The Startup Ideas Podcast - Forecasting the Future of Tech with Scott Belsky

Episode Date: January 11, 2022

How will work and life change in a material way over the next 5 years? That one line, written by guest Scott Belsky (@scottbelsky), was enough to get hosts Sahil Bloom (@sahilbloom) and Greg Isenberg (@gregisenberg) to immediately invite the successful entrepreneur and investor onto Where It Happens. But, what started as an exploration of exploding trends turned into a conversation that resulted in, at least, three potential game-changing business ideas. If you're looking to place bets on the future -- or create the next unicorn -- this podcast will leave you with endless opportunities.Want more community? Learn more here: http://trwih.coSPECIAL THANKS TO OUR SPONSORSCAPCHASEhttps://www.capchase.com/roomToday’s show is sponsored by Capchase.Capchase is a new financing option for fast-growing startups. They are offering Where It Happens listeners .25% off their first draw, preferred onboarding, and more. Their main product Capchase Grow lets you tap into your future revenue today, meaning you can reinvest in your business faster. We love what they are offering to business owners.To learn more go to capchase.com/roomCOMMONSTOCKhttps://commonstock.com/Why settle for the old model of investing when new options offer you so much transparency to help you grow your wealth? Commonstock is the home of smart money and an innovative social media approach to investing. We both love the platform and have used it to enhance our financial strategy.Commonstock is a social media platform like Reddit, but it removes anonymity and adds transparency. The app lets you see what smart money investors are buying and selling – in real-time – all while letting you see their reason why. This way, you know whether investors have skin in the game, or whether they only talk a big game. It’s a great way to get insights that support your investing strategy.To learn more and sign-up today go to commonstock.com.

Greg, we are back. What's that, man? We are back. 22, shit, man, a lot. Crazy break. I feel like, normally I try to take the, like, holidays as a time to kind of, like, catch up and regroup on things. And I felt like with COVID, it was like 2X the ability to do that because I was able to

just get out of a bunch of stuff that I didn't really want to do. So it was good. I feel like I got a lot done over the break. It's good to see you, man. And we haven't really chatted. So, I mean, we've DMed a little bit. So, and we talked about some articles. We had enough of each other after that week in Miami, right?

Like, it was kind of, we kind of needed like a little break. You know, I felt like we'd gotten real, you know, we spent a lot of time together. So it was good to have a little break. It's like distance makes the heart grow fonder, right? All right. Yeah, but I'm ready. Let's, let's, I'm ready to be back into it. Yeah.

And, you know, like, we have a very cool set of things to talk about today. which I'm personally really excited about. We, you know, we've both been talking over the last few days about, like, what does 2022 look like? And what are our personal goals?

Like we talked about late checkout, talked about some of my personal business stuff, what we were focusing on. And a lot of it always honed around, you know, like predictions for the future. What does the future look like and how are we going to actually build into that future?

I always think, like this concept and this framework, you and I have talked about of like variant perception. Like you have to have a variant perception of what the future looks like, i.e. like a contrarian or different perspective, and then go build into that. And then you're paid when you're proven correct about what that variant perception is of the future. And so you and I have jammed a lot on that. Like, what are our contrarian views of what the future looks like, that not a lot of people

understand or believe, and how do you go build into that? And that's kind of a good frame-up for what we want to actually get to dive into today. So, okay, so what's on your mind, 2022 predictions. Where are we going? Where's the world headed? I feel like the common wisdom today says that the world is never going to be as in person as it was pre-COVID. And my like, one of my more contrarian views is that I think a lot of things are going to go back to normal. Like I actually, I might be totally wrong in this, but I think that a lot of tech jobs are going to go back to being in person versus this like, you know, assumption that everything is going to be a remote forever. And I think I saw some chart on like hacker news or something that like 80, 90%

of job openings for developers were now remote. I just think it's going to swing back in some direction. I think people are going to find it hard to manage and build culture and scale culture in a remote context. And I honestly, I think I'm like a total unicorn in thinking this right now because everyone's going to yell at me and say that I'm an idiot for making that statement. But I still just think it's really hard to like manage wartime and and really build and scale culture in a remote context. I mean, so I've been working remote since 2014, which is a really long time. And even when I had a company in San Francisco and our team was in San Francisco, I was like, we're working remote. I think people like me who have seen like the unlock of productivity in remote, in tech, it's going to be hard for us to go back.

I think what you're going to see is a ton of like, like summits. Like late checkout, we're a remote company. There's 50 team members. Like how do we do a summit every month, three months, whatever in different cool places that we can come together and get FaceTime? I think that's where I think there's a ton of opportunity to build companies around that. Yeah. I like that. I think that's like a cool infrastructure thing too of like bridging the gap in between the two and how do you go build a business that allows people to, you know, basically like culture as a service.

Right. Like, you know, you need to have culture. It's so important for growing businesses. Can you create a culture as a service business? And it sort of relates in to some of the deeper stuff I wanted to get into, too, with our guest today. just around like polygamous careers as he called it so scott belski is our guest today um amazing tech entrepreneur writer etc wrote over the weekend this epic piece on um predictions right like it was 10 predictions for the near future of tech was what i think it was called and i saw it and i immediately sent it to you and was

like holy shit we got to get scott on we've been wanting to have them on for a while but with covid really hard to do in person right now and getting a video team that doesn't have COVID right now is like next to impossible. We have a friend who was hosting a New Year's party and he was like, I can't get vendors that don't have COVID. So I think we were stuck in that. But I was like, dude, holy shit, we got to get Scott on to go through these things because a few of them really spoke to me. A few of them I totally disagree with. And I think we can have a really cool conversation with him just like jamming on a bunch of these predictions and the businesses that can be built around these ideas. Yeah. And I think right before this, we actually have.

a community call in our Discord and just got the feedback from people from the room where it happens, Discord. And just to get us into like, what do you think? Do you agree? Do you disagree? And it's really interesting. Scott is, I have the most amount of respect for Scott. He's, he invested in my last company islands. You know, everything he says, I think is like gold. But at the same time, it's so interesting that we disagree on some stuff. You disagree on some stuff. You disagree on some stuff. and our community disagrees on stuff. It just goes to show you that like not everything is a gold, I should say. Not 100% is gold.

Just because, you know, and we were talking about this earlier, like Aaron, Aaron Levy and Brian Cheske are kind of talking about how Web3 is, you know, basically a sham. That's basically what they're saying. Just because these leaders or titans of industry are saying, you know, this is where the world's going to go doesn't mean it's the gospel. So take everything with a grain of salt. I agree.

I want to get, I actually want to talk to Scott about that too because I think he'll have a great take on it. So let's bring him in and just dive in on this stuff. Cool. Let's do it. Capchase is the financing solution for fast growing startups. It lets companies access their revenue today so that they can reinvest in their business and grow and scale much.

