What is a Company?
Death of the Middle, Building Love, and Protocols
👋 On time for your weekend: a round-up of this week’s remarkable stories at the intersection of #technology, #business, #design, and #culture.
📚 Reading
The Death of The Middle:
The internet is changing our preferences — we’re getting more interested in either exactly what we want, or whatever’s most frictionless. Aggregate or specialize. In other words, give people everything they want or the one thing they need. Everything in the middle gets slaughtered.
🧐 There’s that Smiling Curve again—Erik Torenberg
What Is an Entertainment Company in 2021 and Why Does the Answer Matter?
And after years of dodging the question “is Netflix a tech or media company?”, Netflix founder and Co-CEO Reed Hastings recently declared, “we’re really an entertainment company”. At its core, an entertainment business does only three things:
Create/tell stories
Build love for those stories
Monetize that love
🤔 Or, really, any successful company in 2021—Matthew Ball
Raiders of the lost Bank:
All you need to know is that a pre-programmed protocol is doing, automatically, what hundreds or thousands of people would do in a traditional financial institution. And it does so without paying giant bonuses, without favoring powerful clients, and without even knowing who the clients are.
😘 More room for us to craft loveable stories—Dror Poleg
🎧 Listening
Embracing Uncertainty:
When you are a startup and if part of your core philosophy is not the acknowledgement that in order for you to succeed as a startup the rest of the world must be wrong in some way, then you will fail. .. It must be true there is disagreement there, or your startup is not doing something innovating and interesting by definition.
Jeremiah Lowin—Infinite Loops
“Meetings are expensive”:
How many individual changes did you make that made it all the way to our users in a month, and how many did your team make? We compensate for the size of the team and we say you need to get about eight a month .. People say "I can easily cheat beacuse I can make my the changes smaller" and that is exactly what we want people to do!
Sid Sidbrandij—Danny in the Valley (Apple, Spotify)
How to be a complete and utter f#ck up:
One of the things I learned is this: succesful people (or high performers, or happy, or whatever word you want to pick) have different beliefs to most people. And the one belief that enables you to deal with failure, is to realise that “yes you can fail, but that's OK” [..] You have to have that emotional maturity to go "this is quite painful, but I can step back and learn from it"
Steve McDermott—The Wicked Podcast (Apple, Spotify)
👷🏻♀️👷🏻♂️ Our Work
Beating the Innovator’s Dilemma—A presentation shared at the 2021 Virtual Innovation Summit on innovating for the Passion Economy (YouTube).
📬 Suggestions?
Please, feel free to send tips, comments, and ideas for the next issue by replying to this email. Or, send them directly to hello@futuring-architectures.com 🙏