sari

There are three stakeholders in a promotion-based monetization model: creators, audience members, and advertisers. Each party pays with a different currency.

Let me phrase what I’ve been saying in this essay in a slightly different way. What you want to create is a distributed apprenticeship in the art of being you. You want to assemble a set of influences you can observe and imitate, and peers and mentors that can give you feedback on how well you converge with that model of yourself.

Thankfully, the founders figured out a subtle shift in positioning around the time I joined that made a big difference. They kept all three core elements in place, but started pitching it as a newsletter platform rather than a paid publishing platform.

Dear investors, 

We reflect on 2024 with both satisfaction and impatience. We’re satisfied because the business is strong, growth is robust, and we continue to attract the world’s best writers and creators to Substack. But there is still much work to be done, new territories to push into, and some key improvements to make to the product, and we’re i... See more

And all this happened with surprisingly little at stake: in the case of open source the main incentive is just individual software engineers gaining prestige and high-paying jobs. Nadia Eghbal has written extensively about the incentive problems in the open source community holding back progress.

OpenAI is now the clear leader in LLM APIs - a position that 4 years ago Google was arguably in the default position to win. The failure of Google to capitalize on its many advantages specifically in AI has been striking. It feels like a Xerox Parc moment of inventing transformers, having all the talent, data, and distribution to build the seminal ... See more