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Why Figma Wins

Artificial invitation mechanisms (i.e refer a friend) are not PLG. Sustainable growth from the product comes from built in in natural product-led acqu

The second built in PLA channel Cash App is using is billboarding—when a user’s use of your product is visible to others around them. For example:When

..it is possible that every bit of complex technology will in its turn reveal to us something about ourselves we did not know. Part of inventing and t

Now on to the good news. Your no thanks doesn’t need to be an absolute, total, eternal no. We can use typewriters to write letters and write a poem on

The Technology That Actually Runs Our World

Deep Learning Is Hitting a Wall

AI-first companies are going to change the world. I’m going into learning mode on the space. I will share what I learn in real time on this thread:

You’ve been duped into thinking you can create a life without danger, one liberated from constraints and uncomfortable emotions, and that such a life

1/ Boundaries are not saying no. Or making sure something doesn't happen. Or distancing. Or even letting yourself have wants in the face of others'.

the depth of a conversation depends on how deeply seen you feel, not on the topic of conversation

That is, be systematically ascetic or heroic in little unnecessary points, do every day or two something for no other reason than that you would rathe

Traumatisation is most usually presented as anunassailable, concrete fact, and this is where I need to be respectful. If someone brings a firmconvicti

when the trauma label has been appliedby outside mores – when an event like an explosion, an assault or a sexual event has taken place andour culture

Game of Trees

If you want to untangle something, like string or a cord, focus on adding as much “looseness” as you can rather than trying to untangle it. -Kevin Kel

The job of a code reviewer isn't to review code. It's to figure out how to obsolete their code review comment, that whole class of comment, in all fut

Fantastic advice, for software builders: Headline driven development Here is a simple process for shipping software projects that works. First, deco

222. Automating Processes With Software Is HARD

The destiny of our species is shaped by the imperatives of survival on six distinct time scales. To survive means to compete successfully on all six

We need the right kind of climate optimism

We Need the Right Kind of Climate Optimism

Gen Z and the End of Predictable Progress - by kyla scanlon

What we’re seeing isn’t just a media trend. It’s a shift in the architecture of power. Attention → Speculation → Allocation. This is the new supply ch

Many people were outraged by what they regarded as his non-parliamentary use of medieval laws to raise money. The most notorious was ship money. This

" We teachers - perhaps all human beings - are in the grip of an astonishing delusion. We think that we can take a picture, a structure, a working mod

thinking about when my dad was teaching me to drive and had me do my route to school (12 miles away) three times: once at the speed limit, once at the

Strategies for Learning

A great story about simplicity from Akio Morita, the instigator of the Walkman project at Sony: Engineers had the technology to add the recording func

Long-tail users of user-centered design are not given the degree of control necessary to adapt the design object or tool to their unique needs, and de

The engineer who truly understands the problem often finds that the elegant solution is simpler than anyone expected. The engineer who starts with a

A Vision of Metascience

most of success comes from doing the mundane and often distasteful stuff, like identifying and dealing with problems and pushing hard over a long time

Viktor Frankl wrote dozens of books, but only one,  Man’s Search For Meaning,  was not aimed at commercial success. Frankl wrote  Man’s Search For Mea

How to Be Successful

Winston Churchill hit the nail on the head when he said, “Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.”

Here is my definition of imposter syndrome. Imposter syndrome is the persistent, unrealistic, fear-inducing, fucking ridiculous belief that you are su

Sometimes the prize feels closer, other times farther away. Still other times it feels like we are drowning in aimlessness and exasperation. An identi

"Failure is a data point." Amy Buechler, Founder Coach at YC

"Failure isn’t an indictment of your basic worth but rather a piece of valuable feedback." Amy Buechler, Founder Coach at YC

When pursuing a 1-of-1 vision, you aren’t going to be the most popular or celebrated person. You’re going to be an oddity that the most in-the-know pe

It’s possible for other projects to be sexier, more lucrative, and more attention getting, however their purposes are less unique than yours.

I appreciated Nvidia’s founder talking the other week about what it means to work in a zero billion dollar industry. It means really believing in some

The five principles of prompting I developed work equally well as management techniques for humans: Give direction. Describe the desired style in de

People who are good at solving poorly defined problems don't get the same kind of kudos. They don’t get any special titles or clubs. There is no test

2) Clear Roles & Decision Rights Without clear swim lanes and decision rights, individuals on teams feel disempowered and projects tend to stall out.

