“Advertising is a tax on the poor” — Scott Galloway

Companies selling cars, cereal, and printers benefit when prices decrease for gasoline, milk, and ink, because the total price of a product includes the product plus anything else you need to maximize its potential--the complement.

It's easy to say that any application can be done more efficiently with a centralized service, but in practice social coordination problems are very real, and unwillingness to sign onto a system that has even a perception of non-neutrality or ongoing dependence on a third party is real too. And so the centralized and even consortium-based approache... See more

2.4bn people, representing 32% of the world’s population and holding $44bn+ in buying power.

Technology treats the process of consuming and the process of creating as distinctly different, when the reality is that for our brains, the process of absorbing a book is not all too different from the process of producing one. We are always seeking new connections, combining and recombining old ideas to produce new ones. So why is it that we cons... See more

As we emerge from the crisis, we will see the drastic and rapid reduction of friction, stigma, and cost of mental health care services.

While some of Pinduoduo’s incredible growth could be attributed to WeChat, one of the biggest shifts in Chinese consumer behavior has been from the “search, pay, and leave” model of traditional ecommerce to social commerce. That wasn’t just WeChat. Much of PDD’s recent success has been due to its game-like mechanics.

Both of these abstractions will create more mechanisms for digital 3rd places.