The brute reality is that most kids slot themselves into academic ability bands early in life and stay there throughout schooling. We have a certain natural level of performance, gravitate towards it early on, and are likely to remain in that band relative to peers until our education ends.
When platforms make their livings by harvesting and selling our attention, they achieve that by shoving unsolicited junk into our minds, while we obediently scroll down and down and down.
One is this idea that Quibi thought it was designing something for commuters, but went ahead with its launch plans even as everyone stopped commuting. That deserves a sympathetic sigh, but that’s reality now. The only path forward is to iterate toward what will work, which is more of a content and distribution problem than a messaging problem.
The first is a stockholding trust, inspired by more traditional employee stock-ownership plans in the U.S. The goal of the trust would be to acquire 100% ownership in the company over a period of time by buying out pre-existing outside investors.
DAOs present an alternative organizational structure that tries to align incentives for the long-term among a variety of stakeholders. The relationship changes from creator and consumer to everyone as co-creators. Creative organizations begin to look more like flat peer-to-peer networks as opposed to hierarchies.
But this isn’t really a story about the consequences of raising too much venture capital, or even about branding. It’s mostly a story about a not-great business that never figured itself out — where customers spent too little and didn’t come back enough.
Why is competition lacking in this market? The accreditation system. It’s basically a government sponsored cartel, where the incumbent businesses get to decide who's going to compete, and how they're going to compete. This is why the last entrant into the top 10 was over 100 years ago (Stanford).