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lobes are on there, but also individuals. who are actually going and putting their money where their mouth is on these trades, and you're learning alongside them and being taken on the journey. Is it just stocks? There's everything now. There's going to be stocks. There's crypto. We're in this crazy world where there's so many different investment opportunities,

which just means there's so many opportunities to learn. And Common Stock is creating the platform for you to learn alongside the best. And also, as I said, let your gains speak. So to level up your investing game today, check out Commonstock. Commonstock.com. You won't regret it. There he is. The Man, the Myth, the Legend. What's up, guys? How you doing? Thank you. Thank you so much for joining us. It is our, is my pleasure. Well, it's funny. I was saying to Greg before you jumped on here that, like, basically we had you like on our tier one list. I was like, we have to get Scott to come on an episode of

the show. But with COVID right now, it's basically impossible to do anything in person. You know, we've been filming most of these things in person, but like, you know, let alone us all sitting in a room together and not getting COVID, but like go find a video crew that doesn't have COVID right now. It's basically impossible. Which means we'll probably all be back together again soon. Yeah, right? Last time Sahel and I were together recording, I got COVID. I didn't, by the way. We sat together for like eight episodes and I was somehow resilient and came through it. But with a pregnant wife at home, me doing things that exposed me is like a non-starter. So we're ultimately just trying to avoid it. But thank you so much for joining. I mean,

it felt like a perfect opportunity to bring you on because I'm sitting around this weekend. I think it was like on Friday. It was like New Year's Day or New Year's Eve, rather. And I see this thing pop up and a bunch of people are sending it to me. And like, oh, shit, have you seen this piece that Scott wrote and I pull it open? I'm reading through it. And I texted to Greg. And I, I think I was one thing into it. I texted to Greg and I just said, like, dude, we have to get Scott to come on because this is epic. And so now here we are, like a few days later, this is the world of the internet.

So a few days later, we slid in your DMs and here we are filming an episode. So I'm super stoked. Well, it is a pleasure. I mean, Greg and I go way back. We've had quite a few jams over the last 10 years on various topics. And yeah, I mean, this is like my own little mental exercise. I try to capture some things that are interesting to me over the course of a year. year and then I try to force myself under pressure to like synthesize cut down and you know and and and

declare like which ones I think you know are really relevant you know in your future and these are the ones that made the cut so excited to discuss can you actually talk just for one minute about that process because I think a lot of people find it interesting like so during the course of the year do you like have a document like a living document where you're jotting things down that you're noticing and then you try to synthesize it or like what what's your actual process around formulating these yeah i mean listen i'm a compulsive capture um you know both of the books that i published were like seven years of scribbled notes and then one year of synthesis and organization um my feeling is that you know ideas are all over the place but if you apply like a really you know concentrated

form of execution and organization around them you can like 10x the outcome of them and so i feel like I try to treat my writing the same way. So in this case, I have a Notion doc called Annual Fulter Forecasts, and I just think about, you know, things that I feel will be extraordinarily relevant over the next three to five years whenever I come across them. And then, you know, I try to have some like calling periods throughout the year. And then I try to, you know, take the last few weeks just to synthesize. Because to me, it's, you know, it's casting the line for a lot of interesting, you know,

founders that are exploring these ideas. It's also sending some signal to my own teams, you know, and my day job. as an operator building products for creative people about things that are interesting. And it also just, it's mental exercise. Totally. Do you pressure test them with people along the way? Like, do you call smart people you know and tell them to tell you're an idiot or what are you missing?

I do. My DMs are full of debates with a number of people about number of things, number one. Number two, I do send like a draft out to a few friends usually just to get their take on like what they think I should cut. So usually it's like if you had to cut two of them, which would you cut? So actually the 10 that I came out with, I had around 16 or 18 of them before and then I just kind of cut them down that way. And then, you know, Twitter is great for just like sharing things in real time throughout the year. And if everyone, you know, dunce on it.

That usually means it's actually super interesting, by the way. I know. That was what I was going to say. The ones that like everyone agrees with aren't that interesting. No, right. It's the stuff that people are really thrown off by because that's where the opportunity lies. right, is where we are uncomfortable. Absolutely.

We were just talking about, I don't know if you saw last night, Aaron, Aaron Levy and Brian Cheskees, sort of Web 3. Yeah, yeah. Aaron and I have a few DMs going right now. So I, I'm aware of his views and, you know, and I think he has a lot of great points and he's really smart. Like these are the people that I think bring us up to another level, you know, when we're trying to reconcile some new technology and the implications of it.

So what do you, yeah. I mean, I don't know how to process it because I look at those guys as sort of inspirational. You know, they help build the, you know, current Web 2 infrastructure and build really big businesses. And then I look at it and I see them just completely dunking on like, you know, where I'm spending pretty much all my time. So I'm curious, you know, how would, how do you think about that and what sort of advice do you give to people? who see that and don't know how to digest it. Well, I mean, it's one of those moments right now in technology where everyone is both right and wrong right now, right? I mean, whoever thinks that this is going to reinvent the world and solve every problem as we know it is probably wrong.

And those who feel like it's nothing are certainly wrong as well. I always find it fascinating when a technology forces on us a compromise of something that we typically thought was extremely important. A great example happened in my industry, where five to seven years ago, when Adobe about my company, Behance, actually back in 2012, the idea of a creative tool for professionals on the web was insane. Like, no one would ever trade performance and precision for ease of access and collaboration. You know, when we went to creatives and asked them, like, would you want a web-based application for image editing or screen design or whatever? It was like laughable. It was like, are you kidding me? I'm not going to bring my performance down to like whatever my web connection is, right?

And yet there were some teams out there like my friend Dylan and others who recognized that people are willing to trade performance and precision for ease of collaboration. And it was like this insight into this next generation or psychographic of like, I want everything to be with other people. Like I grew up in the age of Google Docs. And even if I have a little more kind of latency issue, I'd rather have that than not be able to work with other people in a truly multiplayer way. And that, to me, has redefined the web as we know it for my industry. And now we have Photoshop on the web and Illustrator on the web.

You know, that's the direction that things are going. So here we are in this whole Web3 debate. One of Aaron's biggest points is that it's slow, you know? It's like, why would you build a company with slower process? Why would you serve customers with more onboarding issues and more friction? Like it defies everything we know about modern software. Everything succeeds based on speed internally and for customers. And now Web3 is like throwing 30 wrenches into the system.

And so he's right. Like speed is critical and speed will be required for things to succeed. However, what is the compromise that we're all maybe willing to make for speed? I think one of those compromises might be autonomy, you know, might be control, might be privacy, might be the sense of ownership, you know, the desire to be incentivized for everything we participate in. Like some of those desires that are very innate consumer desires are legitimate and may in fact, you know, have us trade a little bit for speed and, you know, and then of course speed will come in later generations of the tech.

I think a piece of what you're getting at is something I've, mused on in various ways in the past, which is just that like the future of tech allows individuals to make decisions on those tradeoffs versus being forced into them. Historically, you were kind of forced into whatever the tradeoff was that the biggest company decided for like privacy versus functionality as an example. Like you just were going to give up your privacy in order to have the high functionality of Facebook or whatever these consolidated platforms are now. Now in the Web3 world, part of what makes.

me optimistic is that individuals will actually get to choose with their feet around where they want to be on these different spectrums. And so, like, I think of it, even in the most primitive context around, like, centralization and then like speed and functionality. When you go from, like, say, Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, there's clearly difference in the, like, actual decentralized nature of these. And you get a tradeoff in terms of the speed, like Solana versus Ethereum and the tradeoff there that exists around speed, pricing, etc., the ability to batch transactions, etc. So part of what I think is interesting in all of this is like that idea of individuals actually being able to go and make those decisions on the tradeoffs. I think that's right. And I think that

you know, in many cases centralized services will win or hybrid, you know, decentralized by ethos, but centralized to some extent by like certain aspects of the user experience. You know, I think are maybe going to ultimately win. But I love your point. I mean, the fact that we're no longer forced to do anything, you know, is an incredible feat in and of itself. And, you know, whenever there's competition, it always rises, you know, the customer experience and the options that we all have, which is a good thing, ultimately. Yeah. And you figure out what people actually care about, right? Like, everyone says they care about privacy. One of my, like, general hot takes is that people don't actually care that much about privacy or like the average person doesn't really care

that much about privacy and won't be willing to actually pay for it with worst functionality. And so I think you finally learn. What's that? Especially in the next generation. Yeah. No, totally. Yeah, you've gotten used to it, right? Like people are still posting their entire lives on TikTok, which is like owned by the Chinese government.

