Lillian Sheng

Alex Zhang: We started thinking about the channels within the Discord as like distinct neighborhoods — like how in New York City, people in the Upper East Side and Bushwick are both New Yorkers, and there are different value sets and price points and cultural norms in each of those neighborhoods. Just like the trading crypto channel can be... See more

The thing that I find most beautiful about technology generally is the possibility that we could use it to come up with a different way of seeing people, and a way to be more compassionate to one another, and we can use it to simulate what that might look like.

Borrowing social capital is easier than creating it. MasterClass took people who were already famous and gave their fans even more access to them (without much burden on the celebrities). It’s tricky to create a world-class talent. The MasterClass model skipped the line of building a large audience and lots of credibility and instead, they... See more

We call this a double bind. It’s often caused by a misalignment — where what’s good for a critical value chain participant, like a distribution channel, isn’t good for customers. 

When you make any piece of work that matters, the vast majority of people aren't going to like it. And there are several ways to get through that. One way to get through that is to sand off the edges and make it so that no one hates it. That's a bad idea. The other way to get through it is to deliberately insulate yourself from the people who don't... See more

The Paradox in Newsletters Here’s another more recent example. You’ve likely heard of the amazing newsletter product, Substack. It’s a platform that enables creators to build, host, and scale their own newsletter businesses. The smart thing about Substack is that it uses an open standard — in this case, SMTP, the standard that powers email — to... See more

In recommendation media, content is not distributed to networks of connected people as the primary means of distribution. Instead, the main mechanism for the distribution of content is through opaque, platform-defined algorithms that favor maximum attention and engagement from consumers.

The internet has enabled a truly distributed and multidirectional network, in which any node can be a content creator, broadcaster, and consumer. Any two nodes can have a 1:1 relationship; as a whole, the model can be described as many-to-many (M2M). However, despite the possibility of 1:1 relationships between producer-broadcasters and their... See more

Deliver backwards compatibility