical. For context the US video game business is about $65B, with about $20B coming from virtual goods. I think with new web3 business models we could easily 10x the virtual goods economy. So I don’t see why replacing advertising... See more

Then there is the ugly side. People tend to be more civil the more intimate the media: video and audio over text, synchronous over asynchronous. They also tend to be more civil in smaller communities with shared interests and values. Twitter takes the least intimate medium — asynchronous short-form text — and smashes together thousands of unrelated... See more

he digital world gets subordinating prefixes like the “e” in email and ecommerce, the physical world is called the “real world,” and so on. You see this in how digital innovations like social media were dismissed as toys for so many years. It’s pretty obvious today that social media is driving global politics, business, and culture — but people... See more