So anyway, why don't we dive into some of these? Greg, what do you think? Let's do it. Shit, where do we start? There's so many good ones in here. Well, let's start at the top, actually. Because I thought the first one was like really ripe for some interesting things. So recommendations kill favorites.

Can you talk a little bit about this one to start us off, Scott? Yeah, well, I'll be like provocative just to try to make this interesting for all of us. But what if we're all living in our own prisons, so to speak? You know, everything that we happen to be exposed to throughout childhood based on our location, cultural, you know, the music taste of our parents, the restaurants we happened to learn about when we were living in our city and traveling, like all of these things were exposed to by circumstance. We cherry pick the ones that we like,

and then those become our favorites, and those become our go-toes. And we end up in some ways living the life where we're like more and more constrained to those things because time is limited and you want to make sure you have a good meal at night. You want to make sure that your hour of listening to music is good music. And so you just go back to music you've always listened to. And so I've always been, you know, worried that I'm being like increasingly confined to some

degree. And I used to insanely organize my playlist on, you know, my music playlist and stuff. And my dinner party playlist was my go-to playlist for so many years and so many years. And then over the last year or so, you know, Spotify launched their enhanced function. So any three or four songs you put in a playlist, you can push enhance and have it a refreshed, AI-driven playlist based on that, you know, short, short set of songs. And my running list became that list. And I've was like, oh my gosh, new music every single day when I run. And suddenly I realize that my playlists are like these old, you know, dusty, limiting things that I've been a prisoner to to some degree. And maybe recommendations have reached that singularity moment, at least they have for me and my musical taste,

where I trust the AI more than my own kind of go-toes, you know, my own like sort of, you know, circumstantial run-ins with random songs from Shazam or whatever. And so, you know, that for music, that for travel, that for restaurants, that for whatever, like maybe we're all going to vastly increase the surface area of our exposure to stuff we like and in some ways, like, abandon the concept of favorites altogether. Okay, so my reaction to that is, and, you know, I worked that Stumble Upon, which is like OG Spotify recommendation. So I'm a huge believer in this. finally this is like hitting mainstream what scares me about it is or actually it's a question to you

like do you think that we lose like in a world where you know AI is giving us all our recommendations do we lose like let's say I create a playlist for you for you know Scott like that emotional connection that I you know oh like yeah maybe Greg doesn't get me as well as you know, an algorithm that has been learning, you know, trained to learn about me for 10 years. But the fact that he actually created this and thought about it, even the fact that I don't like the Rolling Stones and it's literally my most hated band, like, do you feel like we'll lose that? That's a good question.

You know, I think that it will, I think these, I think the list that you're describing you might make for me will never be as good. Now, I do think we'll still have Sponsan80. You know, I think that Spotify probably knows you and I are connected and, you know, might say, hey, you know, let's algorithmically test Greg's favorite three songs with Scott and see if he, you know, replays them, likes them, or ignores them, or skips them. And, you know, and so I feel like, I mean, the answer is, of course, yes and yes, right? Like, I mean, we should still, we will still be exposed to music in totally random ways.

I guess this is more about our human tendency to always collect favorites and go back to the stuff we know versus surrendering ourselves to like the AI algorithms that we don't know because they're just so reliable and they push us to actually open our boundaries, you know, more so than our own go-toes. It's also interestingly self-limiting from a happiness perspective. So I have this like utilitarian view on this, which is somewhat informed by like my childhood radio. nostalgia where me playing Spotify in my car. I have my playlist. I have my like 50 songs I like. They're probably embarrassing to a lot of people. I still like the Goo Goo Goo Dolls. I still like semi-charm life. If you don't bop to semi-charmed life and you don't like sing that out loud, I don't trust you. But I still have all of those things. But there's something different about when you turn on the radio and the song you love just comes on without you pressing the button. It's like a totally different level of happiness. And part of me thinks that there's actually like a increase in

overall societal happiness from having things that we love surface to us without us actually doing it. And this is like an unlock for that. If you actually have AI that suddenly is able to, maybe not suddenly, slowly then all at once, able to surface things that you're like, holy shit, I loved that. And it was totally new to me. And it brought up this nostalgia, this different feeling versus me going and picking the song. That's actually like a net happiness driver societally. So I like where you're going.

I mean, you just made me realize that the only company that would probably put a patch on my arm to like determine and detect my pheromones and my like moods and my temperature and body and everything else would probably be Spotify. Because, you know, I am totally fine with music being like, as you said, like perfectly teed up for me based on like all of these signals about me that I don't even realize. And if I'm suddenly sad and then boom. that like perfect song from like you know the 80s that always got me pumped up when I didn't want to go to school if that came on like that would be pretty amazing so that's epic that's actually

like a totally epic idea um that I've never really everyone always talked about like um you know when when we were kids actually those mood rings you have those rings that would like claim they change colors for your different moods you guys just like maybe this crazy idea who we should get the band yeah yeah Spotify into a partnership right right yeah yeah No, I like that. All right. Writing that down. Yeah.

Well, I wonder, yeah, I mean, it's, it seems like a no-brander to do something like that, right? Because music is like, I mean, historically, even if you just look at human society, music has always been a common thread of things that brought people together, things that drove different, you know, relationships, religious, spiritual, whatever it was, unlocks. I mean, even if you think about people with spiritual wellness, meditation, like all of the, like, calm and, you know, headspace and all of the apps and all of the. around that. Like, how do you integrate all of this into this, like, holistic human experience that's driven through sound? Kind of brilliant, actually. I'm a little bit thrown off by this. I didn't think we're going to come up with shit. Well, this kind of goes into one of the other predictions. I don't know if you want to jump around or not. Yeah, please. You know, this whole, this whole question about us opting into ads. And, you know, I wanted to, like, kind of strike out the word ads and just call it

personalized experiences. But I think that, you know, we, we grew up in the age of banner ads and, like, tooth, teeth, whitening ads and weight loss ads. And, like, we see ads as dirty and interruptive and takeovers of web pages and shit like that. We just hate ads, right? And yet, we love it when we walk into a restaurant and they know our name. We love it when, like, you know, a restaurant ordering up, like, Sweet Cream knows that we're a vegetarian and just, like, hides all the menu items with meat. Like, you know, we like, we like to get personalized experiences in every part of our life. People love, you know, not all people, but I know a lot of people who like the Instagram ads, you know, that they get because they're like, I actually click on them. It's like

cool stuff, you know, that is, seems geared towards me. And so, you know, I know we're in this era right now of like the great opt out and as iOS, you know, surfaces, ad tracking and kind of makes it harder for brands to give us personalized experiences. But I think as we're about to enter a world where we want our music to be served up to us based on our body temperature, you know, we want our, we want our, that's just me, maybe, I'm not suggesting that's all of us. We want to have experiences with brands where they know who we are. I think we're going to start opting back in. And I think, especially in the world of AR, you know, where we have immersive experiences around us, we're going to want to be known everywhere we are.

