It’s been a weird few weeks. I’ve been thinking about how fun working at Twitter was once upon a time, but also how often our lives were in danger. Like when the company refused to censor political content in India, because of free speech, and the Indian government responded with threats that forced colleagues into hiding. The internet wasn’t a separate place then, and it certainly isn’t today.

When I launched this newsletter five years ago, I surmised that we were living through a sfumato—the soft transition between light and dark shades. In other words, we occupied a liminal space that was both online and offline (this became the newsletter name. Yeah, I’ve never been less creative in my entire life). Five years later, both worlds have collided into enmeshed chaos. Thank you to COVID, Obama, and memes. Seriously, though, several anecdotes point to this reality—

Cultural polarity bleeds into irl outcomes

Mainstream media is dead. Nobody cares about TV, newspapers, local outlets, or large publications anymore. Power and influence is concentrating in social media, platforms that incentivize engagement (for ad revenue) and, in turn, reward extreme content while leaving moderate positions unheard. Of course, the new media projects like Joe Rogan and Call Her Daddy that are native to these platforms are also opinionated. When they host biased people, they get more engagement and revenue. Everything is computer. TV (irl) is now podcasts (url). Why be shocked that podcasts influenced an election?

Social atrophy restricts irl interactions

Gen Z doesn’t party. Gen Z doesn’t drink. Gen Z doesn’t date. What exactly do these kids do other than pop Zyns and complain on the internet? The data makes the group sound like the biggest generation of losers, and I’m unconvinced it’s justified.

Or maybe it is????? Some men won’t walk up to women because maybe they’ll see them on a dating app, and they prefer to approach them there. Did the collective forget the English language, how to say hello?? Or is everyone so scared of rejection that they’d rather not try? Nike just launched a Why Do It campaign to reflect the times. Just Do It is no more. The general public is on a sad cocktail of learned helplessness and anxiety.

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Though it’s been years since COVID, social skills continue to decline. Young people have limited emotional energy or motivation to engage with new people (please look up the Gen Z Stare). I knew we were in trouble when the internet started debating if you’re obligated to help friends move. What friends? Do people actually have friends these days (the data is bleak), or does the moving issue resolve itself?

Anyway, I see how guys are intimidated by dating with a single glance at the data. God forbid a man is 5’8’ and doesn’t have his own apartment!!! Cultural polarity hits again, leading to social atrophy, leading to withdrawal …

Online compensates for real life

There’s a game on Roblox that’s been played more than 71 billion times. Brookhaven is a virtual city where 500,000 simultaneous players can own a house, drive cool cars, and pose as ICE officials or baristas. It’s basically multi-player Sims, but at massive scale.

Unsurprisingly, lala land appeals to young players who never expect to own anything, let alone see their social security benefits, not that they have or can get jobs! The discord we see online is real life. It’s the shameless rug pull in crypto, leaving retail investors destitute. It’s the rising petty crime around the country. It’s the outrage marketing from American Eagle, elf, and Cluely. It’s the disconnect between single men and women, rising unemployment, decline in religion, and empty malls. It’s all connected chaos.

America didn’t know the rapture was happening this week until the news spread like a cancer through social media in seven days. People sold their cars and homes! And they’re still here! The rapture didn’t happen! If believers had no internet, would they have gone into religious psychosis and made such life-altering decisions? Maybe not.

What I’m trying to say is, this newsletter is no longer online-offline. We’re past that. Welcome to BIAS.

— Holyn

Further reading

Gen Z are eating dinner at 6pm — and it’s because they’re losers

Gen Z’s gender divide reaches beyond politics

Desire, Dopamine, and the Internet

Habits of Mind in an Age of Distraction

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Meta acquired Scale AI for a trillion dollars yesterday. Such impeccable timing—thank you, Zuck, for very publicly validating an idea I’ve let percolate in group chats for far too long.

