issue # 13
season zero launch, the problem with optionality, leaked emails
MOOD
In honor of our Season Zero launch…
Announcing Season Zero ⚡
We're thrilled to announce the launch of Season Zero and are calling all rabbit hole voyagers, curators, concept librarians, and knowledge remixers who want to get in on the ground floor to help us shape startupy to be the best community-curated knowledge graph.
Season Zero will be a 12-week experiment in collaboration, curation, and community.
At the Season Zero finale, top curators will be whitelisted for a Curator Season Zero NFT ring, which can only be earned, not bought. The Season Zero curator ring will unlock future utility and signal your status as a founding curator and contributor of Startupy.
🪐 10 COOL THINGS CURATED IN OUR UNIVERSE
1. Tips for founders or creators working on bringing ideas to life.
The founder mindset topic page on startupy has a goldmine of insights for enduring the lows and optimizing the highs on the journey from start to finish. Some faves:
You get energy by spending it. The fuel tank metaphor is completely misleading. The body supplies energy to meet demand. The tank *expands* if you use a lot of fuel via metaphorician
Sadly, most people are not patient enough to reap the fruits of their own labor. Great teams gain their strength and resilience while toiling their way through the valleys, not just from from relishing the view from the peaks via Scott Belsky's The Messy Middle
Ambition shapes what you achieve. Character is defined by how you achieve it via Adam Grant
2. On the future of search and context.
Some great new additions to the topic page, including a recent piece by Charlie Warzel on the evolution of Google Search: Most people don’t want their information mediated by bloated, monopolistic, surveilling tech companies, but they also don’t want to go all the way back to a time before them. What we really want is something in between. The evolution of Google Search is unsettling because it seems to suggest that, on the internet we’ve built, there’s very little room for equilibrium or compromise.
3. Why going outdoors will change your field of vision.
The Andrew Huberman page on startupy is getting lots of love, including this mind-bending thread: Looking at a vista or horizon is relaxing because you naturally go into panoramic vision. Compare that to being indoors, staring at your phone or talking to somebody. You may not notice it, but your entire visual field shrinks to a much smaller aperture - increasing alertness.
4. A wonderful string of ideas around the concept of post-individualism.
The post-individualism topic page is a wonderful collection of musings on how and why individualism has shaped our culture and how we move towards interdependence, including a thought-proviking critique of Stoicism via Simon Sarris and an exceptional essay by David Brooks on why the nuclear family was a mistake.
5. Kevin Kelly's work.
Revisiting Kevin Kelly's old work, and sitting with this particular insight: “To make something good, just do it. To make something great, just re-do it, re-do it, re-do it. The secret to making fine things is in remaking them.” (see more related thoughts curated in creativity & resilience)
6. The pursuit of optionality is a recipe for emptiness.
The startupy community indexed some of the best resources on why we're living in a commitment crisis. Some highlights:
Mihir Desai on The Trouble with Optionality: The Yale undergraduate goes to work at McKinsey for two years, then comes to Harvard Business School, then graduates and goes to work Goldman Sachs and leaves after several years to work at Blackstone. Optionality abounds! … but by emphasizing optionality, these students ignore the most important life lesson from finance: the pursuit of alpha. Alpha is the macho finance shorthand for an exemplary life. It is the excess return earned beyond the return required given risks assumed. It is finance nirvana.
Pete Davis' Harvard Commencement Speech: We may have come here to help keep our options open, but I leave believing that the most radical act we can take is to make a commitment to a particular thing… to a place, to a profession, to a cause, to a community, to a person. To show our love for something by working at it for a long time — to close doors and forgo options for its sake.
Erik Torenberg on Reconsidering Career Optionality: Even something as prestigious as a Harvard degree makes you only one of 315,000. If you start a company, you can truly become one of a kind—you'll be one of a very few who started the way that you did. Many ambitious people, even though they understand this intellectually, still prefer the more conventional path of accumulating optionality. Why? Several reasons: prospect theory, the fear of looking dumb, and a fundamental misunderstanding of the risks involved.
7. The best business writing worth reading are leaked emails.
Loving this Twitter account of leaked technology emails. Some of our favorites (with highlights) are indexed here.
8. For your password management needs.
We're keeping an eye on Uno, a new kind of password manager.
9. A cool idea.
Love the idea of a reverse job posting, via Andy Pressman
10. An alternative advertising startup we have our eye on.
With digital channels saturated, we're keeping an eye on Adgile, a tech-enabled truck-advertising company working with some of our fave consumer brands like Ghia, Studs, Topicals. (see 100+ more insights, highlights, and startups indexed in future of marketing and advertising)
✨ CURATOR SPOTLIGHT
Find her on Twitter
Why is community growth interesting?
It’s interesting because it touches on many elements of human collaboration.
Let’s start with a shared definition of what web3 is - In her primer Eshita breaks it down as follows:
Web1: Read
Web2: Read+Write
Web3: Read+Write+Own
Based on this definition, the difference is ownership. You might roll your eyes at me, and say - so what ? - stocks grant ownership. You’d be right.
What’s unique about web3 is the manner in which this ownership is expressed:
Economic incentives exist in the form of tokens
Political incentives exist in the form of decision-making power and governance
Simplifying, but you get it. Pretty different. If you’re still thinking so what - I’d say:
This’ll allow new ideas, new projects and new organisations to flourish. We’ll need to find new ways to create together, and to collaborate. When those approaches are successful - they’ll be based on new models of collaboration. Who knows what else we’ll be able to achieve with them. Personally, I find that interesting, exciting, and it gives me great hope for the future.
A podcast worth listening to?
A great episode to listen to is “A DAO’s centre of gravity” In this episode, Rafa and Anisha challenge us to think critically about the analogies or mental models we use to sensemake in web3.
In it, Rafa talks about a concept he calls the initial centre of gravity around which meaning is formed at a project's outset - for example, an initial centre of gravity can be a person, a digital asset or a movement.
Things worth reading and watching?
a16z is blazin’ the way here, giving us the concepts, vocabulary and toolkits to get us going. These 3 articles get tactical:
Community ≠ Marketing: Why We Need Go-to-Community, Not Just Go-to-Market
Go-to-Market in Web3: New Mindsets, Tactics, Metrics
To Start Building a Community, Master These Two Concepts
To be clear, these tackle the how, not the what nor the why - those answers lie within each community.
Projects worth following?
I am uniquely motivated by community-based projects and products. Here are 3 that I love:
Metalabel powers creativity in multiplayer mode. Their suite of tools is a launchpad for creative collectives to re-imagine how to collaborate, co-create and launch projects
Mirage DAO is rethinking how we experience embodied digital art through AR.
and if you’re a player, Loop Golf, where i’m an advisor, wants to become golf’s first digital wallet and build a thriving community of golf enthusiasts and competitors
tbh, I’m like a kid in a candy store.
Thank you so much for being here, and for letting us be a part of your week! If you liked this installment, please tap the little heart at the top of this email.
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