sari

By adding new verticals instead of making the Founders Fellowship really, really big, On Deck has built a group of small, intimate communities that roll up into one large, On Deck community.

While Peloton had no problem growing its community with best-in-class engagement and advocacy, it did experience pain points in managing its community. This came down to a lack of community-specific tools and limitations of existing platforms like Facebook. It was time-consuming and manual to draw important insights, and challenging to manage... See more

Corporate executives often say “employees are our greatest asset” or “we’re investing in talent.” This has always been true figuratively: people are important, and training them is worthwhile. But as talent becomes more important, people will literally become assets that organizations can invest in. In the process, these organizations will adopt... See more

If you think about it, it’s kind of amazing that the largest operating system humanity has ever seen only exists to protect an advertising business two layers further up the stack.

One of the promises of the internet is that anyone should be able to monetize their skills and time. As consumers, we should be supporting these independent business owners. Platforms that are built around empowering their supply base to compete with incumbents will flourish in the next wave of internet companies.

And we need business models that incorporate creators and curators in the platform’s governance, allowing constructive behavior to flourish organically while encouraging audiences to discover and engage with art rather than being surveilled and force-fed content.

...the ever-increasing feature set of the Wki markup language has become more arcane and more user-unfriendly. Even a new user who braves the community policies is likely to be scared off by the increasing complexity of the markup language.

This locks toy companies into a challenging bet. Every year, they have to a) predict trends, b) invent them, and c) commit capital to them. All without knowing how the rest of the year will turn out. Since toy trends exist, but don’t last for very long, they have to invent new products every year—but the technological state of the art doesn’t... See more