Startupy Issue #8: a laid back newsletter about very serious ideas

Welcome to the startupy newsletter. Every week, we curate the hottest links from our universe and share them with you here. As a reminder, startupy is a community-curated knowledge graph. Discover the most valuable tech, startups, and culture insights - mapped and indexed by the best and brightest curators. If you're feeling the vibe, consider becoming a member to get unlimited access to our collective intelligence engine. The price? You tell us. 

🥸 MOOD

🪐 HOT LINKS IN OUR UNIVERSE

Tokens in the attention economy by Cobie

In reality, the only scarce resource in crypto is attention. Crypto assets are not really scarce either. Of course, this is a little intellectually dishonest. Bitcoin and Ethereum themselves are scarce due to their hard-cap supply or deflationary tokenomic designs; Crypto Punks are scarce because there is a finite and fixed supply; and yes, there will probably only ever be 5,200 Crypto Dickbutts. But the amount of things you can speculate on in crypto is ever increasing and theoretically interminable.

🕺 Curated in Attention Economy, Web 3.0, Crypto & Crypto Tokens

effort by Ava

Here’s what I know: if someone’s much better than you at something, they probably try much harder… Fantasy is easy and effort is punishing. Seeming is always easier than being.

🕺 Curated in Personal Development & Future of Expertise

Narrative Distillation by Kevin Kwok

The more static and predictable the world is, the less narrative matters. Historically most businesses followed clear precedents and fit neatly into paths. If starting a restaurant, the potential range of revenue and costs is known. There are few surprises, so it’s easier to look at the current state of the business and know what it will look like in a few years. There is little volatility. Tech startups radically break this mold. By definition they will be unrecognizable in five years, whether that’s because they are a unicorn or because they are extinct.

🕺 Curated in Storytelling

Tiktok, Emergent Creativity, and The Limits of Social Graphs by Kevin Kwok and Eugene Wei

We'll look back at social graphs and say that it is a mistake to use the social graph to approximate an interest graph. The people you know don't necessarily reflect your interests… The second wave of social is about having people be more conscious about building a graph that best matches the needs of what they want to get from that graph. Initially, importing from your contact/address book made sense. But now we can say that was a mistake. You don't need to follow all people you know on all services.

🕺 Curated in Social Graph Design, Remix Culture, Consumer Social & TikTok

Own the Demand by Florent Crivello

Another reason to focus on demand is that it can pull supply much more effectively than supply can pull demand. It is not the case that “the world will beat a path to your door if you build a better mouse-trap” — but if you gather everybody with a mice problem in one place, I guarantee it will soon turn into a convention for better-mouse-traps inventors.

💃 Curated in Aggregators, Strategy & Startup Advice

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Web3 101

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🌱 COMMUNITY HEALTH

Welcoming Jennifer Baez, Sean Neil-Barron, Jonno Evans, Matt Sornson, Jack Sun, and Kassen Qian to our curator community this week and virtual high-fiving Ajinkya Wadhwa, Jordan Bester, Jerod Morris, Keely Adler, and Sixian Lim for their contributions.

488 contributions this week

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651 highlights this week

✨ CURATOR SPOTLIGHT

Find him on: Twitter | Newsletter

Why is storytelling interesting?

As I wrote in a recent piece: "A business without a clear story resembles a car without an engine. No matter how much you kick, scream, or turn its crankshaft over, it won’t go anywhere. It’s no more than a dead vehicle sitting (or a dead company walking, for that matter).

Like near all things in life, I find business simple, but not easy.

It consists of two foundational pillars: spreadsheets and storytelling.

Spreadsheets represent the table stakes; that nitty gritty operational rigor necessary to bring about the business, to make the damn thing work. These myriad minutiae resemble the chassis of a car; they are absolutely essential for meaningful execution.

Storytelling articulates the overarching vision and ethos; it differentiates the Mustang from the Maybach, the Range Rover from the Rally Car, Alexander the Great from Alexander the Mediocre.

Though seemingly superficial, the latter (i.e. storytelling) steers a vehicle powered by the former (i.e. spreadsheets).

Sans spreadsheets, a business will fail to launch. Sans storytelling, it will careen off course.

Together, they can propel a business any which way in service of its desired destination...Good stories make prices go up and help things happen.

They get you the job or the girl.

Great stories create generational wealth and unlock leaping emergent effects.

They get you the promotion or the “yes” in response to the proposal.

Bad stories destroy fortunes, friendships, future opportunities."

Podcasts worth listening to?

Chris Dixon and Naval Ravikant — The Wonders of Web3, How to Pick the Right Hill to Climb, Finding the Right Amount of Crypto Regulation, Friends with Benefits, and the Untapped Potential of NFTs (#542)

One of the most lucid, convincing conversations on the macroscopic sea change that Web3 will usher in.

Balaji Srinivasan on The Future of Bitcoin and Ethereum, How to Become Noncancelable, the Path to Personal Freedom and Wealth in a New World, the Changing Landscape of Warfare, and More (#506)

Balaji's intellectual breadth and depth is staggering. From COVID to China, media to moonshots, this conversation is a tour de force that will alter your perspective and stress test your intellectual firepower.

Things worth reading and watching?

The Social Architecture of Impactful Communities by Nick DeWilde

Community is a competitive advantage. Ever since reading this piece two years ago, it has served as blueprint and framework to cultivate genuine conversation, collaboration, and compassion.

The Upheaval by N.S. Lyons

"We are living through an era of epochal change. At few times in history have so many currents of civilizational transformation coalesced and crashed into us at once, and at such speed. To say that we are being unmoored by massive technological, economic, environmental, geopolitical, and socio-cultural shifts would be to insufficiently limit our description of what is occurring."

Projects worth following?

New Science

Alexey Guzey's noble effort to "[build] the 21st century institutions of basic science." I am all for the disruption of the academic and research industrial complexes.

Baton Market

Small businesses are the backbone of the American economy. Baton is building the first true two-sided marketplace for the 32M American small businesses and their potential buyers in order to bring transparency and trust to this antiquated $11 trillion market. Disclosure: I am a small investor.

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Startupy Issue #8: a laid back newsletter about very serious ideas

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