For nearly two years now, I’ve been obsessed with modern consumer founders. These digital savants understand consumer behavior and, having figured out growth without working early at Facebook, they launch a suite of apps that make millions within months. Often, these small teams iterate app ideas and their growth strategy until they find a cash cow to underwrite further experimentation. Thanks to AI, they are capital-efficient and reach profitability quickly without venture capital. Of course, there are a few venture-backed companies like this, and they look a lot like Meta.

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All the tech giants are conglomerates hiding in plain sight

Meta is a conglomerate. Okay, okay—I can hear all the tax and legal guys clamoring to “well, actually” me and, to that I say, pipe down! Technically, it doesn’t fit the traditional definition, but the label feels even more apt after the Scale AI stake: $14 billion (yes, billion) for 49% ownership.

Meta owns and manages several businesses: Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, Threads, WhatsApp, and Reality Labs. Unlike a traditional conglomerate, Meta’s businesses are diverse but related in that they’re focused on technology.

The same can be said for Amazon (AWS, Whole Foods, Twitch), Microsoft (GitHub, LinkedIn), and Alphabet (Google, Waymo, YouTube), of course. These conglomerates came to be through:

1. Internal R&D. Waymo. Need I say more?

2. Acquisitions. Whole Foods cost Amazon $13.7 billion, but at least they own 100%.

As I reflected on the state of venture capital in the last year (DM for hot takes), I realized startups can embrace the conglomerate strategy right out of the gate.

The Barbell Framework for AI conglomerates

In the Barbell strategy, VCs make sure bets, which are more conservative and less risky. They also throw in a wildcard here and there, investments that are speculative but with high upside. The Middleness is no man's land; you don’t want to be there. This concept can be applied to our new crop of AI companies:

Sure Bets (or, the R&D conglomerates)

For anyone wondering why Anysphere (Cursor) is a sure bet, two words: power laws. The company also built one of the most impressive coding models out. Originally structured as an applied research lab, Anysphere is working on automating coding and owns the Cursor product used by developers everywhere. I would be surprised if they didn’t introduce or explore another coding product in the coming year(s) that leverages their research and models. This would be similar to OpenAI (ChatGPT, Sora, io) and Anthropic (Claude app & models). Eric Vishria, GP at Benchmark, described this new approach well—

One of the things that is really different in the AI world versus the SaaS world, is that in the SaaS world, over and over again, you had people who really understood the customer. And the problem. And then they understood a domain. They understood what the technology was more or less capable of. […] And they were just like, here's a better version. And that evolved a little bit over time in SaaS land. But that's what it is.

And this is almost diametrically opposite of product development in the AI era. When I look at the teams that are having the most success today, they have intimate knowledge of the models. They are right on the frontier of understanding which models are better at what, and why, and when. And what they're going to be good at and what they're not going to be good at.

And what they're spending their time on, is figuring out how do I apply this capability of this model to this domain or to this user. So they're actually working inside out or technology out, versus customer problem in. And of course, they understand the customer problem. And a lot of times they have firsthand knowledge of it. But they're really close to the metal and capability, and they're applying it. And I think this is a really different way to develop products than in SaaS. — Eric Vishria on The Peel.

These companies are research labs at their core. They’re building seminal models that they can apply across industries and customer problems. What they’re are doing is working. OpenAI is at $10B in annualized revenue with Anthropic and Anysphere (Cursor) trailing close behind. Anysphere (Cursor) could focus on their sole product for years to come and they’d be fine but as a lab, I expect they have more in store.

Middleness (or, SaaS)

What else is there to say here, honestly?

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Wildcards (or, the Apps conglomerates)

Developers don’t need to raise venture capital to build a profitable business. I’ve been following bootstrapped projects and unlike traditional product studios, acquisitions are happening bellow the surface. Oleve, a New York-based company with a team of 5, grew to 4.5M users across two products (Quizard, Unstuck AI) and reached $6M ARR by February (up from $1M in a year). Meanwhile, 24Labs is building and acquiring products (Crayo) and Playa Vista launched Rayz before selling it to another company and shutting down.

