To the extent that we were taught any history at all, I suspect that many of us learned our world history in a fairly linear fashion: “First the Greeks, then the Romans, then the Dark Ages, t… | Continue reading
Water is weird. It’s absolutely vital to us as a human species and as a planet: we’re made of water, we consume a lot of water, and we can’t survive without water. It’s very precious to us. On the … | Continue reading
One night, a young man who we’ll call Student went to sleep and fell into a strange dream. Student: Huh, where am I? I don’t recognize this place. In front of him was a large black box,… | Continue reading
Six months ago I proposed The Michael Scott Theory of Social Class, which says: “The higher you ascend the ladder of the Educated Gentry class, the more you become Michael Scott.” The M… | Continue reading
In honor of the Apple Watch release today, I’d like to talk about something Apple seems to consistently get away with, and why they’re not lucky – they’re good. One of the most in… | Continue reading
Hello everyone! This week in Dancoland, Jim O’Shaughnessy and I have a fresh podcast recording for your enjoyment. Alex Danco: Everyone’s job is World-Building | Infinite Loops You can … | Continue reading
The most pure expression of power you’ll ever see is standup comedy. I don’t mean the greatest magnitude of power, mind you. Most standup comedians are broke, and most comedy acts fail t… | Continue reading
Each year, Shopify releases a report with Deloitte called our Economic Impact Report, in order to highlight and celebrate some bigger-picture impacts of Shopify merchants around the world. This pas… | Continue reading
What a year it’s been. Last February, before joining Shopify, I wrote a post called Debt is Coming that provoked a great discussion around how fixed income is finally going to challenge the all-equ… | Continue reading
David Byrne, from the Talking Heads, wrote a book recently called How Music Works that’s filled with interesting insight into the mechanics and the detail of how music gets made, and how scenes get… | Continue reading
Here is a riddle I think about quite often, and just might be of interest to the Gamespop crowd going forward: Five pirates (who used to be hedge fund managers before they gave up their life of sin… | Continue reading
You people want a Gamestonk take, well okay then you’re going to get a Gamestonk take. Unless you’ve been completely living under a rock up until today (Thursday the 28th, as I’m writing this), a b… | Continue reading
I’m happy to finally share a thesis I’ve been chewing on for a little while. I call it The Michael Scott Theory of Social Class, which states: The higher you ascend the ladder of the Educated … | Continue reading
Toronto is not the next great startup scene. Neither is Waterloo, or Vancouver, or anywhere in Canada. I’m sorry that I have to write this. I really am. I want it to work. But the growing cho… | Continue reading
I’m now six months into Shopify. So far it’s going basically on schedule: as I was told, “Your first couple months you’re going to have zero idea what’s going on. Then around month three you’ll com… | Continue reading
Nadia Eghbal’s new book, Working In Public: the Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software, may not have been on your short list of books to read this year. It’s admittedly a nerdy topic: … | Continue reading
Whenever I have a candid conversation with someone interesting in tech, I like to ask: “What are taboo topics in Silicon Valley?” Unsurprisingly, most of the suggestions I hear are not actually tab… | Continue reading
Welcome back to this multi-part newsletter series on Gift Culture on the online frontier. If you missed them, check out Part One (defining gift culture, and the “homesteading” behaviour exhibited b… | Continue reading
If you go to the About page on Matthew Ball’s website, you’ll find a quote from Jason Hirschhorn: “Kevin Mayer called and said ‘Hey, Bob Iger and I would like to have lun… | Continue reading
Three years ago, Chamath sat us all down at a Social Capital all hands meeting and told us about this great new thing we were gonna do. It was called a SPAC. A SPAC (“Special Purpose Acq… | Continue reading
Three months ago to the day, I wrote: I’m getting concerned that we’re not psychologically ready for what’s coming next. The future may not be predictable, but people are. I have no idea what’s goi… | Continue reading
Kevin Kwok had a great essay the other day on Figma, and how its runaway success is based on hundreds of successful loops baked into its product and business model: Why Figma Wins | Kevin Kwok It g… | Continue reading
Obviously we’re going to talk about this today: Ok, so. Up until this year, I would’ve told you that there are two general kinds of financial bubbles. The first kind of bubble is where everyo… | Continue reading
The other day I went for a drive around town, just to clear my head a bit and check out the empty city. For the most part, it looked empty, but ordinary; like being out at dawn before the city wake… | Continue reading
