Levels of Hype
Hype, Third Horizons, and (of course) Web3
👋 On time for your weekend: a round-up of this week’s remarkable stories at the intersection of technology, business, design, and culture.
Three articles and three podcasts wrestled from this week's algorithmic feeds and like-bait drum. No fluff, and signal > noise⚡️
📚 Reading
🤯 The five Levels of Hype:
One important component of hype is thus a set of promises of what the technology can achieve in the future for you dear reader […] Today‘s tech industry is obsessed with the big futures. The metaverses, the next internets — you name it. Hype is everywhere, oozing out of the headlines of news articles, growing like mold all over my LinkedIn feed, and blinking at me whenever I open my inbox.
4-minute read by Johannes Klingebiel
🔮 Funding the Third Horizon:
Whatever the sector or context there’s always a ‘business as usual’ dominant pattern. Often if you metaphorically stand in that place and anticipate the future potential you can see how many of the ‘business as usual’ systems are going to fail [..] It’s not because anyone is doing anything wrong (although some people are!), it’s just that the world is changing, and nothing lasts forever.
9-minute read by Cassie Robinson
🤖 The Web3 playbook for brands:
To move in the right direction, ask: “why is this a problem and how can I use Web3 to solve it?” Do not ask: “What NFTs should I drop?” Go beyond isolated initiatives (a fashion show in Roblox) to create a durable value generated by the growing brand ecosystem of services, physical and digital experiences, information, entertainment, community and collaborations that connect physical and virtual worlds.
5-minute read by Ana Andjelic in The Sociology of Business
🎧 Listening
🧐 Our Best Advice on Strategy and Roadmaps:
So, a traditional roadmap: here's a list of features, and here's when you're gonna get them. Companies like that, because then marketing can plan, and customer success can plan, and your sales team can plan selling those features. Here's what's wrong with that. We're assuming that we can predict the future, we know when things are going to be released. We don't. Engineering is uncertain, there's uncertain problems and we can't forecast uncertain problems.
32 minutes with Melissa Perri on Product Thinking
🤓 How Globalization Changed from Moving Stuff to Spreading Ideas:
I think we are going to see international trade increasingly deal with services. Some services which are noted and recorded in statistics, some services which are within international firms but never show up in international statistics [..] The sort of globalization that we're accustomed to—this massive movement in goods and particularly in goods in process—this massive movement in goods and particularly in goods in process, is going to slow considerably.
90 minutes with Marc Levinson on National History Center
🚤 From Web 2.1 to Web 3:
I wake up every day, I'm like, "Oh wow, working at Gumroad is now, cheaper because Amazon lowered our pricing on their cloud stuff over here or faster because Figma now has this feature that lets us do this in a minute instead of 10 minutes”. And if you're using the old system, you don't get any of those benefits. You think you're doing better, because you're on kind of the cruise ship, but you don't realize that you're not on the speed boat…
73 minutes with Sahil Lavingia on Infinite Loops
🎁 One More Thing
Thirty minutes ☕️ with Adriana chatting on morning routines and lifehacks, career choices and favorite books, and a few thoughts on innovation.
📬 Suggestions?
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