Funny enough, the companies that do raise venture are generating less revenue on average, according to a16z.

A notable venture-backed company is wildcard Amo, which describes itself as such:

Our first app, ID, brought a new take on the social profile […]. And our second app, Bump, is the best map for friends [..]. Together, the apps form the beginning of a new kind of social company. One that exists across multiple apps, but only one you. And with many more ideas for new ways to bring you closer to your friends. We’re going to experiment, build, re-build again, and no doubt get lots wrong along the way. But we hope that what we get right earns its place on your home screen — as a new collection of apps that serve you and your friends above all else.

A new collection of apps housed under one company. If it looks like a Meta and quacks like a Meta, it might be a Meta (save the billions in revenue)! Another venture-backed example is Infinity Constellation, which has 8 subsidiary startups. According to Upstarts Media, Infinity finds founders “who are experts within a certain domain to build an AI services business in their area, sharing back-end software and operations with the rest of Infinity’s portfolio and getting a boost from exposure to its customer base and founder peers.” Does this sound familiar? The company’s portfolio is at a combined $7.1 million in annualized revenue with an expected $15 million by the end of 2025. They raised $17 million from VCs.

Why AI startups should be conglomerates

Biotech/longevity, some defense, and even hardware are all interesting. SaaS? Not to hit you with another quote, but it’s Charles Hudson so I must!

Even in an industry with many firms, I suspect most of the industry’s dollars are going to the same themes regardless of which firm writes the check. And, in my experience, most themes only produce a very small number of really meaningful winners. I worry about what this means for the venture ecosystem.

This job used to be about hunting for the most revolutionary, high-risk ideas. From the earliest internet days to the social media revolution, these ideas were so visionary that they sometimes sounded unbelievable. That promise of invention brought us the most formidable tech companies of this generation. — What Does it Mean to Be a Venture Capitalist Today?

We have our foundational model giants, though it’d be thrilling to see someone overtake Cursor for example. What comes next? The app layer that everyone is talking about? What does that look like? The App Store charts are lined with companies that won’t take VC money (Finch) or don’t really need it (Stardust). These companies are making delightful apps that I and millions of people love. The way I see it, builders can assemble a small team, launch an app or two, growth hack it, monetize along the way, and iterate until they find a flagship. You can opt into venture funding with this approach, but with shared resources (team, users, networks) you may not need it.

This is one of the few times I’ve just riffed on a nascent idea and maybe I’ll write a follow-up down the line. If you have any thoughts or just want to jam on it, definitely reach out!

Special thanks to Samir. Thank YOU for reading! If you’re new to BIAS, make sure to subscribe.

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What happens when algorithms are mimetic machines? When they’re designed to encourage existing behaviors instead of promoting the discovery of new ideas? The 7-second, 240-character online storytelling we’re exposed to reinforces our beliefs, rarely challenging us to discover foreign concepts or communities that may appeal to us. In a way, the subcultures we click into have become the new culture, supplanting what used to be mainstream culture into fragmented pockets of online paradise (or not).

What happens when we’re overwhelmed with information? We look to creators, tastemakers, and voices of authority who are shaping the subculture. Sam Altman the AI gawd. Rihanna, our fashion queen. You get the point. These people understand their craft and the way it may reach people, and that’s apparent in the way they communicate their ideas and engage with their communities.

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When subcultures evolve inorganically, the loudest voices can co-opt a movement. The abundance of information means anyone can masquerade as a voice of authority. One quick social search and you can learn the minimum viable opinion for subculture in 10 minutes and launch a platform. If you’re early, you can appear to be a connoisseur and become a critic quickly.

In one of my favorite essays, David Chapman says of these artificial connoisseurs: “They dress just like the creators—only better. They talk just like the creators—only smoother. They may even do some creating—competently, if not creatively.”1 If you look closely, you can identify these posers by their shallow motivations. It’s obvious in crypto and scammy memecoins. But a more controversial example lies in founders who attend Christian events for hopeful converts and line up to pitch their startups.2 It makes you go “mhmm” but as a Christian, I want everyone to find salvation so I’ll assume they’re well-intentioned.