Yeah, I also think, go ahead. Yeah, no, I also think like, first of all, when I think of my own life, like, probably like 5% of my wardrobe is from Instagram if I actually think about it. Is that high or low? I, like, it's high. It's high. It's like when I'm, I think of my flip-flops, I have some hats. Like, I don't, when I'm scrolling through Instagram, I don't feel like I'm getting

targeted, you know? I feel like that's like the old guard, that targeted field just feels like, oh, this is interesting. You know, I talked about StumbleUpon earlier. For those of you who don't know StumblePon, it was this website or toolbar, actually, that you'd press a button based on your interest. It would serve you up websites that were interesting to you. And we invented this. We didn't want to call them ads. We called it paid discovery, which, you know, one in every 10 stumbles would be this.

you know, relevant for you web page. And I think that that's the direction. I mean, it's happened with Instagram. But I think like you're totally right on this prediction. I think it's 100% going to happen. And I think that people like me are just going to want to opt in to content from brands, basically, or or influencers or whatever. That's the way I see it at least. So I get a little scared here. And it ties the first prediction set together. to this second one for me. And I want, I want you guys to tell me if you, if you disagree, what scares me here is like, so music tied to your mood and your daily habits and, yeah, like, whether you're tired, awake, whatever. I love that. Like, I think it's human,

you know, happiness, utilitarian view is, is net positive. When you start, like, now venturing into the world of, like, consumer brands being able to know how you're feeling and target you at times when like your emotional state is most, you know, attuned to spending money because you're depressed or whatever it is, I start to feel this like little dystopian tickle on the back of my neck that I don't love. Like it starts to get black mirrory for me. And so what I worry about with this like opt-in ads, like super personalized, everything is perfect right when you need it, is like, okay, where does the data sharing? Where does all that just like cross that very thin line to being overly intrusive? your life. I mean, listen, I'm scared about the same thing. And as I'm sharing ideas and

brainstorming with you guys, I'm also cognizant of the fact that we're going to have to have an incredible announce of transparency with the user so they understand, you know, what they're doing, you know, what they're sharing and why. You know, maybe it's like a, um, maybe it's like a way where you kind of get paid for your willingness to contribute that additional information into these algorithms. Like, you know, conceivably in an economic sense, more highly efficient ads allow consumer companies to lower prices because they're able to actually drive better margin efficiency or better kind of return on that spend. So I wonder whether they can kind of pass through some of that. Like, you know, you actually kind of get paid in a certain sense more

directly for your willingness to contribute additional data or opt into these things. Yeah, it would be interesting. I mean, there's a lot of innovation to be hot here. Like, can people be informed why they're seeing or why an experience is a certain way? You know, when you're looking at an experience, you already kind of know what's an ad. I mean, they have to show that. But if you can further understand, like, what's being personalized for you and where it's coming from, you know, imagine if it doesn't, you know, if it's a normal thing for us as consumers to kind of go in and just look at our profile from the standpoint of the brand. Like, what are, you know, do they see me as an athletic person? do they see me as a this person or a that person and why?

I mean, it's, it sounds kind of scary and controversial, but shouldn't we as consumers kind of know how we're being profiled to some extent and maybe even be able to, you know, to impact that to some degree? That's interesting. I wonder whether there's a way to do that in a third party context. So if you could like create a tool that basically takes as inputs, everything you're being served up and then creates an output. put of like, here's the archetype that you are being targeted based off of in your online

persona. You know, it's somewhat related, which is, you know, another idea that I've been growing and hopefully I'll find some founder that's tackling this and wants help, but is the idea of us, you know, as consumers filling out a profile for ourselves of all of our likes and dislikes and everything and proactively opting to share. that with every brand and restaurant and hotel and airline that we ever come in contact with. Because everyone in the hospitality sector wants to know more about us. And there's a lot of information that we want everyone to know about us,

or at least like the subset of brands and experiences that we patronize as consumers. And so why isn't there like a brand for that, you know, where you fill out your preferences? You know, I don't like shampoo bottles in my hotel rooms, so I don't want to waste plastic every time I stay in a hotel, put that in there and then boom, every time I'm at any participating hotel, they have my profile, they don't waste the money on the shampoo. I'm not pissed about it, and everyone wins. So you're saying to say, Saha. So, okay, so, well, like, I might want to go do this. This is brilliant. So basically, like, you have a central hub, whatever, call it Belski.

Yeah. And you log in and it collects up front a bunch of information about you on all of your different preferences, food, hospitality, all of these different things. And then hospitality industry, whatever it is, travel industry, hotels, restaurants, everything, start in a given city. They all pay to then access this hub. It's all. It's an API thing. You know, we would make an API that interacts with all their databases for all their customers, right? And then it's hugely valuable for them.

Because then the first time I go to Joe's Bar and Grill on the corner, they create the best experience for me. They already know exactly the five things that I'm going to want. They know the exact drink. I always have a Woodford on the rocks when I come in. They already have it ready for me. It's like that amazing restaurant experience you get when you've been somewhere 100 times. And they know it the usual and they give you the thing and they know exactly what you like. And they know it's your birthday and they know, you know, give you a rose because it's your wife's, you know, anniversary that week.

Like they do all that. And isn't it funny that like every brand out there is trying to suck data out of us that we don't necessarily want to have shared? And I'm suggesting like let's make a company that gets all the data we do want shared. You know, let's structure it in such a way. You know, it gets it from us for free because we want people to know it. And then every brand that we patronize, you know, that pings this API, like, you know, gives us a better experience. And it's sort of in our control, right? Because we furnish the data ourselves.

Would you make this product Web 3 or do you think it's more of a Web 2 product? I mean, you know what? That's a great question. Like, I don't know. Like I've only built products in the Web 2 world, so I think about it that way. You know, my view on my view on the decentralized concept and it goes back to like the early conversation is the tradeoffs, right? And, you know, if there's an instance where the customer needs or wants, you know, something like the benefits of the decentralization of the product experience

or the underlying like, you know, the data structure or whatever, the service itself, if they're willing to trade, you know, a lot of the benefits of centralization for that. Sounds great. Yeah. I think I think some of the benefits, just like jamming on it a little bit. Some of the benefits of making a Web3 is, well, firstly, it's just, you know, if you want to, you know, let's say you earn tokens, you'd be able to swap it into Ethereum or other, you know, USDC. Earned tokens for what? So let's say every time you like checked in a like, so to speak, or you posted a like, you got one token of some sort. So the more that you contributed

to the network and the deeper the network you gave, so you're incentivized to publish because you're getting, you're getting tokens. And maybe those tokens. So that's, oh, sorry, you have sending you want to say there? No. Cool. So, so like number one is like the financialization of it and swapping. Number two is, um, the social aspect of it. So let's just say, um, you know, a friend of mine actually bought me an Xbox for, uh, for Christmas and I started downloading some games and I started like understand, you know, kind of getting into it. I go on to I, I like published page and I say like, I like Halo Infinite.

I like to play with Danny Trin, um, et cetera, I earn these tokens. And if I have enough Xbox tokens, or I have enough overwatch the game tokens or enough, you know, Halo Infinite tokens,

then I get access to maybe a private community of people with certain exclusive benefits. I guess I think about this and just like, and maybe I'm just being like naive on it, But I think there's like a pretty simple MVP that you can build something around in one city. Like say we were doing it in New York, I would just go, you go get 10,000, 20,000 users to fill out the info. And then you go on the back of that and go to a thousand, you know, kind of single, like single location, restaurants, hotels, whatever, that are in the city. and you tell them to pay you $100 a month to have access to this pool of information from these people.

