Hello and happy Sunday!

Slow news week, eh? If you’re anything like us, perhaps you’d like to take a break from the doomscrolling and settle into a nice, edifying read. If that’s the case we’ve got you covered.

This week in Everything, we’re exploring problems with the ways businesses prioritize their efforts, the Coinbase memo, this week in news from the passion economy, and the virtues of spatial methods for organizing knowledge.

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Everything Index - Week of 9/28

• Articles we published — 3

• Podcasts we released — 3

• Tesla Stock Price — +2%
  (Change since last week)

• Chamath’s Number — 14
  (Number of articles on Google News for “Chamath SPAC” from this week)

• People Who Are Wrong — 0
  (Number of times Rabois tweeted the word “wrong” this week)

• Days Until the Election — 31

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This Week’s Top Posts

Ranked by the % of people who rated the post “amazing” in our feedback forms.

1. 🔮Intangible Returns by Nathan Baschez in Divinations (1,511 words) 🔒

2. 💝Passion Economy News: Casey Newton goes Indie, SignalFire’s Creator Economy Market Map, Newsletter Curation, and More in Means of Creation (2,184 words)

3. ⚡️Spatial Organization by Dan Shipper in Superorganizers (1,333 words) 🔒

4. 💞#31 - Talk Therapy is a Mission-Based Podcast🎧 by Dan Shipper & Nathan Baschez in Talk Therapy (17 min)

5. 💝Ankur Nagpal, CEO of Teachable, on empowering course creators, new formats, and COVID acceleration on Means of Creation (50 min)

6. 💞#32 - Are We Prioritizing Correctly? by Dan Shipper & Nathan Baschez in Talk Therapy (14 min)

Noted

Tidbits from our little corners of the world.

PHOTO OF THE WEEK

This gigantic bookshelf is beautiful, to be sure. But it’s not just a beautiful object. The meaning of it is beautiful, too. Here’s the headline from the photo essay it came from: “My wife recently passed away. I used my time off to build her the giant bookshelf she always wanted.”

NEWS

• Coinbase attempts to escape polarization — but gets mired in it instead.
  Brian Armstrong, the CEO of Coinbase, attempted to address employee dissatisfaction with his commitment to running an “apolitical” company in a public memo. Reactions were…polarized:

  Casey Newton @CaseyNewton

  My favorite new contrarian Silicon Valley theory is that you can remove politics from your workplace by wishing it in a Medium post Coinbase is a mission focused companyThere have been a lot of difficult events in the world this year: a global pandemic, shelter in place, social unrest, widespread protests and riots, and west coast wildfires. On top of that we have a…blog.coinbase.com

  September 29th 2020

  91 Retweets1,138 Likes
  Paul Graham @paulg

  Yet again, @brian_armstrong leads the way. I predict most successful companies will follow Coinbase's lead. If only because those who don't are less likely to succeed. Coinbase is a mission focused companyThere have been a lot of difficult events in the world this year: a global pandemic, shelter in place, social unrest, widespread protests and riots, and west coast wildfires. On top of that we have a…blog.coinbase.com

  September 28th 2020

  475 Retweets3,188 Likes
  dick costolo @dickc

  This isn't great leadership. It's the abdication of leadership. It's the equivalent of telling your employees to "shut up and dribble."

  Paul Graham @paulg

  Yet again, @brian_armstrong leads the way. I predict most successful companies will follow Coinbase's lead. If only because those who don't are less likely to succeed. https://t.co/3wKYAej7qO

  September 29th 2020

  466 Retweets3,851 Likes
  Eoghan McCabe @eoghan

  @balajis 99% of CEOs feel exactly the same.

  September 29th 2020

  18 Retweets482 Likes
  Jane Manchun Wong @wongmjane

  It’s ironic because this blog in itself is also politics

  Brian Armstrong @brian_armstrong

  https://t.co/FudJSuaumB

  September 29th 2020

  11 Retweets194 Likes

  Two days later, Armstrong announced that Coinbase would offer severance packages to employees who were dissatisfied with the updated mission statement.
  