On the opposite side of the spectrum, people will decide they don’t like the new thing and it’s easier (and more of a dopamine rush online) to criticize it than to contribute. If you hate AI so much, why are you on TikTok? Using a filter? With AI-generated captions?? Okay, weirdo. I’ll always be grateful for the mute and block buttons.

With so much noise, it’s hard to know who or what to trust. That’s why it’s important to zoom out and realize that to weave a fabric between people and arrive at a formidable movement takes time. Mass culture may be dead, but the persistence of subcultures is enough motivation for us to keep exploring new ideas. If you think an idea is crazy, take it another inch or two.

My friend Alice Ma summarized the tension well—“We can choose to stay NPCs or we can start seeing more people try to break out of that. Are we the slaves to our algorithms or do we become masters?” I can’t remember the last interesting and infallible main character. If you have haters, good! Let them scream into the void.

I’ve been obsessed with storytelling lately, especially worldbuilding that contextualizes and drives a plot forward. Ralph Lauren does this masterfully and is arguably America’s most important experiential designer, but that’s an essay for another day. Personally, I’m proud of the world I’ve built. Last week, a NYMag article went viral for saying it must be nice to be a West Village girl, and, you know what? Yes, it is, because I get to enjoy a charming intermission after two amazing years in venture. I really can’t say enough great things about investing at the earliest stages and working with founders, and maybe I’ll boomerang right back to venture next month. Presently, I’m exploring within and beyond venture, including giving this newsletter the love it deserves and testing new mediums (hello, video). Some topics I’m interested in:

• AI consumer apps, bootstrapped and/or developed by product studios

• Stablecoins, memecoin culture, and onchain apps (are y’all okay?)

• Startups working on brain–computer interfaces (!!!)(hello, Nudge)

• Fertility, specifically new tech and innovation (the bolder the better)

• Family offices & holding cos (send me your faves)

• Manufactured “third spaces” (or, why does Capital One have a cafe)

There’s more where that came from, so if you want to chat about these or other related topics, shoot me a note via email or Twitter. Talk soon!

It feels so good to be back. Special thanks to Alice Ma (Mad Realities). Thank YOU for reading! If you’re new to online-offline, make sure to subscribe.

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Fifty years ago, a young man took a calligraphy class from a monk that seemed inconsequential until ten years later when he merged that calligraphy knowledge with software to create a little company called Apple. Without that class “the Mac would never have multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it's likely that no personal computer would have them.”

I’m no Steve Jobs fanboy but even I can admit the man had taste and respected craft.

Taste is how we reflect our opinions to the world. It’s a craft that’s earned through practice.

Every few months, people latch onto a new buzzword to explain the future of tech. The word is usually vague—there’s no shared definition, making it divisive by nature. Today’s buzzword? Taste.

Per my Twitter feed, taste is eating software. Yet, no one can define what taste is. Taste is creative and cultural discernment, earned with practice like learning code or mastering markets. Something can have good taste (Adam Sandler), no taste (Google), or bad taste (X.com). Taste is a spectrum of aesthetic appreciation.

Silicon Valley is hostile toward taste. Startups aren’t built by tastemakers anymore.

Contrary to the narrative, taste always mattered in software. Going back to Apple, some of the company’s earliest employees were historians, poets, and musicians who happened to be elite computer scientists. In the aughts, podcasters launched Twitter, designers made Airbnb, and photographers started building what’d become Instagram.

These days, technologists would rather be shape rotators than wordcels—and, calling someone nontechnical? An offense of the highest order. Tech doesn’t value culture or creative. This isolation is reflected in the products which, instead of being human-centered, are designed for growth and attention. X (fka Twitter) is a prime example. Twitter had curated content, an iconic brand (remember the fail whale?), and thoughtful features (conversation controls). X is a broken product with a flat brand and hostile UX—people you’ve blocked can now see your posts. I’d guess the org chart is filled with shape rotators; the wordcels were laid off or left.