And then you use it to serve up, hey, here are these places to the 20,000 people you just signed up and say, here are these places that are going to know exactly what you want, deliver you great experience. And the places are willing to do it because the retention on these users that are going to love their first experience is going to be amazing. And they're going to have customers for life or at least longer than they otherwise would because they're going to serve up a great experience. But you like, what is that? I mean, at a thousand stores at $100 a month, that's a million dollar ARR business right out of the gate. I just, like, I think you could spend some, and it would get smarter over time because you'd be able to, as you got more data, make the algorithms better and provide a better service. And eventually you could have some of these restaurants or hotels or others,

they could start building the profiles for you because you know, you book at a local hotel or you book at a, you know, wherever you go or an Airbnb. And they say, hey, you know, before you come, like fill out this survey so we know your preferences. And so it's a white-labeled version of the questionnaire that you mentioned at the beginning. And then at the end it says, do you want to only share this with Airbnb or do you want to share this with every brand and restaurant and whatever you go to so you can have a personalized experience everywhere. Like what percentage of people are going to be like, yeah, you know,

everywhere. And then you have it for the for the entire globe of consumers. Yeah, that becomes your, you know, you, you leave SDK Steakhouse in New York and they tell you, hey, you can get $50 off your next meal if you fill this thing out. Right. And now you have, you know, as a company, you have another, you know, 1,000 people a week or something that are filling this thing out for free. and the company pays for it. Exactly. Like, I think it's,

you know, it could be, it could be like the one massive consumer data company where everyone's information is in there because they wanted it to be in there. It's stuff you want the world to know about you, you know, and that's what I find so compelling about it. I actually agree in the sense,

you know, in terms of an MVP, like it doesn't need to be Web 3. And in fact, like 90% of Web 3 ideas, MVP it in Web 2 and just learn. Yeah. And then if you can add a web three component, once you've understand the problem set a lot better, I think that makes a lot more sense just because it's harder to build on Web3.

I'll tell you, like, somewhat of a tangent, because I know we get to jam on this call, right? Yeah, yeah, please. It is also around, I mean, listen, I bet I've had a lot of these Web3 debates with people as well as you have and have seen a lot of them transpire. And there's a cynical side of me that wonders also if the reason why. a lot of things will have to become Web3 is because of the financialization of all of us and in some ways it's a sad statement on humanity. But do we, are we going to no longer participate in things

unless we're compensated? You know, there was an interesting debate I was having with a few folks over on 20 this weekend about Wikipedia. You know, Bill Gurley mentioned, you know, to me, well, you know, Wikipedia seems to be going pretty well and no one's paid. It's not a DAB.

you know, and it's probably one of the most, you know, incredible gems of the world, in Internet at least, right? Now, a couple questions that I pose in response, number one, is Wikipedia all it could be? You know, is it some ways being held back by the fact that it's like 0.02% of participants are actually contributing content. Everyone else is just using it. Like, could it be something that's 10x better if people were incentivized, if maybe the best talent in the world were incentivized to engage?

number one. But then number two, I was like, what if less people actually contribute to it in the future because of the desire to be compensated for everything? You know, like, what if that's like this new trend? I, okay. So, first of all, have you guys been to Wikipedia recently, like the homepage? Oh my God. Like how much, how much you're asking pay money? You mean? Yeah, exactly. Like a third of the website is like, give us money and it's a nonprofit. And I totally get it. And, but it just feels potentially unsustainable. And for one of the greatest, like Wikipedia could be one of the most important products of humanity.

If you think about it. The fact that that could potentially break is really scary. Yeah, I mean, it brought the entirety of like human knowledge base, the base of human knowledge online. It did. It's like what the research papers did, except they did it for the mainstream, right? Like, it's amazing. It's like a nonprofit, you know, it's the closest thing to a Dow that we basically have today

in the sense that it's communally governed and it's owned by no one essentially. Did you guys ever do, as a side note, did you guys ever do Wiki quests when you were like younger as kids? No. This was the most fun thing we used to do during like, during like free periods in middle school or whatever, you would start at some page. Like, say you started at Space Jam, and then there would be an endpoint. Like, you had to get to, you know, from Space Jam to Pope Leo the 10th.

And you had to just only using link clicking, you had to find your way from one to the other. And it was such like, it was actually a very cool thing because it forced you to like create these mental connections and map out in your mind like, okay, what's my general path to get from one to the other? And it was all like, it was speed. And then sometimes you do one with number of clicks. and so you'd say you have to do it at under 10 clicks and get from one to the other. But it's actually like pretty fun.

Now I'm on Wikipedia right now as we speak and it's making me like the nostalgia is kicking in of wanting to go back and do one. So funny. It is an incredible resource. Yeah. It would be a shame if it was less maintained in the future because of the, you know, this strange change that we feel like everything we want to contribute to we want to be an owner of and otherwise not contribute.

So with Wikipedia, with that example, if you were trying to create a Web 3 version of that, do you think that's a worthwhile endeavor or what would it look like that's different than the current version? Yeah, well, I guess the grand experiment would be that instead of having this loyal army of volunteers, very, very small minority of users, give up their time to kind of sustain it.

you know, if you had a group of people that were otherwise incentivized to not only sustain but innovate it, right, to like bring it to new levels or whatever, you know, there's, I guess the negative argument would be, hey, first of all, if it's not broken, don't fix it, but I don't like that argument generally because it doesn't bring us to extraordinary ends of anything. And so, like, what else would you do? You know, how will Wikipedia ever become an immersive experience? you know, why aren't, why isn't, why isn't, why isn't Wikipedia have a meme layer associated with it? You know, we know that memes are a compression vehicle for knowledge, like, but no one has an

incentive, right, to build on top of Wikipedia. If you, you know, if it's still, if it's just going to be part of the nonprofit, unfortunately, like, it doesn't seem like it's attracting that level of, like, innovator necessarily. So I, I, that's an open question, right? If it were, if it were sort of, if it were an organization in which every participant gain tokens based on their contributions, would there be 10x more contributors, would there be 10x more developers? Would there be 10x more designers, you know, making mockups of concepts that are voted on and then executed and whatever? Or not. Would it just be like a, you know, a crazy crap storm of stuff without any, you know, centralized leader and decision maker? Like, I don't know, but it's definitely worth the experiment.

What if you made Wikipedia into like a play to earn game, Greg? And you had to kind of like buy some number of wiki tokens in order to be a kind of builder and contributor on the platform. And then you can earn them for contributing well and innovating around it. And then you kind of cap, you know, the ability for new people to buy into it so that it never becomes like centralized in the hands of one given party or body that would then control the internet. I think, so I love that. I think gaming is a really great way to get people to do things. And it's just a really great, you know, I'm curious Scott's opinion, but like great product design or experience to bring people to get together, immerse them, and get them to click buttons. So, yeah, I think if we were doing Wikipedia 3.0 in Web 3, and make sense to,

to think about it in a gaming perspective. I'm inclined to agree in the sense that, you know, you always felt like, you know, leader boards, you know, would incentivize, you know, for their people to be kind of greatest contributors in certain verticals, right? And, you know, you are always wanting to defend your position in that leaderboard, and that means you have to do a great job

in terms of community guidelines, and you have to make sure that everything's factual and backed up and whatever. I mean, I think game mechanics ultimately, you know, drive those like ego analytics that make us feel like we're successful, you know, contributing in the right way to a product. So it'll be super interesting to see that layer, you know, in a product. Yeah. Alexis Ohanian has at 776, they have this internal proprietary software they built out called cerebro, I think it's called, like Star Trek reference, that manages like all of their internal stuff. And one of the portals is this like value add, like, how can I help?

portal within it that actually gamifies their ability to execute against asks from portfolio companies and how much value they're adding. And so like every single investment professional or team member at 776 has like a scorecard that shows up publicly every day and they all try to compete to see who can add more value to the portfolio. And it's it's sort of brilliant, right? Like they invested in AXE. So I know they understand gaming and, you know, play to earn in general.

