Welcome back to this multi-part newsletter series on Gift Culture on the online frontier. If you missed them, check out Part One (defining gift culture, and the “homesteading” behaviour exhibited… Read more Scarcity Status versus Abundance Status (Gift Culture, Part 3) →
Welcome back to part 2 of a multi-part series on Gift Culture at the digital frontier. If you haven’t read last week’s post on gift culture as an adaptation to… Read more The SE Suite: An Interview with Julie Young (Gift Culture Part 2) →
If you go to the About page on Matthew Ball’s website, you’ll find a quote from Jason Hirschhorn: “Kevin Mayer called and said ‘Hey, Bob Iger and I would like to have lunch with you’…And Iger, I’m going to paraphrase here, says ‘You know, you’re an idiot.’ And I’m like, ‘Why is that, Bob?’ And he goes, “You give away for free what we pay tens of millions of dollars a year from management consultants for.” Kevin was talking about Matt’s Disney-as-a-Service post from 2016; but it could have been any of his… Read more Homesteading the Twittersphere →
One of the themes we talk about a lot in this newsletter, such as here and here and here and here and here, is how Silicon Valley is a “controlled… Read more Rollin’ (ARR-paid vehicle) →
This week, I’m delighted to share an interview with Harry Hurst, founder and co-CEO of Pipe. Six months ago I wrote a post in the newsletter called Debt is Coming, about the all-equity model of funding startups finally coming to the end. It ran away to become the most widely-read thing I’ve ever written, ever. (Read it first, if you haven’t yet.) Since then, I’ve had a blast getting to meet all sorts of interesting founders, operators and investors who are thinking about the future of financing recurring revenue software… Read more It’s Not Debt, It’s Better: an Interview with Harry Hurst of Pipe →
Three years ago, Chamath sat us all down at a Social Capital all hands meeting and told us about this great new thing we were gonna do. It was called a SPAC. A SPAC (“Special Purpose Acquisition Company”, or “blank check company”), he told us, was a new way we were going to help take big tech companies public. Going public is an important moment in a company’s life. It’s a transition from one state to another, it’s a stressful but monumental transition, and the current way we do it –… Read more SPAC Man Begins →
Three months ago to the day, I wrote: I’m getting concerned that we’re not psychologically ready for what’s coming next. The future may not be predictable, but people are. I… Read more The Freud Moment →
I’ve now been at Shopify for two months. One month in, the leadership team announced that we’re moving to “Digital by Default”: permanently. The era of office centricity is over; it’s time to figure out what comes next. I’ve had mixed feelings about this announcement. On the one hand, I was disappointed. I like having somewhere to go for the day, and having done so much travelling over the last several years for work, I was even excited to have a “regular commute”. I was especially looking forward to building… Read more Craft is Culture →
