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In 1997, David Bowie wanted a liquidity event. Instead of steadily receiving royalties from his 25-album music catalog throughout the next decade, Bowie decided he’d rather receive a lump-sum payment. This led to Bowie Bonds: a set of bonds backed by the royalties from Bowie’s music catalog. Notably, Bowie wasn’t selling his music indefinitely. The... See more

Premium mediocrity, by his definition, is a fancy tile backsplash in an apartment’s tiny, nearly nonfunctional kitchen, or french fries doused in truffle oil, which contains no actual truffles. It’s Uber Pool, which makes the luxury of being chauffeured around town financially accessible, yet requires that you brush thighs with strangers sharing th... See more

Perhaps the demise of traditional retail and media can be explained by the Internet offering better alternatives for curating your own community of like-minded people/products and removing most of the friction around connecting.

When considering the question of what is better, algorithms or curation, I think this observation that the core Facebook and Google algorithms are actually solving two very different problems is a useful one. Google is seeking the single best answer to a direct query from an effectively infinite number of data points (i.e. the Internet); while the ... See more

-Grow the Substack economy to help writers connect with the services they need to do their best work and build thriving publications, such as editing, design, insurance, and financing.

We will all start to opt-in for ads [read: personalized experiences]: If you subscribe to my view that technology at its best takes us back to the way things once were — but with less friction and at a far greater scale, then perhaps you’re agree: We want local restaurants to know our names and preferences. We want experiences catered to our tastes... See more