“Mistakes aren’t a necessary evil. They aren’t evil at all. They are an inevitable consequence of doing something new.”

you can have a great blog post that no one reads (or vice-versa) In most of our traditional media ecosystem, the product is terrible, but it has great distribution

Using small amounts of money requires a small sacrifice. These exchanges of value small acts of creation, recording users’ subjective judgement in the objective world. Sacrificing value, rather than using likes or upvotes, creates a more honest signal reflecting the upvalued content’s worth.

By unbundling the newspaper, the Internet atomized news. The fundamental unit of news transitioned from an entire newspaper to a single article.

Similar to physical activity in the Strava example, learning is not something that most people enjoy doing. As TikTok founder Alex Zhu points out, education goes a little against human nature. In combination with a strong enough signaling mechanism however, you can get users to participate. It’s kind of the opposite of Chris Dixon’s famous “Come fo... See more

Since a critical mass of connections is required before users experience value, the key to building a successful network is minimizing the friction in creating connections. Contact-list integration helped social networks like Facebook and LinkedIn gain initial traction through the removal of sign-up friction.

Starbucks will be one of the first major retailers to tokenize its loyalty program.