Can I ramble for a sec?

On Artifact shutting down and something worth remembering

My son is watching Blippi, which means I’ve got about 20 minutes before he loses it. I do not write well under pressure, but I feel fairly confident rambling about this one thing. 

The founders of Instagram recently shut down Artifact, the AI news reading app they’d been working on for the past two-ish years.

Here’s what they had to say:

We have built something that a core group of users love, but we have concluded that the market opportunity isn’t big enough to warrant continued investment in this way.

”The market opportunity isn’t big enough” – for reading? For knowledge?

That’s such a cop out. It reminds me of when Airbnb had just a few dozen employees, and Rocket Internet raised $90 million to clone them and failed. This is actually not a fair comparison, because my understanding is Artifact was self-funded, and I can’t think of any one company they were trying to clone, but there’s a broader point I want to make here about how no amount of funding can compete with a genuine interest in what you’re building.

Right around the time of their launch, I listened to an interview with the founders framing their new venture along the lines of “AI has captured our imagination and personalized news feels like a good place to start”.

From the outside, the narrative felt very tech for the sake of tech.

I’m jaded having spent many years working in various startup strategy roles, and seeing time and time again how the right motivation is never a technology trend and always something far deeper and more personal, and the right question is never “What is your AI strategy” and always more like “If I had to solve this problem today given the technologies available, would the solution change?” 

Personally, I find a lot of comfort knowing that in my own life and work, I’m looking for a practice and a journey, not a quick hit.

Sublime as a product meets a very practical need of saving all of the things I want to return to in a way that allows for the compounding value of those ideas.

But Sublime is also a sandbox to express my values – attention is sacred, creativity over productivity, resonance over scale, less is more. When I hit a hurdle, I always return to the bigger questions that fuel me, and it always works:

• How can we transform the vast expanse of human knowledge from a predatory amusement park that exploits our worst impulses to a beautiful stream of ideas that support our creative and intellectual endeavors?

• How can we cultivate more intentionality in our lives?

• When the AI bots take over, where will we go to get grounded?

• In a world where we are constantly exposed to other people’s opinions, how and where do we cultivate our own taste?

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For the past decade, our idolatry of startups and innovation has meant the focus has been: What can we disrupt? How fast can we grow? How big can we get? How much can we raise? 

Founders are taught to possess enough faith that they can build something very big very fast. This creates a pressure cooker of responsibility that distorts reality to the point that founders often find it hard not to confuse themselves for God.

There’s this clip from Robert Greene who is now writing a book about the Sublime (the feeling, not us). When you take a hike and you feel a sense of awe at everything that you're seeing, you're experiencing the sublime. In most of life, this sense of “smallness” is experienced as a humiliation. But the sense of smallness in the presence of the sublime has an oddly uplifting effect.

I love the idea of coming face to face with our cosmic insignificance and feeling empowered by it instead of burdened by it.

Maybe Sublime will be really big one day. I genuinely think the world needs what we’re building more than ever. But increasingly, I’m not interested in this framing. These days, I’m thinking less about how to change the world and more about how to support and enrich my community’s world.

I’m not sure how a post on Artifact shutting down ended here, with no grand conclusion. I both have so much to say and nothing to say. Perhaps it is because so much of what I want to say requires more time to marinate. 

Or maybe what I really want to is that as I look at my two year old next to me, I can’t stop laughing at how ridiculous and silly this business of building software and thinking we’re changing the world is. 

Related stuff

1. A beautiful read on how to do the slow, hard work of staying put. (this is the #1 thing I’ve shared with friends on the verge of giving up - on relationships, jobs, etc…)

2. This quote from Edward Abbey, on growth:
   Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of a cancer cell.

3. Jason Fried makes a convincing case for why we should stop using war terminology in business.
   

4. I love this quote from Sarah Manguso:
   “I knew I was getting somewhere when I began losing interest in the beginnings and the ends of things.”
   

5. A three minute video that will make you feel feel huge and tiny at once.
   

6. Our best people are on bad quests. Choose good quests (highlights here)

7. This quote, from

   Adam J. Kurtz
   took my breath away:
   The truth is that one day you hate yourself, and the next day you can’t wait to use your gifts.

8. This drawing by

   Jenny Lawson (thebloggess)
   made me go ‘whoa’.