Non-Fungible People
Big Tech, Meme Lords, and NFPs
👋 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 relentless like-bait drum. No fluff, and signal > noise⚡️
📚 Reading
👊 Big Tech Must Stop Hiding:
Their aggregated disclosures no longer come close to explaining how they operate. Investors and regulators need to know more. How many people use WhatsApp each month, and for how many hours? What is the Apple App Store’s profit margin? What is Microsoft Azure’s share of the cloud computing market?
4-minute read by Mariana Mazzucato, Ilan Strauss
🤔 Welcoming Our New Meme Lords:
Plainly speaking, the blockchain market rewards highly transmissible, highly visible, and easily digestible ideas. There are many more buyers for the underlying blockchain assets of ideas that double as successful memes [..] Harnessing memetics almost guarantees rewards for those that create them or purchase early as new buyers do the same. The result resembles a Ponzi-like dynamic...
11-minute read by Vaughn McKenzie-Landell
👩🎨 NFPs:
While most team members are “fungible”, there are always a few “non-fungible people” [..] NFPs are usually individual contributors, not managers. The management function is much easier to replace than a uniquely skilled individual. A common mistake that I and others have made is to promote an NFP into management when they are much happier not managing people.
2-minute read by Fred Wilson
🎧 Listening
🔮 The crypto future of work:
And part of the game, and that's why these [tech] companies pay so much and hire so much, is to hire 100 people who look the same on paper and just to assume that 80% of them are just a total waste of money, 20% of them will maybe do something useful, and one of them might invent the next Instagram or the next Gmail, and it's worth having him on the payroll for the next few years; the outcome of that person is going to make everything else worthwile.
58 minutes with Dror Poleg on Leading From Afar
🤪 How to nurture the crazy ideas that win wars, cure diseases, and transform industries:
There is some property of the collective that is important [..] How do we design certain elements of our organization? The kind of incentives we put in place for our people. Which do they care more about? The success of their project (which is a focus on nurturing crazy ideas) or getting promoted? There is a competition between those two things, and whenever you have a competition between two things, that's when you get a phase transition.
38 minutes with Safi Bahcall on The Innovation Engine
🧑🎤 Prioritising Solid Cultural Growth:
The traditional ways of creating and exchanging value—which means I make products and services, and people exchange them for money—are not relevant anymore, are not the only way anymore that brands and consumers interact [For example] in fashion, NFTs, virtual worlds and blockchains have exploded. How do you prescribe value to an NFT, how do you participate in that calculation, and how do you even understand it?
38 minutes with Ana Andjelic on Back to the F**kture
📬 Suggestions?
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