why curation...

I’ve been thinking about the enduring, perhaps increasing currency of personal recommendations (practically artisanal craft now if you think about it!) as well as the value of connoisseurship and curation in a culture where unthinking automation has left us feeling drowned in a deluge of content.

I suspect that’s the core appeal of all the... See more

Second, I’m reflecting on a point former Netscape CEO Jim Barksdale famously made in 1995: “There are only two ways to make money in business: bundling and unbundling.” I think we’re burnt out by the fragmentation that the D2C era brought to everything. After subscribing to tons of hyper-niche content over the years, the idea of a couple brands we... See more

You can use algorithms to surface new things. But algorithms are not nearly as good as human curators yet. Whatever pattern matching is going on inside the mind of Werner Herzog when he recommends books and films is yet superior to YouTube’s recommendation engine. Going from Herzog to Kapuściński and from Kapuściński to Mandelstam and Mandelstam to... See more