Sixian

Part 2: How to cultivate a point of view

But clock time was not always viewed as being this organic. The accusation that is today leveled against the internet — that it distorts natural rhythmicity and turns the human body into a machine — was once leveled against clock time itself.

A Company’s Social Contract With Its Labor Supply

To paraphrase René Girard: we set out in search of the one thing we think we truly want, which we believe must be hidden under the one rock that is too heavy for us to lift. If we get something that we wanted, we believe we must have wanted the wrong thing. We go in search of a new model.

I’d heard the trope that company culture was up to everyone to build, but here we were actually doing it. Stripe was a Big Mood and we were all all in. On all of it.

In the field of creativity, shared knowledge and wisdom have historically been hard to come by. This may be due to the house-of-cards structures upon which many creative industries are built. Or, perhaps it’s due to the fact that industries that seem to reward buttoned-up, ego-driven practices do not tend to generate great knowledge-sharing... See more

In an interview with Roxana Fabius, Patricia M. Hernandez, and me for The Scalability Project (2020), adrienne maree brown described relationships like a spiderweb—diaphanous yet strong, thick yet porous. “A web allows things to fall through, like a sieve,” she said. “Some things are not meant to be caught.” I like to think of these webs as... See more

...a lot of people make businesses to compete with tools where people are already making money. I know in marketplaces, we often see people design marketplaces to try to intermediate or digitize transactions that are already happening.  But the big mental breakthrough is to say, “Can we create something that creates new transactions that aren’t... See more