Ellen Donnelly

Vibe coding hints at a future where software emerges from the inside out—from the people closest to the problems. As AI lowers the technical barrier, we may see more tools built by marketers, editors, researchers—anyone with deep context and a persistent itch to fix things.

Lots of consumer platforms — everything from Instagram to Youtube to Twitch — didn’t start out as ways for people to make money. They were initially about fun, status, connection and/or fame. They initially started as social networks, but as each grew their users realized they could build income off of them, which changed the trajectory of the comp... See more

It started with the “Information Economy” in the 90’s. Since then, every couple of years there is a refresh. Just in the last 10 years we’ve seen The Attention Economy, The Sharing Economy, The On-Demand Economy, The Crypto Economy, The Creator Economy, and The Ownership Economy all become real categories.

Right now people are pushing hard on The Co... See more

This is a great example of how having an advanced degree — in this case, a law degree — can give creators a competitive edge in an extremely crowded market. It's not a coincidence that some of the biggest channels are run by former prosecutors and defense lawyers.

We're seeing this same phenomenon play out all across the Creator Economy. Some of the... See more

I believe that the time for being identified by—and tied to—corporate jobs is passing, and it’s time to transition to what comes next

With billions of people using the major social platforms, and the people who remember a pre-social-media web increasing in age while decreasing as cultural force on the internet, we’re rapidly losing fluency in what the internet could look like. We’ve almost forgotten that links are powerful, and that restraining links through artificial scarcity i... See more

Strangely enough, if you want to make something that will appeal to future generations, one way to do it is to try to appeal to past generations.

People would pay thousands of dollars to be a fly on the wall in some of Amy Buechler’s conversations. As a licensed psychotherapist and the first (and only) in-house founder coach at famed startup accelerator Y Combinator (YC), Buechler has mentored countless of its batches, the cohorts of startup founders who made it past YC’s razor-thin

1.5–2 pe... See more