issue # 35
issue # 35
meghna rao down the moonshots rabbit hole, intensity, dreaming of a different internet
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Mood
Cool things curated in our universe
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This legitimately brought tears to my eyes
A beautiful essay by Adriano (the Brazilian famous soccer player) himself on himself.
Outsiders, they don’t understand, man. When they talk about Brazil, when they talk about the little kids in the slums?
They always paint a dark picture. It’s always pain and misery, man.
And yeah, it’s like that sometimes. But it’s complicated. When I think about growing up in the favela, I actually think about how much fun we had. I think about flying kites and spinning tops and kicking a football in the alley. Real childhood, not this bullshit tap, tap, tap on the screens that these kids do now.
Curated in [touching stories] and [fame]
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Dreaming of a different Internet
I'm finding great solace in writers and thinkers like Ezra Klein, Robin Sloan, Spencer Chang, and Joe Edelman articulating the need for a slower, quieter, more intimate and connected Internet.
Here's Ezra Klein on The Great Delusion Behind Twitter: What’s surprised me most as Twitter has convulsed in recent weeks is how threadbare the social media cupboard really is. So many are open to trying something new, but as of yet, there’s nothing that feels all that new to try. Everything feels like a take on Twitter. It may be faster or slower, more decentralized or more moderated, but they’re all variations on the same theme: experiments in how to capture attention rather than deepen it, platforms built to encourage us to speak rather than to help us listen or think. (full highlights here)
Here's Robin Sloan: Publishing on the internet is a solved problem; finding each other on the internet, in a way that’s healthy and sustainable … that’s the piece that has never quite fallen into place.
Collecting lots of related strands in [dreaming of a new internet]
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On intensity
Oof, as someone with a tendency to let projects and obsessions swallow me whole, this resonates sooo much:
And that’s why intense people grow angsty when they can’t get back to their ‘thing’. They want to be in the membrane. Away from the surface-level triviality of the world. Everything outside of the membrane doesn’t demand their full self—it is, by definition, designed for everyone. But the intensity membrane is only accessible to the few willing to push past the barrier. Those that want to press their nose against the bubble until they break through the mundane and into the membrane. And once you’re on the other side, it is hard to compel yourself to stay out of it for too long. You’re always thinking about breaking back in.
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What does it mean to be human?
Exploring what it means to be human, which feels particularly timely with everything happening in Generative AI.
If you're a startupy member, join me down this rabbit hole by adding your links, references, and inspiration on this topic.
Curator spotlight: Meghna Rao
Writer and editor living in Brooklyn
Rabbit hole: Moonshots
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What are moonshots and why is this interesting?
Moonshots are big, ground-breaking bets, the kind that many say venture capital was created to be able to take. It's an interesting topic because it's directly related to perceived stasis around the current moment, the feeling that many have that we haven't made much progress in the U.S. in the past century.
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A book worth reading on the topic?
I'm a really big fan of Safi Bahcall's Loonshots, because I think it takes an actionable approach to nurturing big ideas inside companies while still keeping the company running; it also creates a real framework for how to create the sort of storied Bell Labs/research lab we don't see much of. Here's an excerpt from the book.
Things worth reading and watching on the topic?
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Tim Beiko on Ethereum's moonshot; he really opens up on how Ethereum is avoiding specific pitfalls so it can achieve its ultimate aim of becoming a protocol for human coordination (lots of contrasts too with Bitcoin, which I think has come to be many people's conception of a big cryptocurrency).
Why can't we fund moonshots? One of my favorite tech writers Evan Armstrong writes a really sharp piece on where we went wrong with VC and how we ended up where we are now, at the end of 2022, with lots of wins (Moderna! OpenAI! SpaceX) but also lots of failures (I don't even need to name them).
Lessons from a failed Jupiter probe: A moonshot doesn't need to achieve its original aim for it to be hugely impactful. David W Brown, who's been covering space and innovation for decades now, takes a close look at the moment when the original Jupiter probe failed to open one of its antenna at the moment it mattered, rendering the original mission of the trip obsolete; from the trip, we learned that one of Jupiter's moons, Europa, has water on it, meaning it might even have life.
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Projects worth following on the topic?
There's not a lot out there explicitly trained on finding moonshots, but I think some of these spaces are really conducive to training your eye to understanding them.
Packy McCormick's Not Boring is not explicitly about moonshots, but almost always looks for the magic in our sometimes-boring startup ecosystem. He gets how to find the moonshot even in seemingly mundane places.
I'd sign up for Dan Romero's Farcaster, because I think the social network has so far been a place where I can find really far out and cool projects (I am not going to speculate why, but that is what is forming there).
✨ Bonus
Speaking of moonshots, Meghna Rao interviewed me on building moonshots, slowly. Here's an excerpt:
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