  (For a longer take, here’s Ben Thompson going blunt on value, responsibility, and corporate response to the world at large.)

  Listen to Dan and Nathan discuss the Coinbase memo on Talk Therapy:

  Listen Now

MORE NEWS

• Compact nuclear fusion reactors are looking more plausible

• Palantir and Asana went public

• Axios launches local newsletters

• Triller fudged their metrics

• Google commits $1b to publishers

• Knowledge database Golden raises $14.5mil seed round, Marc Andreessen joins board

SMART ARTICLES FROM GOOD PEOPLE

• Byrne Hobart on good and bad S-Curves

• Sari Azout on how our tools shape us

• Dan Stern on how our interfaces with reality warp our perceptions

• Nikhil Krishnan on why workflow > tech

• Mario Gabriele on demystifying Palantir

JAM OF THE WEEK

If you like The Strokes you’ll like this:

TWEETS OF THE WEEK

🔥 Burn of the week 🔥

Fiddler @cFidd

Ridiculous, you say

Sean Spicer @seanspicer

These media stories about the line of succession are completely ridiculous

October 2nd 2020

48 Retweets253 Likes

Thread of the week:

Jessica McKellar @jessicamckellar

My friend starts her first software engineering job today, after learning to program in prison. Here's how she got the job, and how you can help more people like her get jobs after getting out: First, let's be clear that my friend served 13 years for a serious, violent crime.

September 30th 2020

3,230 Retweets13,863 Likes

Come for the graphic, stay for the Elon Musk hot take in the replies:

Universal Curiosity @UniverCurious

Light speed. Credit @physicsJ

September 28th 2020

1,282 Retweets5,847 Likes

Power Tip:

Siri Srinivas @pjux

higher up the chain you are, fewer words you use in your email replies.

October 1st 2020

64 Retweets1,001 Likes

Any other week, this would at least be the fifth most popular story:

tylercowen @tylercowen

Amazing what a buried story this is, shall we party now? Compact Nuclear Fusion Reactor Is ‘Very Likely to Work,’ Studies SuggestA series of research papers renews hope that the long-elusive goal of mimicking the way the sun produces energy might be achievable.nytimes.com

September 29th 2020

839 Retweets3,377 Likes

SF follows NY:

Anthemos Georgiades @anthemos

Our September @Zumper rent report is out The YoY drop in San Francisco this month is pretty seismic, a far steeper fall than we've reported before SF 1BR rents ⬇️ 20.3%

October 1st 2020

185 Retweets837 Likes

At risk of putting the Digest out of business:

Brett Goldstein 🚀🏠🌴 @thatguyBG

We launched a *little* something on Product Hunt today: The Daily Micro (@usemicros) - screenshot-sized summaries of the greatest essays in tech, sent via SMS every weekday. Check it out: producthunt.com/posts/the-dail… Why? Newsletters are getting too damn long. Thread 👇

October 2nd 2020

16 Retweets154 Likes

80 million…how cute:

Dan Rose @drose_999

In 2008 Facebook’s user growth hit a wall at 80M and we were having serious debates about whether any social network could ever reach 100M users. 2 years later we had doubled our user base and not long after that we reached 1B users. Here’s how we did it:

October 3rd 2020

1,144 Retweets5,622 Likes

COMMUNITY FEEDBACK

Some of the best feedback we received in our forms this week:

• “What strategies actually work for prioritizing? Pick the low-hanging fruit? Cherrypick the big ROI’s? Or do you do it through your people, because if the people aren’t up to it, the “upgrade” is going to fail anyway? And how does a business then guard against the solo “expert” employee with extreme job security? The issues are endless!” (on #32 - Are We Prioritizing Correctly?)

• “Amazing but I disagree that you cannot do it in Roam Research. Just take all menu items in a list and tag each item on like #Meat #Sandwiches and you can then use the sort/filter tool or open the graph view. Is there something I'm missing?” (on Spatial Organization)

Keep ‘em coming!

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This post was written by Babe Howard and edited by Nathan Baschez.