It's complicated to build your professional career around a word you often find cringe. Community. What does it mean? You can hear how exasperated I get answering that question for the infinite time here. Community may be a bastardized, overused word that gets sprinkled around like holy water but the art and science of how people come together, share, create, trade, and influence each other is still my eternal fascination. The world works in networks. No man's an island (I'm reading the Wager realising that even in shipwrecks you're navigating interpersonal dynamics I recognise from Discord). More soon but this summer I've been getting more specific on my fund thesis. This one c-word can make people's brains leap to "community-adjusted EBITDA" (thanks WeWork) and the worst excesses of ZIRP but the history of technology is littered with banging examples of groups creating, trading and accelerating things: how railroads and telephones extended across certain countries and accelerated wider trade and industrialisation telephone wealth led to Bell Labs and other clusters of smart folks like Xerox PARC creating innovations like the graphical user interface their corporate overlords will never let flourish the military/industrial effort for ARPANET Homebrew Computer Club kids and their loose clubs of personal computer enthusiasts first wave of forums/LAN parties - either you were active online & made all your friends get online too or you grew up to be an enterprise software buyer gaming and MMOs network effects era from mainstream social networks to mass forums to the sharing economy - weirdly a low point in the history of communities in technology imho creator economy + how everyone launched a newsletter (substackification of the internet) crypto rests on community - in terms of belief, adoption, and scale open research and open models as uneven networks of researchers and engineers accelerate frontier AI and my latest favourite from Breakneck; "process knowledge" in China. Process knowledge here means deep expertise and know-how embedded in teams of workers on how to manufacture and scale up production. Factories are owned by engineers. Can't crack a technical problem? You probably know someone who can.
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Looking at all this exciting history the question then becomes; if community is a core ingredient to acceleration + (gross term) value capture, what do we want to build? You can see here how the pendulum swings from hardware to software to hardware/software as problems evolve, entrepreneur + funder excitement shifts and new possibilities get unlocked. Reggie spent all of 2024 interviewing hardware founders & builders from Teenage Engineering to Humane and Rabbit; the last two make his book such a 2024 time capsule as the first wave of next gen consumer hardware launches, doesn't hit the mark and wraps. I really wanted to read it; he found shipping to Europe complex; which is how I ended up bookmuling 24 copies to London. Some have been sent to Amsterdam, Berlin, Cologne, Hamburg, Munich + Rome but a few left; reply if you're interested. Also thinking about; you have to try Cofounder. In the "personal workflow AI tools" category, this is the best I've tried so far. useful write-up on Nepal's decentralised coup laughed a lot at The Studio Posthog's new site. Into how fresh + wacky the design feels (make the internet weird again pls) but behind the design are a lot of great "principles of building" docs Eleanor interviewed me about how I write and the worry that reading + writing is becoming a luxury good. You need time to create/consume; it's a muscle you train; our ancestors were marking X on their marriage certificates 150 years ago; I can't accept that reading and writing for the masses could only be a 150 year thing if you have a US cell number, please call this aura check hotline and report back. This week I feel like the world needs an aura check. But not here. Here, we're good. Thanks for reading, Sarah ✌️
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