The measure of my success as a leader is how minimal my intervention can be. I’m committed to stepping back and allowing others to make their own dec

"The best leaders are exothermic. Every atom jiggles faster around them. There is no chance for stasis.” -Tobi Lutke

1. It doesn’t have to be new. It just has to be fresh. The toy brick was invented (and patented) by British toymaker, Hilary Fisher Page in the 195

90% of Claude’s code is now written by AI, and this has completely transformed how they build products. The bottlenecks have shifted from engineering

hottest companies in Silicon Valley, famous for one thing: they made an extremely boring product extremely beloved. He speaks about how «technology ma

I came of age in the Napster days, when only fools spent money on anything digital. Early on, we decided that we’d rather pay for the internet with at

One mistake I often used to make at Justin.tv was offering a potpourri of business models (virtual goods, product placement, chat ads, contests, etc..

The problem in media isn’t the business model. The problem is that most of the content sucks.

Elon Musk on taking risks: "This is how civilizations decline. They quit taking risks. And when they quit taking risks, their arteries harden. Every

You are only as good as your ability to test your riskiest assumptions as quickly as possible.

Author and entrepreneur Eliot Peper on taking risks: "If you know something's going to work, it's not worth working on. It requires no courage. It r

Most critically, these roles tend to be self-reinforcing. Organizations using fear-based future narratives often develop risk-averse cultures that fur

The stages of CEO & how to evolve as your company does:

Business Plan: development of ado.vc decentralized financial instrument for investors end entrepreneurs

Writing a Business Plan

The stages of CEO & how to evolve as your company does:

The stages of CEO & how to evolve as your company does:

Today’s thread is on “VC backchanneling” — how you can use it to your advantage as a founder. When I was a founder I knew that VCs all talked w/ eac

The stages of CEO & how to evolve as your company does:

Startup COO job boils down to this: 1. Pick a problem area, and build 0 to 1 yourself. First principles get you pretty far! 2. After it gets going, st

The stages of CEO & how to evolve as your company does:

The Mom Test: How to Talk to Customers & Learn If Your Business Is a Good Idea When Everyone Is Lying to You

if project management is the meta of doing work, then managing your psychology is the meta of project management. A moderately-good process maintained

I often hear of founders shutting down their company after a year or so of trying, so I don't know who needs to hear this but: it takes anywhere betwe

Product-market fit works in both directions. The perspective of the builder is always toward what they can do to change their product, what features a

Start in the future and work backward

If you pay attention, you’ll see that today’s winning brands understand the customer’s story is the only one that matters. Your most important job as

Solving a problem for your user is great, but easing their cognitive dissonance can have a much greater emotional impact. There is likely something th

The Questions Before the Questions

startups: build it and nobody will come until you figure out distribution which is way harder

Product Validation Frameworks are Mostly Useless Without Taste

Product Validation Frameworks are Mostly Useless Without Taste

A trend is a fad whose demand is not satisfied. A fad is a trend whose demand is satisfied too quickly. The lesson? If you experience success, do not

This is silly simplified but people who work in “Brand” are typically valued for their taste and ability to forecast and predict trends. They see the

One of the surprising and counter-cultural truths about modern-day marketing, which I suspect drives many efficiency-minded people practically insane,

The Future of NFTs: A Visual Exploration into the REAL use cases

The greatest lie told to the public is that people make apps to sell data. Data has no value—you can buy a complete data set on the entire US populati

pretty clear that collecting cultural ephemera is a new consumer behavior that’s going to become a core part of life on the internet

Books you read are sending you input. Your friends modeling behaviors for you. Newspapers. Tools. People you follow on Twitter. The architecture of a

The dream isn’t just to show all of ourselves unfiltered to the world. It’s to find a character that we feel comfortable being, that we deeply resonat

Rob and I had to face the truth: Matter is a great product—3x App of the Day, with many thousands of passionate users—but it isn’t the next Duolingo.