It’s time we did a non-pandemic related newsletter issue. So this week we’ll do something more fun. Today we’re going to talk about an interesting journal article that came out two weeks ago,… | Continue reading
So: To be clear, I don’t think we can really call COVID-19 itself a Black Swan event. Plenty of people saw it coming, in some form or another, and said so. If you asked people last year, “what will… | Continue reading
Seems like a good week, with the Coronavirus pandemic and all, to talk about this: Upon request, I feel like I ought to explain some of these misunderstandings. I already wrote one a few months bac… | Continue reading
Here are two aspects of the anti-tech backlash that I believe are both true, and are actually reciprocally related to each other: Critics in media, politics, and even in tech itself, who spend all … | Continue reading
Here are two aspects of the anti-tech backlash that I believe are both true, and are actually reciprocally related to each other: Critics in media, politics, and even in tech itself, who spend all … | Continue reading
It’s January 2020. And if you’re a founder just starting out, trying to create something out of nothing, one of the best investments you can make is still a plane ticket to San Francisco. A l… | Continue reading
Before I found my way to the tech world, I was a grad student in the neuroscience department at McGill University. I never took the opportunity to get my PhD, and left science to do a startup inste… | Continue reading
Before I found my way to the tech world, I was a grad student in the neuroscience department at McGill University. I never took the opportunity to get my PhD, and left science to do a startup inste… | Continue reading
Ten years from now, what seismic change will we reflect back on and think, “well that was pretty obvious, in retrospect”? Debt is going to finally come to the tech industry. We can hat… | Continue reading
Here is a wild story: You should read the original thread of tweets here, but here’s what happened: Pim Techamuanvivit, the owner and chef of a few popular restaurants in San Francisco, was m… | Continue reading
Here is a wild story: You should read the original thread of tweets here, but here’s what happened: Pim Techamuanvivit, the owner and chef of a few popular restaurants in San Francisco, was m… | Continue reading
Ten predictions for the next ten years. 1-5 come out today, come back for 6-10 next week. #1: Enterprise software in the 2020s will replay Softbank’s Capital-as-a-Moat disaster of the late 2010s. … | Continue reading
The more we understand about the world around us, the less it seems we understand about people and the way they are. This post is an introduction to one man, named René Girard, who bucked this tren… | Continue reading
The more we understand about the world around us, the less it seems we understand about people and the way they are. This post is an introduction to one man, named René Girard, who bucked this tren… | Continue reading
Michael Seibel of YC posted a short video the other day about a topic that’s near and dear to my heart: Why Fundraising is Different in Silicon Valley. This is an interesting and important questio… | Continue reading
Generally speaking, I think there are currently two main anthropological clichés about internet culture: The first one is “The internet brings out the status-seeking narcissist in us.” The internet… | Continue reading
One problem I think about a lot (as a clear non-expert) is how land use and transportation patterns are evolving into a new kind of inequality wedge in North American cities. There’s no doubt that … | Continue reading
Back in 2015, I wrote a blog post called Dropbox: the First Dead Decacorn. At the time, it was the most widely shared take I’d ever written. I learned several things from writing this piece, and no… | Continue reading
If I told you about a piece of consumer electronics technology that: A billion+ people own and use every dayHas changed those people and their world in some pretty radical and consequential waysGet… | Continue reading
If Netflix is a genius aggregator with all the subscribers, the best data, and the most focus on long-term compounding… then what’s the deal with this ransom payment they just made? Today we’re goi… | Continue reading
We have to talk about WeWork again!So I guess they’re postponing the IPO after all, now that we’ve spun the roulette wheel and landed on “too toxic to handle” rather than “trillion dollar market op… | Continue reading
Each day on Tech Twitter, we get up in the morning, open up the website, and then go see what it is we’re mad about. A few days ago, it was this: The concept of “pay to get a better place in line” … | Continue reading
So. WeWork, in whose co-working locations I’m sure many of you have spent time, is going public. It’s going for it at a time where – if you believe the news – the world economy is threa… | Continue reading
As a general rule, I try to read everything that Matthew Ball writes about media at REDEF. His work is high-quality, perceptive, and I always learn something. So I was surprised, but also intrigued… | Continue reading