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“Today [the education system] retains throw-back elements from pre-industrial society. Yet the whole idea of assembling masses of students (raw material) to be processed by teachers (workers) in a centrally located school (factory) was a stroke of industrial genius.” — Alvin Toffler in the Future Shock

Pipe needs to simultaneously attract companies willing to sell their recurring revenue and investors willing to buy it.

Wikipedia had to deal with unique problems, since anybody could edit. With its popularity, spam and shameless self-promotion became a constant problem. These were challenges predecessors didn't have to face. Pasting a sales brochure into the Web pages of Britannica was impossible, yet this phenomenon was a continual battle for Wikipedia's patroller... See more

You can charge recurring revenue; after all, nobody wants to work with obsolete data. (This is harder in the early days, not because of lack of buyer appetite, but because your update cadence probably isn’t good enough.)

When you have money flowing through your conversation tools, you can begin to use it to coordinate actions, including creating financial incentives for conversation. For example, you can pool some money into a question and promise to pay it to an expert that answers it in a real time crowd fund.

It’s one thing to create engaging free content, but it’s a totally different thing to conceptualize a value proposition, create effective marketing messages that communicate that value proposition, and get those messages in front of fans at the right time, repeatedly. This, in my experience, is the main thing creator platforms are most likely to ge... See more

But for content platforms, the move to digital content hasn’t been correlated with a burgeoning long tail: the top creators are massively successful, while long-tail creators are barely getting by.