Meatspace Algorithms

$CABIN: crowdfunded creator residencies

This week, a group of internet friends tried an experiment: what happens when you meet online and then come together IRL to build something? What ideas emerge when you create the open-ended space to explore them collectively? I've spent the past nine months building remote co-living cabins with high-speed internet

Funding the creator economy

This is the 1st essay in a 5-part series on funding models for the creator economy Funding the creator economyAvoiding the venture trapCash rules everything around meShared income and bespoke financeNFTs, $GME, and the crowdfunded Cambrian explosionThe idea of the American Dream emerged in 1930s, as the United States was

Avoiding the venture trap

This is the 2nd essay in a 5-part series on funding models for the creator economy Funding the creator economyAvoiding the venture trapCash rules everything around meShared income and bespoke financeNFTs, $GME, and the crowdfunded Cambrian explosionVenture capital is the shiniest of the capitals. You, the founder, get a big

Cash rules everything around me

This is the 3rd essay in a 5-part series on funding models for the creator economy Funding the creator economyAvoiding the venture trapCash rules everything around meShared income and bespoke financeNFTs, $GME, and the crowdfunded Cambrian explosionMost of the time when I see a pre-revenue company trying to fundraise, my

Shared income and bespoke finance

This is the 4th essay in a 5-part series on funding models for the creator economy Funding the creator economyAvoiding the venture trapCash rules everything around meShared income and bespoke financeNFTs, $GME, and the crowdfunded Cambrian explosionIn between debt and equity lies an idea that is quietly changing education. It's

NFTs, $GME, and the crowdfunded Cambrian explosion

This is the 5th essay in a 5-part series on funding models for the creator economy Funding the creator economyAvoiding the venture trapCash rules everything around meShared income and bespoke financeNFTs, $GME, and the crowdfunded Cambrian explosionA return to weirdThe early 2000s were a heady time for people still hanging

Decentralized cities

One of the favorite past times of tech twitter during the pandemic has been predicting the next Silicon Valley. Austin, with its natural beauty, weird-chill vibe, flagship university, killer BBQ, and long history of technology companies is an obvious choice. Francis Suarez, with the hustle of a direct-to-consumer CBD salesman

Multiplayer marketplaces

Last Wednesday at 4:00am, bleary-eyed and freshly caffeinated, I watched in awe as a dozen people, many who had never met before, descended on my property and worked together to build something that may be there for hundreds of years. We are building a new Creator Cabin and I've

Six economies of online creators

Kevin Kelly described one of the first paths to becoming an independent creator employed by the internet in his classic essay 1,000 True Fans: To be a successful creator you don’t need millions. You don’t need millions of dollars or millions of customers, millions of clients or

What GPT-3 can do (and what it can’t)

GPT-3 is a natural language processing neural network that is taking the internet by storm with examples of incredibly human-like outputs. Put simply, it uses a massive dataset of text to predict what words go well together. It's as if someone took the entire internet and figured out how to

Come for the course, stay for the community

I signed up for David Perell’s Write of Passage class expecting two things: (1) some tips and tricks for online writing and (2) weekly homework assignments that would hold me accountable to start producing content. In short, I was looking for a traditional school experience. So far, that’s

From last-mile to last-minute logistics

The great challenge of logistics has historically been the last-mile: in a fractal expansion of road networks, how do you traverse the last bit of distance to every home? It is an under-rated marvel of modern civilization that this challenge has been largely and quietly accomplished in developed countries like

Get ready for gig work

When VC thought-leaders opine about the future of work on Twitter, they mostly just mean that people will use video conferencing more than they used to. And this, of course, is a big change with lots of second-order effects. As people have been forced into a rapid transition to working

Mega-cycles of technological revolutions

I’m reading Carlota Perez’s excellent book Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital after seeing it referenced in several essays by Venkatesh Rao and others. It’s a great read if you don’t take it too literally and just try to play the game of fitting patterns to her

Siri as the new mouse

A question from Steve Jobs’ 1985 Playboy interview (worth a read!): Most computers use key strokes to enter instructions, but Macintosh replaces many of them with something called a mouse — a little box that is rolled around on your desk and guides a pointer on your computer screen. It’s

Amazon’s Dash Button and frictionless, invisible computers

This week, Amazon released a small plastic button that you can affix to anything. You press the button, and it orders more of a specific product for you. The device was panned on Hacker News. The general public was so skeptical that journalists had to assure everyone that it was