When the institutions are optimized to fund the legible thing and the individuals are optimized to build the legible thing, the identity of the founde

And I realised that if you ever hear someone explaining things in terms of a long list of caveats, the odds are good that you’re looking at tacit know

Tacit knowledge is knowledge that cannot be captured through words alone.Think about riding a bicycle. Riding a bicycle is impossible to teach through

A democratic cultural politics would be developmentalist — oriented to learning, growth and discovery — rather than presentist. All kinds of resources

Some assume that a fundamental property of the internet is that it is globally connected, but countries, such as Iran and China, who have built their

Conversational Canyons

There are a lot of organizational structures and lived practices embedded in our bodies that we just enact by default. But through explicit facilitati

Slack is the opposite of organizational memory

Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System

my sense is that people who take a long time to respond to messages, or tend to go into shame spirals about them, often put a lot of pressure on thems

The 37signals Guide to Internal Communication

2) Clear Roles & Decision Rights Without clear swim lanes and decision rights, individuals on teams feel disempowered and projects tend to stall out.

Human scale institutions strive for optimum scale. Not mega scale. The point at which maximum quality can be attained. Their purpose is not to maximiz

When startups start taking off, the founders usually can't tell what's changed. It's some combination of all the random things they did to make it ta

From My Data to Our Data: A Proposal to Equitably Distribute Wealth in a Digital Economy

If Twitter had to start over without its graph, on the other hand, it would be dead (which speaks to why Twitter clones like BlueSky which are just Tw

Twitter became about arguing, Instagram became about showing off, Facebook became about people you went to school with saying weird things. The most

Social media has also proven to simply not be that efficient in terms of matching high quality content with a relevant audience. Just because people c

people think the solution to the web becoming a big performance stage is to have lots of fragmented smaller communities. But finding the right communi

So when people opt to devote their energy to tracking the latest TikTok star or scrolling content instead of nurturing interpersonal relationships, th

Social media stopped being primarily about connecting socially a long time ago. People still use a range of technologies to connect to friends and bui

Taste for Privacy: How Context, Identity, and Lived-Experience Shape Information Sharing Preferences

The social-platform layer offers the feeling of encounter with the friction surgically removed. As one analysis of Gen Z’s parasocial turn put it, onl

We can always opt out of this arrangement, of course, and live happily in meatspace, but that is precisely the point: Offline we exist by default; onl

We are currently living in a time when the lines between fantasy and reality are blurring and virtual worlds are creating room for new rules of self-e

A thread about social graphs and how web3 brings a paradigm shift in how social networks will be built in the future: 🧵

Attention Required! | Cloudflare

It’s an almost unthinkable reversal from Meta’s extremely lucrative walled-garden strategy, which it has employed for its entire history as a company.

On the one hand, Octavia Butler has this to say: “The only lasting truth is Change.” On the other hand, Bill Bernbach would counter as such: “A com

pretty clear that collecting cultural ephemera is a new consumer behavior that’s going to become a core part of life on the internet

Something I’ve noticed, however, is that exclusively using TikTok doesn’t mean I’m only exposed to TikTok-specific trends and culture. In fact, many o

Introducing a Rocks, Sand, and Water Framework for AttentionWe always talk about consumers’ attention as being finite, but how is it divided?I imagine

Gen Z and the End of Predictable Progress - by kyla scanlon

The game has shifted, and the winning strategy with it. It’s no longer about understanding specialized details; it’s about grasping the high-level glo

What we do with our freedomThe examples of the excruciating etiquette of the aristocratic courts, the marriage market Rhimes dramatised, the civil ass

There’s a phrase making the rounds online: “The more I heal, the less ambitious I become.” I’ve been wondering if its resonance reveals a quiet fatigu

I am not less capable because I refuse to live in constant activation. I’m just less exploitable.

My body was not an obstacle to ambition, but the barometer for what sustainable ambition could look like now.

HEY Email

A good life doesn’t ask you to be good at everything. It asks you to find the small circle where you have unusual leverage, and to be peacefully avera

My father was a Sarkari Babu (government officer with basic salary) his entire life, he was at one job throughout his life. He drove a Bajaj scooter

Here are some things I’ve asked chatgpt recently: “why is Toblerone so popular at airport duty-free stores?” “give me a recipe for a chickpea tagine

I used to be a parrot, echoing other people's ideas, opinions, and beliefs, because I wasn’t sure of my own. I thought that by ‘borrowing’ and mimicki

There is insane demand for people who can understand and explain technology in a compelling way.

