worlding at institutional scale

The sweet spot for startups is seeing 24 months into the future. This is a stone’s throw into the adjacent possible. It’s far-out enough to be asymmetric, familiar enough to be pitchable, and time enough to build.

A cathedral is something we want to make perfect — intricately carve it over time. To make a cathedral, we lock ourselves away until the work is just right, then pull back the curtain to show the world what we’ve been working on. The dream of the cathedral is that after working in isolation, the world will celebrate the work and see us in whatever... See more

When you stand on the precipice of something you’ve worked hard on finally seeing the light of day, the life of the project flashes before your eyes.

In those moments the practical concerns that consumed you during the creative process fall away. Instead we retrace the emotions. The elations of discovery. The moments of doubt. The day things turned... See more

To think about beginnings, we have to go back to the moment before a World is born, to the moment of a curious creator looking at Reality — chaotic, meaningless, scary, but latent with potential — and wondering what to do with it. Philip K Dick said, “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” A World is conceived when... See more

What is a World?

We could say a World is something like a gated garden. A World has borders. A World has laws. A World has values. A World has dysfunction. A World can grow up. A World has members who live in it. A World gives its members permission to act differently than outside of it. A World incentivizes its members to keep it alive, often with... See more

A World is a reality you can believe in: one that promises to bring about habitable structure from the potential of chaos, and aim toward a future transformative enough to metabolize the pain and pleasure of its dysfunction.

Posting can be fun, entertaining, and even enlightening. But when we want to share a creative act we went deep into the void to create, we owe our work more than a post. We owe it a RELEASE.

A RELEASE is a richer and deeper expression of an idea. A release is not just the work, it’s anticipating the work. There’s an invitation to become part of it... See more

[Willed introversion] cannot be described, quite, as an answer to any specific call. Rather, it is a deliberate, terrific refusal to respond to anything but the deepest, highest, richest answer to the as yet unknown demand of some waiting void within

Linus Torvalds's style of development—release early and often, delegate everything you can, be open to the point of promiscuity—came as a surprise. No quiet, reverent cathedral-building here—rather, the Linux community seemed to resemble a great babbling bazaar of differing agendas and approaches (aptly symbolized by the Linux archive sites, who'd... See more