But it's kind of a brilliant way of just incentivizing people to actually execute against the whole how can I help thing that. VC, you know, it's become a VC meme, you know, make it less, make it less meme-like and more reality. You know, in some ways, like any mechanic that brings us back to the way things once were, you know, I also shared in this article, like, that's always my governing kind of compass for predictions is, you know, what sorts of technologies are enabling us to go back to the world we long for?

And so in some ways, what did we do in the early days to amuse ourselves? We just played games, right? I mean, we competed in the gladiator arena. We watched other people compete. We, you know, we always were like having that sort of very visceral, physical, like, gaining mentality as, as early humans. And so to bring in some of those mechanics to the types of, you know, work and the kind of things we do together these days, you know, seems like a no brain. It's like, I think of it as like nostalgia as a service. Yeah.

Like it brings you back. it actually ties into one of my favorite ones on your list too really well, which is this whole idea of polygamous work. And the reason I think it ties in is because to your point on like arrows of progress being really around back to the way things once were, I think of like the when you read the classics and you read the classic works of all of these like stoic philosophers or ancient Greek philosophers, so much of them was like they were grounded in being polymaths. They weren't just one thing. They were a philosopher. They were a writer. They were were an athlete, you know, they were like 10 things and they did all of them. They were socialites.

And then somewhere along the way, like the industrial age brought us this whole idea of you graduate college, which you had to go and spend way too much money for. You get done. You take a job. You work in that job for 40 years. And then they give you a gold watch and you retire. And that's your life. That's what it looks like. You, you know, you hope you saved enough money to be okay, but that's your life. And I thought your way of phrasing the polygamous careers, um, was brilliant. So I'd love to dive in on this one because I think there's also, you know, hundreds of businesses that are going to be built around this exact trend and this exact kind of flow of progress. Well, I mean, you're exactly right. I think that, I mean, I've

always found personally, like, you know, that I'm most happy when I feel fully utilized. And I feel fully utilized both in personal ways with my family and friends. And then professionally, I feel fully utilized both building products with teams, helping founders go through problems of their own partnering with designers to solve gnarly problems and you know to have to pick one of those tracks as my full-time forever role would leave me depressed and I actually made that mistake once in my career where I said okay I'm only going to be you know an investor and it just was like I felt like I'd hung up my sort of spurs you know in every other aspect of what I was proud of about myself and it just did not you know it didn't it didn't work well for me so you know I think that

the, and to your point, at the entire system, right, from college recruiting to health care, LinkedIn profiles, tax forms, they're all geared towards monogamous careers. And it's not really about people splitting themselves. Now, why is, but why is this suddenly a turning point? Like, what's really systematically changing right now and why? I mean, first of all, we've, like, grown up in the generation that's now in their, you know, entering the workforce. They grew up with, like, constant bells and buzzes, right? They were in a hyper-networked world. where they would be, you know, on Facebook and then on a math tutor and then in roadblocks and chatting live with someone and live broadcasting, something to their friends and whatever, all in the same

hour. And so the idea of like building that skill set until you're 18 or whatever and then suddenly being told, okay, now your job is to just crank out Excel spreadsheets at a bank, you know, that's going to be like such a drop in dopamine for lack of a better term. I don't know. Like, it's just going to be driving us nuts. And so why? Why? you know, what does this new world look like, right? Now, a lot of people that are kind of anti this thesis would say one of two things. Oh, that's just the millennials. They're all selfish. You know, they don't want to like work hard, you know, and then others have told me, hey, Scott, you're missing the fact that like specialization wins. Like I would only want to bet on people who truly specialize.

Well, to those people, you know, my one retort is that creativity is the new productivity. know, we're going to stand out increasingly in our work and on social media and on any other thing that's, you know, amplifying our opportunity stream through our creativity. You know, it's not about doing things faster. It's about standing out and doing things more beautifully and elegantly and whatever else. And so if we're all becoming artists of AI and robots, you know, is automating all the productivity side of our equation and it's all about creativity, well, then we, you know, we better be acting like artists. And artists die when they, you know, become too specialized. Like the whole point of being an artist is to be like exposed to many

mediums and constantly be changing your own craft. Yeah, there's so much there to dig into. So creativity is the new product. I've never heard it phrase that way and that's brilliant. I think like I always go back to this whole concept of working like a lion, not like a cow. If you're if you're creative worker, you have to work like a lion. It has to be bursts and sprints of creative energy followed by legitimate periods of rest. And the industrial age work culture, which we've, that's persisted over the last several hundred years is not suited to that, right? You're supposed to go to the nine to five job.

That's like what 90% of people still do. And it's what you're supposed to do. And all of society and all of our infrastructure has been built on top of that, to your point, you know, financial services is one of the hugest areas of disruption for this, in my opinion, because the way I put it is like 1099 income is effectively taxed. at a much higher rate than W2, not in the sense of like an actual tax rate, but in the sense that you can't go get leverage on it. Good luck getting a mortgage with a bunch of 1099 income. If you have a million dollars of 1099 income here and a million dollars of W2 income here,

what is that worth to you in society? A whole hell of a lot more on the W2 side for better or for worse. Because all of the systems, all of the underwriting, everything has been built around it. I mean, we, Greg and I both have a friend who has like, you know, eight plus figures net worth and is not able to get like a really low rate loan on a house. And he could buy the house outright, but he cannot do it because he doesn't really have W2 income. That's crazy, like that we live in a culture where that's the case. And so I think there's all of these cool business opportunities that are going to be built around, assuming this trend is real, which I do personally believe it is,

building the infrastructure layer that allows polygamous workers to thrive in society in the same way that W2 workers have been able to. Like I think there's this business collective, a friend, Human Radfar was the founder of that is like enabling 1099 workers from a kind of tax and back end efficiency standpoint. Brilliant. Things like, you know, new banking for businesses, for startups, for small businesses that enable you to do things more efficiently that are going to start being, you know, able to underwrite more effectively. There's all sorts of businesses that I think are going to be built around this trend. But fixing the infrastructure is like it's the only thing that's going to allow it to really thrive. And, you know, Greg, I feel like this is curious to hear your thoughts,

but I feel like this is an actual area where the notion of DAOs for future businesses might have a talent advantage. Because if you are just a rock star engineer or designer or whoever else who has its desire to have two or three irons in the fire that really fully utilize, their skill sets and interests, you know, and subscribe to this new kind of polygamous career, you know, manifestation of, you know, or approach to life, I guess, you know, it's not like freelancers. They're actually going to want to own, right, some of their outcome. They're going to be, they're going to want to be compensated based on their contributions, not some like predetermined

contract that's super ambiguous. It's like, I want to be compensated for the code that I commit, for the design that gets into production. And, you know, our, their models that could allow people to kind of, you know, have some percentage of various different projects, you know, act as an owner of those things, you know, be rewarded for their efforts to market it and almost, almost behave like a founder. I don't know if Google still has it, but they used to have this, I think they call this spot-on bonus where you basically can give a coworker $500 like almost at any time if they do something really great. And I thought that was really cool because it, you know, it's not about the money, but just the fact that, you know, if you do good things, here's a bonus.

