Sixian

On Monetizing Individuality

On the other side, the millions of smaller vendors, EGMs solve the challenge of selling into large corporations. 

One risk was over the last five years, you saw technology players, tech forward, skinny labels as they call themselves, emerge to try to disrupt the major labels, whether that was a Distrokid at the low end or an Orchard or Grooves in the mid segment or Believe Digital. They were trying to say, hey, we can use technology to do like 80%, 70%, 50% of... See more

You can tell for yourself whether a strategy you’re currently using seems to be a crutch or actually helping; often in areas when you are actually making progress you won’t be able to imagine a nonlinearly better version of yourself, only one who in fact followed the current strategy to its logical conclusion and is now about as great (at the thing... See more

A lot of the most important work that public institutions do is the most laborious, it's the most time consuming. It's the first thing that you would optimize away if you were trying to increase the profitability of your VC library, right?

Enterprise Gateway Marketplaces are going to be a big part of the ongoing marketplace revolution.  They make it manageable for small vendors to sell into S&P 500 customers that are normally out of reach and make it easier for enterprises to work with outside vendors to get the latest business products and services without having to bring them... See more

Barnes reports that Egyptian farmers in the Nile Valley maintain irrigation ditches not just to keep the water flowing, but also to “sustain communal ties with other farmers.” 20 Similar protocols prevail in Nikhil Anand’s Hydraulic City, in which the anthropologist shows how the maintenance of water infrastructures binds residents, plumbers,... See more

Thinking about the two opposed theories, it struck me that between the carrier bag story and the hero’s journey, there is a third kind of story that is superior to both: the boat story. A boat is at once a motif of containment and journeying. The mode of sustenance it enables — fishing, especially with a net, a bag full of holes — is somewhere... See more

Playbooks for creating viral products

1.  Novelty/Entertainment


2. Instrumented