Sixian

These network effect winners, these new big firms, have power in a way we haven’t seen before, because their power also comes from us using them, not just from something that they do. 

"For me, that’s pretty much it: waking up and being excited and curiously restless to face the day ahead, and being very present with that day, and then going to bed feeling like it actually happened, that the day was lived. There’s nothing more than that, really."

One of the recurring similarities from anecdotes of burnout is a sense of temporal inertia – a kind of suspension of that time passes both achingly slow (similar to the temporal experience of the depressive where “a day feels like a year”) and freakily fast (the month/s of prescribed “sick leave” from work flies by). This is a sort of hauntology... See more

The thinking behind building network effects is less about emotion and more about the math for customers around getting value — utility. Giving the customer more value out of your product by getting your other customers to put value in it. Customers are not even usually aware that they are doing mental math around the value they are getting from... See more

The problem with a carefully crafted positioning is that it typically makes the wrong part efficient - it makes it easier for clients to hire you for well defined work. It allows greater legibility, trust and expertise around work which is well defined.

The problem is that good specialization is exceptionally hard. And mediocre specialization has two core problems:

1. It attracts less senior, more tightly defined work that traps you in a mode of repeatable execution work


2. It puts you in a well defined box that grinds against your identity

So, the model of the major labels certainly has changed, but by the way, after 15 years of decline and pressure, we are now in a world where the major labels continue to be the dominant players in the market and so, a good question is why is that? What is their value today to the consumer and to the artist? Democratization of music has done some... See more

(S)pecialization doesn’t lend itself well to novelty and surprise.