And to your point, Scott, around like, Gen Z especially, like they need to be an environment that feels more like, you know, Roblox than, you know, doing data entry, right? Or it's just not going to work. And what I love about Dow's is you're getting dopamine. You're getting dopamine by virtue of like the discord is buzzing. There's community calls. And most importantly, you're getting, you know, every day or every time you contribute, every time you commit code, every time you design, every time you do something, you get that hit of like, I just earn tokens.

Yeah. And it's, you know, it's funny. Like, again, back to that financialization of everything thing, you know, I don't want us to, I don't want to turn us to all turn ourselves into. the hamsters, you know, where it's like, do this, get this, do this, get this. And it just keeps like doing that over and over. But I also wonder if, you know, there is some gain in empowerment, right? When you know that like every contribution you're making is being valued, as opposed to like wondering, you know, whether you're just a cog in the system and not

moving any needle forward. So I think there's something to be explored here. I do think that the companies that embrace this, this, you know, new modern form of worker are going to have a talent advantage. There's someone I know who, well, actually, Sahill and I talk a lot about balance and rest and that all the time. And there's someone I know who's a part of a Dow. And this particular Dow has this token that has just gone through the roof. So, you know, he was getting, you know, a couple hundred dollars a week or a few thousand dollars a

week. And it's now, you know, to do a couple tasks. And all of a sudden now, I don't know what the number is, but it's something crazy, like $50,000 or $100,000 a week. And he's working 20 hours a day contributing to this day. He quit his job and stuff like that. And I face-timed with him. And I, like, saw his eyes. There's like, they're drooping. He looked terrible. He didn't shower. It was like, brutal. And I was like, dude, you need to stop. And he couldn't get him. And he basically told me, I can't, I can't stop. So I think what we're going to see is, you're right. Like, I think that, like, I think there's going to be a subset of people who are going to be contributing to Dows,

who are going to be unable to basically take a step back and be like, okay, I need to go eat with my family. I need to take a shower, et cetera. And that's scary. There's also just going to be opportunities around, like, the polygamous worker operating system. both from a company standpoint and from an actual individual standpoint, where like right now, all of these companies have built the kind of operating system for like managing hybrid workforces or managing remote workforces, right? There's all these great businesses out there that are doing that, that enable like talent,

HR teams, whatever, to manage where are people working, when are they working, etc. But like extending that to now I have workers who are working maybe 20% of their time. I have like a two-day, you know, worker. and I need to make sure that, you know, we're optimizing what they're working on, when they're working on. Maybe I want to make them 40% rather than 20% and kind of manage that and negotiate it. Like the operating system to do all of that, I think, has yet to be built around this, you know, kind of polygamous work future. And it's pretty interesting because right now it's like really fly-by-night shit. If you're a 1099 worker and you're trying to do a bunch of different projects, where do you go?

Like maybe you have an upwork profile. Maybe you're on Fiverr. You know, maybe you're kind of tweet, you know, Twitter DMing with people. people to do some work. There's no like central portal that actually allows you to kind of, you know, manage all of this in one place and have the companies be able to like manage trade, etc. I think it's a great, it's a great opportunity because being in a big company, I know how hard it is to bring on a freelancer to do a specific project for us. And you kind of have to go through someone else. And yeah, and if you're in New York or California,

good luck. It's crazy. And yet I've also seen the other side of this, you know, having built the hands and seeing the creative careers of the most talented people I'm, you know, on the network that I always followed, those folks, they don't work for anyone. Like, they work for lots of different people, right? They don't work for any one particular company only is what I mean to say. If you're like an incredible illustrator, typographer, a person like Jessica Hish, or if you're a, you know, just an amazing, you know, motion graphics designer or data, data infographic kind of person or whatever, like you are, you are working for the best agencies and brands in the world. And whether it's Nike or whoever else, like, you know, they're kind of

working with you at your terms because they want your skill set. But those people are so famous that, you know, they can get companies to bend over backwards to have to work with them. But if that's any lead indicator of what the best talent in the world will be doing in the future, you know, I think it's a decent one. And I think that to your point, the system that allows folks to be engaged by many different brands and projects without, friction, you know, that just unlocks a massive talent advantage for the, you know, for the companies ultimately. So yeah, and for the people, it's more efficient pricing of their services, right? If it's all in one place, you don't get these like massive gaps. You know, it's like a much

more efficient market for them, which is good for the individual. So you can kind of like, you know, you can onboard people that way because you're actually, they're not going to have the friction costs. It'll just be like pretty transparent. That's right. Yeah. And Scott used this You use this word, Scott, or two words, just to say, standing out. It's really about standing out. And I think that's so true that I'm happy that we're, you know, going to 2022 where it's, you know, it's not about, you know, if you graduate a certain school or, or so to speak. It's about just can you be creative and can you stand out amongst the sea?

I mean, that's very difficult. But I think that if you, you know, for everyone who's listening, if you can, you know, orient yourself around standing out, I think that's going to go a long way. I think that's right. And that's also why I feel like the democratization of these creative tools that let you stand out is also so critical. You know, another one of my sort of thoughts in this piece was around the mainstream of 3D creation. Because I just feel like right now it's still something that's pretty hard to do. And most of us, you know, can't just create in 3D. but you know if we're if we're starting to have experiences with each other in VR and soon AR

I feel like just like you know Facebook started to introduce photos into the activity feed actually like after their launch like it was just the profile photo as we might remember and then photo and everyone sort of became a photographer once social media welcomed photography as a mainstream you know part of the product and cameras on our phones allowed us all to be photographers and edit our photos same exact things. going to happen for 3D. I'm like wholly convinced that that's the case. And, and, you know, but the tools don't exist for that yet, which is pretty exciting. But yes, standing out. I mean, at the end of the day, we're all brands to some extent and we're all only as late as good

and fresh as our latest content, right? Yeah. And I think it's like, what does that really mean concretely? Like standing out? It's like understanding like cultural zeitgeist. And, you know, if people are going this, you know, zigging this way, like zagging. And, you know, using design and creativity to be different. And so you stand out on a timeline. You stand out on a feed. Exactly. Yeah.