If you don’t have time to clean up, you don’t have time to cook Professionals understand that the project is the whole project, not simply the fun

Hindsight is 2020I don’t mean “hindsight is 20/20.” I’m talking about the year 2020.See, early in 2023, I wrote an article about starting and growing

A solid foundation requires a robust team structure. Hiring individuals who not only have the requisite skills but also align with the company’s cultu

Aggressive growth projects often lead to UX cruft, slowly degrading long-term user engagement and retention. Yes, you can move short-term metrics by t

Founder Mode

People who don’t take themselves too seriously. They have to be able to laugh at themselves to succeed. What to look for: This is usually very easy to

The #1 thing I look for when hiring people is FIO. "Figure It Out" You can get pretty damn far just by being: - Resourceful - Reliable - Results or

@mckaywrigley I have a bunch of questions I ask. What would you build for yourself? What did previous companies you've worked for need? What are you a

Startup Handbook: Hiring Employees

Zoom’s simplicity is a strength when it comes to the company’s ability to grow its network. When the product concept and value is simple to describe,

The best software businesses are networks. When every new user that joins makes the network more valuable for the other users, it leads to a sort of a

Advice I would give to a college freshman: These next four years, one of your main goals should be to figure out how not to have the rest of your lif

"Every product in the world, the quality at the end of the day is simply a reflection of how much the people who created it gave a shit about the prod

we have a world where friction gets automated out of experiences, aestheticized in curated lifestyles, and dumped onto underfunded infrastructure and

Long-tail users of user-centered design are not given the degree of control necessary to adapt the design object or tool to their unique needs, and de

Be Good-Argument-Driven, Not Data-Driven

Most AI backlash is economic anxiety coated in a veneer of social justice. Alfalfa farming consumes 19 times the water that data centers do; there’s n

“Diffusion lag” reflects a lack of product-market fit. Even AI optimists are still hitting practical roadblocks. That’s why detailed case studies are

Here are some things I’ve asked chatgpt recently: “why is Toblerone so popular at airport duty-free stores?” “give me a recipe for a chickpea tagine

At the Institute for the Future we believe that the value of futures thinking is not in predicting the future (something no one can do), but in imagin

Cayce Pollard as the positive archetype for how to navigate volatility. So by intensely tuning oneself in to subjective responses to things, you can c

The purpose is to scout the path and shift the discourse.

honestly i'm so good at consuming content LMAO. like how do I make it my job to literally just read, watch, and listen to stuff??

We live in a world where movies aren’t considered art, but intellectual property. They’re “content,” little chunks of stuff that can be licensed, exte

How Do You Compete with Free? Notion: the embattled artist

- ABCMouse is making north of $100M/year with a $7.99/month product

Software AND a Service is the new Software as a Service.

Hyperconnected 'Kakao Kingdom' - "Everything is hyperconnected on KakaoTalk. It connects people, as well as numerous services affiliated from taxi-ha

By yielding a generational wealth creation opportunity that was a strange hybrid of a lottery jackpot and self-made fortune, crypto created an ideolog

For example, it was 30 years after the invention of film that someone first tried telling stories with it — before that, film was mainly used as a dem

Just a moment...

How do you explain the web to people who have never used it? You make it as simple and as accessible as possible.

Home

Regenerative crypto economics

Solana vs. Ethereum L2s, a UX comparison

25/25) I would praise SOL if it pivoted & fixed these flaws The problem is that it would require changing the very attributes that where sold as

ChainArgos

For example, it was 30 years after the invention of film that someone first tried telling stories with it — before that, film was mainly used as a dem

Don’t shrink the vision to fit the doubt

10 key insights from Lenny Rachitsky on building a successful newsletter: 1. What do people ask you about that you don't have a great answer to? Vi

The Substackerati

Ugh, I can’t believe I had to live/work through the deaths of both print media AND online media and now possibly television and film too?? Can I just

The problem in media isn’t the business model. The problem is that most of the content sucks.

the answer for publishers in the age of AI is no different than it was in the age of Aggregators: build a direct connection with readers. This, by ext

This is definitely a hard topic to solve effectively. Builders (all role-encompassing) in DAOs need to be compensated transparently, fairly, above tra

Compensation will change. We all know that an insight from a creative genius may happen in an instant, but is often the product of decades of experien

“leverage points.” These are places within a complex system (a corporation, an economy, a living body, a city, an ecosystem) where a small shift in on

Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System

Good and Bad Friction in DAO User Journeys: The DAO Discovery Process

Christian Angermayer on Investing in Innovation

Remember in the before times how on hard days you could grab your work bestie and go have lunch blocks away from whatever was bothering you?

Like many people I thought Covid, with its stopped clock and blunt force, would bring a major reckoning. A reckoning with small things, like what we w

Exploiting Productivity Momentum