Lillian Sheng

Since there’s no guaranteed distribution for content through friend graphs in recommendation media, creators are incentivized to seek engagement elsewhere when they’re not getting it from the platform where they created content.

When Jesse evaluates investments for their ability to be dominant he actually inverts the question: he spends a lot of time assessing factors that could prevent a company from becoming dominant — what he calls “dominance friction.” And dominance friction comes from a pretty surprising place: any time a company’s interests are misaligned with its... See more

Lean Into Subscriptions

Advertisements shouldn’t be an afterthought. Several direct-to-consumer fashion and lifestyle brands know this already — they live and die on their social media presence. However, advertisement quality matters a lot more for industries like education, software, and media than you might think. In the words of Matthew Ball: “[I]f media matters to... See more

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

When to implement a waitlist

Being mobile-first means user is more attentive as an app is a more immersive experience than a browser.  There’s also a rough cut-off for the number of apps any sane person can have on their phone. - On average, Chinese users open 26 apps a month.- About 75% of their time is spent in the ecosystems of Tencent, Alibaba, Baidu, Bytedance and... See more

Interpretation of data In absolute terms, we seem to have generally flat or rising output in both "critically acclaimed art/entertainment" and "science and technology." (The exceptions are film and modern music; I think different people will have different interpretations of the fact that these decline just before TV and video games rise.)

My final prescription to you for a life of fuzzy thinking and infelicity is to ignore a story they told me when I was very young about a rustic who said: “I wish I knew where I was going to die, and then I’d never go there.” Most people smile (as you did) at the rustic’s ignorance and ignore his basic wisdom. If my experience is any guide, the... See more