👋 On time for your weekend: a round-up of this week's 30 remarkable stories at the intersection of #technology, #business, #design, and #culture.
📚 Reading
The case for opsimaths. Maybe late bloomers aren't so late:
We are not very good at knowing how to assess people who have not yet succeeded but who might become impressive later on. Why do some people show no sign of their later promise, and how can we think about the lives of those late bloomers who had precarious journeys to their eventual flourishing?
🚀 Late or early, the journey will be the reward—The Common Reader
Power to the Person:
We have YouTube stars launching $100 million photo apps and $3.4 million NFT sales, $2 billion NFT companies, $72k socks, and the world’s largest companies starting to get involved. It’s almost impossible to tell what is real and what is going to blow up. But something is clearly happening.
👯♀️ It’s a great time to be a person—Not Boring
Unfettered Conversations:
By its free and open nature, the internet favors individuals and small media upstarts over institutions and powerful media incumbents. In a world of easy-to-use tools for creator-monetization, and with the ascendance of subscription-model publishing services…the trend in media toward individuals has never been more obvious.
👊 People over institutions—Pirate Wires
🎧 Listening
Creating the Creator Economy:
There is no one single monolithic identity of what a creator is. Creators are like workers, there's so much variation among them. And just like we don't talk about the worker economy, we need to stop talking about creators in generalisations.
Li Jin—North Star Podcast (Spotify, Apple)
Focus on the First Mile:
I call it ego-analytics: people want to know and see that they are being successful. And I always like to say that in the first thirty seconds of every product experience, every user is lazy, vain and selfish.
Scott Belsky—Invest Like the Best
Shopify and digital transformation:
The big strategic competition in these markets is not someone who is in your market that fits an antitrust law definition of your market. The competitive thread is somebody who changes the whole business into something else, or offers your customers a completely different way of doing the same thing.
Benedict Evans, Toni Cowan-Brown—Another Podcast
👷🏻♀️👷🏻♂️Our Work
The sister newsletter, this week zooming in on the creator economy—The NTWK.
We’ll be taking part in next week’s Entrepreneurial Platform Innovation program. Do let us know if you’ll be there too. A shared experience is double the fun.
📬 Suggestions?
Please, feel free to send tips and ideas for the next issue by replying to this email. Or, send them directly to hello@futuring-architectures.com 🙏
This is a great round-up, thank you