Timour Kosters
@timourkosters
Investor & builder working in blockchain and ml. Tweeting: @timourxyz
linktr.eeTimour Kosters
Companies with poor unit economics found themselves propelled by aggressive venture dollars (which themselves were propelled by a low-interest-rate environment). Those companies then turned those dollars into aggressive customer acquisition. Until recently, the market rewarded growth at all costs.
Digital Native • Revisiting Lifetime Value and Customer Acquisition
I think of product-market fit as the transition moment you feel as a founder when you go from "pushing" your product on people to them "pulling" it out of your hands. But the path to get there is deeply personal. One founder’s journey to product-market fit may look totally different from another’s, and yet both paths could be completely valid —
... See moreFirst Round Capital • Airtable's Path to Product-Market Fit
‘You don’t ever have to say anything,’ he says. ‘Always remember that as a thing you need never do. Many’s the man lost much just because he missed a perfect opportunity to say nothing.’
Claire Keegan • Foster
One major reason for this is the quality of SHEIN's recommendations. Just as Bytedance anticipates the content you’ll want to watch, SHEIN anticipates the clothes you’ll want to buy. SHEIN is to commerce what Bytedance is to content.
Rex Woodbury • The TikTokization of Everything
Although my work as a nonduality teacher is aligned with the shentong view, I do not speak of fundamental consciousness as a metaphysical reality. I cannot claim to know what it is. Buddhists often speak of it as the nature of the mind, while many Hindu philosophers have asserted that it is the nature of the universe. Still others claim that we
... See morePh.D Judith Blackstone • The Fullness of the Ground: A Guide to Embodied Awakening
Meditation and Buddhism
The last decade showed that questionable business models can subsist for a long time (and even flourish) when capital is abundant. Thirteen years after its founding, Uber is still figuring out how to be profitable: the company’s gross margins actually declined seven percentage points over the past three years, and the net profit margin is -3%.
Digital Native • Revisiting Lifetime Value and Customer Acquisition
meta-crisis and New Ideas for the Future
There is a peculiar attitude, here at the beginning of the 21st century. On the one hand, we agree things aren’t fine. On the other hand, there’s a widespread feeling that there’s nothing to be done.
The first thing to recognize is that this isn’t always how the present feels: often in the past, people had a sense that there was something—something huge — to be done. Essays like the Communist Manifesto give people this sense. Before that, at the dawn of modern democracy, documents like Common Sense (in the US) and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (in France) gave people the same sense. There was something to be done.
Human nature, far from being fixed, is read differently from age to age. These different readings give rise to totally new ideas for institutions. And these new readings and new institutions seem to reshape us. Often, what works out in practice would have seemed impossible on the previous views. Furthermore, the traits we are supposedly balancing — autonomy, collective responsibility, equality, etc — are themselves changing. They, also, are expressions of one view of human nature or another.
Indeed, each of our present-day institutions can be traced to a vision of human nature which swept through society. Each new vision led designers to focus on different features of a desirable society, and to recognize different approaches as viable. This made new institutions attractive.
To bring about grand futures, we humans have to figure out how to reconcile our current needs with our lofty ambitions. Tight-knit support communities - what we call tribes in this post - seem to be a good way to preserve our well-being and values while achieving more impact. Yet, building effective tribes seems like a relatively neglected puzzle... See more