Startupy Issue #13: 10 things curated in our universe this week

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 platform for connecting ideas and curating knowledge. Think Wikipedia - but for interesting perspectives, not facts. If you're feeling the vibe, consider becoming a member. For $20/month or $180/year you get unlimited access to our curated knowledge graph and community. 

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🥸 MOOD

🪐 10 COOL THINGS CURATED IN OUR UNIVERSE

1. On ideas and the market for solutions

An excellent read on how we can fix the market for solutions, exploring why it’s still hard for builders and customers to find each other, and how we can increase the scale and quality of companies we see founded in the future. Lots of related ideas curated in future of talent, idea generation, and the future of funding topic pages.

2. Power to the People

The power to the people topic page is packed with interesting insights on how and why artificial gatekeepers of quality (academia and media) are disappearing and what that means for individuals.

By uploading one short video every day, the 16-year-old D’Amelio can earn 20 times more than the world’s most successful singer earned in 1801. Charli is scalable in a way that was possible only for a tiny group of TV, film, and pop stars 20 years ago. via Dror Poleg
It used to be that “who you know” — not “what you know” — held the most value. But in the last 15 years, it has become much more important to build something than to know people via Auren Hoffman

And speaking of people, we love stumbling upon a good personal site - check out Brie Wolfson's (startupy curator) personal site and explore this great collection of personal sites.

3. Molly Mielke’s tweet sums up our feelings about crypto - technology is irrelevant if we don't wrap that progress around our own enlightenment as a species. Related insights in our humane tech, collective ownership, and public goods funding topics.

4. David Cain’s work

We’re deep down the delightful rabbit hole that is David Cain’s blog, Raptitude. A standout highlight for me: We live in a society that assesses people by what their lives produce, not what it takes to live them. Inner work is ignored unless it explains some outer work.

5. On democratizing wealth through ownership

We’re keeping an eye on Teamshares and Withco, two startups making it possible for small business owners and employees to create more wealth through ownership.

6. An excellent set of frameworks from Chris Paik. Must read if you are a founder or VC.

7. Revisiting highlights from The Sovereign Individual

In the future, wealth will be measured not just by the amount in your bank account, but in your ability to structure your affairs to realize complete individual autonomy and independence.
We will identify more with people who share our interests and work than our country. An investment banker in Manhattan has more in common with a trader in Tokyo than the server who prepares his food for lunch.
As our financial freedom increases, governments won’t have any choice but to treat us more like customers, and less like victims of an organized crime ring. When money can be earned anywhere, you won’t be obligated to live in or subject yourself to high taxation. Governments that charge too much will drive away their best customers. The nation-state will not endure these changes in its present form.

8. On alternative customer acquisition channels for brands

The infrastructure for DTC brands topic page has a goldmine of resources for consumer brand founders - including new tools to bypass Instagram ads and acquire customers through collaborations such as Disco, Cortina, and Canal.

9. On remote work and teambuilding

Feeling the grind of remote work and keeping an eye on Marco and Offsyte - two startups helping companies plan beautiful retreats and fun virtual/in-person events.

10. On Weird Internet Careers

Spotted: AMAZING contributions to the Weird Internet Careers topic page from our favorite curators / weird internet careerists Tom Critchlow and Nick deWilde. I’m sitting with this quote in particular: there are at least two kinds of games. One could be called finite; the other infinite. A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play. As someone who cherishes independence, I’ve realized that rather than trying to win, my primary goal is to continue playing.

👆  Use the Startupy randomizer to get inspired ☝️

🌱 COMMUNITY HEALTH

Welcoming our first group of Season Zero curators to our curator community this week and virtual high-fiving Supritha Sumathi, Tomas Soracco, Sam Liebeskind, Prashanth Narayan, and Darren LI for their contributions.

657 contributions this week

1,393 connections this week

674 highlights this week

✨ CURATOR SPOTLIGHT

Find his Twitter | Website

Why are executive dashboards interesting?

In my work as an independent consultant I find it fascinating that executives are both perpetually frustrated with their dashboards (i.e. their "view of the company") while simultaneously not doing anything about it. I think that GOOD dashboard design is hard but I think if you can get it right it creates great alignment and momentum inside an organization.

A podcast worth listening to?

Not quite a podcast but this is a great conference talk from Clare Gollnick on Why No One is Looking at your Data.

Things worth reading and watching?

The book Working Backwards about how Amazon works is great - in particular the concept of input metrics and output metrics. There's a good book summary here.

I also liked this framing of "flat metrics dashboards."

Projects worth following?

Two projects I'm watching very closely:

Doubleloop which is a startup building dashboards that connect strategic objectives, data and input metrics all in one visual place.

Variance which is a startup building the ultimate product led growth data pipeline by defining milestone and connecting it to your CRM.

Applications for Season Zero are still open!

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Startupy Issue #13: 10 things curated in our universe this week

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