And it's just like we fundamentally now live in a very, very cool era for entrepreneurs. I'm not old enough to say that it's like, you know, the first time in history. But the barriers to starting something are so damn low. I mean, with no code, low code, you know, with communities being able to actually surface and find niche communities as quickly as possible. I mean, if you were to just like very quickly want to come up with a business idea, you go out and find a large market, say financial services, you go find a niche community that is underserved by incumbents within that. You go ask a hundred of them, have 100 conversations and ask them what their pain points are. and then you go use no code, low code to build something that is like very well suited to that niche tiny community. You can spin up a business in an, I don't know, a week if you wanted to

and like get something off the ground and started. And for very, I mean, you can go use like one of these services to hire developer talent to build something out very cost effectively. Like it is amazing the era we live in if you're entrepreneurial and you have a builder mindset. I love that. I'm totally. agree with you and you know I think obviously Spotify and so Shopify and some of the other companies that are long-tail e-commerce you know these are the companies that are enabling right exactly what you're saying arming the rebels and in 10 years from now I think we're going to see probably 10x the number of small businesses as there are today and and we'll probably we'll probably have more long-tail purchases

you know in our lives than we do today as well I think it's partly because of the hyper personalization targeted ad stuff were talking about earlier, you know, Greg can, instead of 5% of his wardrobe, it can be 15% of his wardrobe. That's from like super niche, you know, uh, makers of stuff that, you know, are uniquely tuned to him. But I also think that we're going to want more of this back to the whole, like, we go back to the way things once were. We're going to want to patronize local artisans and small shops or the future equivalent of local artisans maybe is the person who like stitches t-shirts on eBay, you know, with like opposite color stitching. Sorry, uh,

Etsy, maybe not eBay, you know, and makes like custom things on Etsy and that's like our t-shirt person and whatever else. And so that that long tail of small businesses that, you know, that make our lives rich and interesting, I think that's a great positive trend for society and culture. There's like an inherent tension here though, right? Where, yes, technology is enabling this long tail to exist. You're able to like rent capacity. you know, at contract manufacturers if you're building products or at AWS, if you're building services or tech. And, and that enables a lot. At the same time, power laws suggest that all of the winnings are going to a fewer number of people. And like, I've thought about this tension recently

in a very weird context with music where I was listening to like throwback 90s singing the car jams or something on Spotify. And there are an unbelievable number of songs by artists. that I don't know that they produced any other song. Like, it was, you know, steal my sunshine by like L-E-N. Amazing song, like, generationally good song. Don't know if they produced anything else. Like, I do feel as though as technology has progressed, there may be fewer of those, like, random one-hit wonder types because all the algorithm just keeps pushing you to the exact same,

like, small set of songs where in the past, radio basically said, if you can get your single on the radio, you know, you could have like just one song that just happened to be a massive hit and took off. And so like I'm wrestling with this inherent tension. And maybe I'm maybe I'm just misunderstanding it. But I am feeling this tension that exists between like the idea of power laws and technology and what it does. And this whole idea of enabling the long tail to exist and thrive. Yeah. It's like really because there's, you know, there's some behaviors we have in culture where we don't ever want. want to be like wearing the same thing as everyone else. We don't want to eat the same thing as

everyone else. There's this desire, it seems, to, you know, to seek originality, right, and to express yourself creatively through your originality, which, I mean, I guess to your point, we could all be buying it off of Amazon. So there's the power law at work for you. But I just, I just can't help but wonder, like, for example, I've been watching this company called the Custom Movement, where they have artists personalized or customized shoes and it's just like huge marketplace now of people who essentially are buying like the white classic nikes and then they're just like doing amazing it was a yc company back you know many years ago not many but like five years ago maybe and you know it's and it's artists like personalizing

everything for everyone and the idea of like why wouldn't you want personal apparel and shoes that are one of a kind and uniquely catered to you and that's great for an artist out there that's great for a small business. It also might be good for Nike if they're making the underlying shoes. But it's, I can see the two fighting. I mean, there will be like the cost curves, you know, fighting in favor of power laws. And then there will be originality maybe on the other side. Yeah. Well, it'll be interesting to see it play out over the next five, ten years. This was, this was absolutely awesome, man. I feel like we've taken up a bunch of your time more than I expected we would just because we got so deep down these rabbit holes. But this was incredible.

and some just amazing, interesting ideas and insights. And there are a few business ideas in here that if there are entrepreneurs out there who are listening to this that want to go build this, the local customization, optimization for hospitality, SaaS play. If there's someone out there, Scott, me, Greg, hit us up because I'm super, super, super interested in that. But no, thank you so much, Scott. This was freaking awesome.

I'm glad we got to do it. I can't believe this is the first time we've actually interacted somewhat face-to-face. In person here. But no, guys, great. Thanks first of all for doing these conversations in the first place and for having me. I'm excited. It should be a fascinating year ahead, that's for sure. Yeah, no.

And thank you for publishing your notes, your notion, basically, with the world. Because I think it's a domino effect. that's the best way to describe it. I think a lot of people read that, and we had a lot of chatter about it in our Discord. And so, you know, thank you for that inspiration. And it's going to be a hell of a year. So a lot of trends, a lot of stuff happening.

And thank you so much, Scott. Absolutely. Thank you, man. Guys. Talk soon. All right. Cool. Wow.

That was fucking crazy. Are we still recording? Yeah, I don't know. Are we still recording? Honestly, post this. post this. It was crazy. One of my favorite parts about starting islands,

my last company, was jamming with Scott Belsky because he invested in the company. We would have these conversations, just like the one we had now, about where the trends are going and what opportunities exist. And more often than not, Scott is completely on the mark.

and it's such a pleasure. He's such a nice guy. My brain is absolutely spinning with ideas right now. We had a few good ones. So what did you think? Oh, I mean, first off, just an awesome guy. I had never met him face to face. And I feel like I was best friends. I mean, just like he feels like your friend right away. Crazy smart. To your point at the end, I mean, I love that he's willing to just like put himself in the intellectual gauntlet. I actually found it fascinating at the beginning when we talked through his process, like how he jots down notes and he's like a compulsive, compulsive, like, note jodder and his notion doc and then kind of starts to aggregate and synthesize. I'm probably going to implement that this year, actually, is just like things I'm observing. I'm just going to have one page where I drop down big observations to try to synthesize.

I love that he sends it to people and, like, has people spar with his ideas. That's just such like a cool concept to me and so interesting. In terms of takeaways, I mean, I had a bunch. My biggest, if I had to pinpoint one, I think it's that business idea around, you know, a SaaS platform for like customized hospitality experiences. I think that is fascinating. I'm a little bit shocked that it doesn't already exist. But I think it's like a brilliant thing you could start at a regional level with a pretty light touch effort, very little, you know, development build out. And honestly, I mean, you could focus, it would be a huge driver for mom and

pops for smaller restaurants, smaller hospitality chains. I think it's really, really interesting. It goes to that mental model of like taking what the highest end premium experiences already do and bringing it to everybody, like that model, that framework of doing business. Because the four seasons sort of does this. Like they, once you've gone there, they'll start to pattern what you like, what you don't like, what newspaper, etc. And then they provide it to you. But doing that at a scale where smaller mom and pops, smaller businesses are able to access and deliver that same set of experiences is an amazing business idea. So I'm like, I'm hooked on that. I want to get into the community and jam on that more because I think there's something super interesting there to be built.

Yeah, I think you're absolutely right. And like we talked about like could start on web two. Definitely a web three opportunity there also. I loved talking about Wikipedia, by the way, because it was a reminder that, you know, if we lost Wikipedia, that would really suck. So, yeah, that was super amazing. Scott's an idea machine. So I loved it. I'm so glad we got to do it to start the year.

It's a great way to frame up the year, too, and just like start thinking big to start 20-22. So for everyone out there, I hope you enjoy. voted it as much as we did. And we're going to get Scott into the community. We'll go deeper on all of this in the Discord. So, so excited to release this one and go further on it. So thank you all so much for joining. Cheers. The saying used to be, let your games speak. With Commonstock, it's about let your gains speak. I love Commonstock, love the platform, and have really been enjoying learning from other people on there. How does it work? It's a platform for verified investment knowledge. So people are going and sharing their ideas, sharing their trades, but it's actually

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