the goal is resonance, not scale

For an idea to resonate, it needs to do the following:

Something in my subjective experience or previous insight connects to the idea in front of me and gives it potency. The connection between two ideas always carries the possibility of a third, new idea.

It moves me through language. I might find the phrasing particularly harmonious, the choice of ... See more

Anti-network effects sometimes incorporate network effects of their own, but are generally more deliberate, intelligent, and actively governed. They are designed with scarcity in mind and are not so easy to starve out. They have long horizons and think many steps ahead in time, and can be spatially intelligent across entire topologies.

27/ They need... See more

The math is simple: more people are consuming more of everything than ever before, but there are very few hits of real scale. That means that many of us spend our time in niches, not in the center.

When you try to make something that solves everything, you obsess over questions of power: how to make something that is omnipotent and everlasting. But when you make something that does one thing well, the questions are much more personal: does it solve my problem? and for how long? and who for? and where will it push the space around it? I want t... See more

Fast forward to today and tools are incentivized to expand their market by attempting to solve everything at once. But this means that the market for any given piece of software is often anyone and everyone.

As anything scales too effectively - from fashion to restaurants to music - the market opens for more non-scalable alternatives. Once Starbucks opens on every block, many of us crave the artisanal coffee shop. Once our favorite Italian restaurant becomes a chain of three, we grow tired of it. Why? First, so much of what we buy and do is tied up in ... See more

This begs the question: What might it mean to reimagine the form of these datasets in a world unconstrained by pressures like speed, scale, and universality? By looking to artists like Anna Ridler andothers for their rejection of “off-the-shelf” datasets, we can imagine what it would be like to curate datasets with much deeper intention and context... See more

So, the question that keeps me up at night is, what are us humans gonna do with all of our newfound time? Which brings me back to Japan, and this quaint Kyoto restaurant I found myself sitting in one evening. There were 10 seats, one chef/owner and one apprentice, and the most incredibly crafted experience. It wasn’t expensive, but everything was i

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One option a company with a useful network has (whether it’s an email platform or a social network) is to curate what they feature. They’ve built an asset and that asset goes up in value when it attracts thoughtful users.

The other option is to believe that ‘open’ is the answer, the more open the better. As we learned when we launched Squidoo a deca

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