Generally, tech lacks “taste” these days and that’s okay.

The startups with the highest market share in the last decade aren’t tastemakers but they’ve built good products by investing in research and talent. Does ChatGPT make me feel anything? No, but it works. Is TikTok tasteful? No, it’s bloated but the algorithm’s elite.

It seems we’re using taste as a proxy for UX, brand, design, growth, and community—elements imbued in product. Silicon Valley’s export is great software and hardware. AI may commoditize software but the relentless founder is motivated, not threatened, by changing tides. I still believe product is the final boss but if startups seek to improve things like brand then they must import (recruit) multidisciplinary, creative talent. Ultimately, founders who remain obsessed with their customers and products—their craft—will continue to succeed.

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Founders are product and team builders. Taste manifests when both are done well.

Earlier this year, I gave a talk on how AI agents are our next muses (following this creator and influencer era). You can read the accompanying essay here, but In short:

While no AI is truly anthropomorphic, it is made in our (human) image. Generative AI seeks to be as or even more productive and creative than people. But, culture typically rises from the youth and there’s no such origination with AI. Cultural artifacts and references are key to technology.

So, I understand the desire to demand taste from technologists. I challenge us to dig a little deeper and demand what matters when it comes to software: exceptional product. The “nontechnical” founders who are building apps using ChatGPT rarely aspire to build venture-backed, generational companies. We should expect the best software engineers in the world—who are raising millions if not billions of dollars—to be product visionaries who have an edge on AI-generated software because they recruit cracked teams that masterfully craft visual stories. If both things are true, then taste is consequential.

It’s been fun watching people debate taste and who gatekeepers or arbiters of taste should be. Moments of cultural criticism like this remind me why I got into tech, but this is probably my first and last essay on taste. I enjoy frameworks and my friends have written excellent guides on this exact topic, which are linked below. Without frameworks and shared understanding, terms like taste are a distraction.

Just go build something, do stuff!

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Special thanks to Kristy Tillman, Seyi Taylor, Khushi Suri, Abena Anim-Somuah, Adam Delehanty, Reggie James, Nick Susi, Keeks, and the many other conversations that influenced this essay. As always, thank you for reading! If you’re new to online-offline, make sure to subscribe.

Further reading

How to Develop Taste by Ruby Thelot

Sort by Controversial by Scott Alexander

How the Great Recession Infuenced a Decade of Design by Eliza Brooke

The Taste Economy by Daisy Alioto

Notes on Taste by Brie Wolfson

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The humanoids are here.

Boston Dynamics unveiled their new project yesterday—a humanoid robot with crazy motion. Naturally, it has a spinning head and wild dexterity. I don’t want to ever be within 1,000 feet of this thing, yet I was more than comfortable taking a Waymo autonomous ride in San Francisco last month. AI has gotten really really good and, combined with hardware, it’ll make for some special and weird futures.

Perception AI, a quick summary

In my last essay, I emphasized how machines are made in our (human) likeness. Today, machines have three of the five human senses. In order to understand and interact with the world, machines need visual, auditory, and tactical processing. These complicated processes combine several technologies like deep learning, natural language processing, computer vision, and much more. And, we’re just getting started. Recent studies show that machines can learn how to smell and there’s even a startup for device olfaction, Osmo. and even taste. Similarly, recent studies show AI can determine or predict taste. The bots are almost human!

Okay, so what does this even mean and why should you care?

• Autonomous vehicles are already here—Waymo, Tesla, and the cars that parallel park for you.

• Improvements in healthcare with more accurate, faster imaging and diagnostics.

• Better weather imaging and climate risk assessment.

• More personalized and immersive retail experiences.

• Smarter home devices that can anticipate your needs.

• And, much more.

Ambient computing, today and tomorrow

I’m most interested in the intersection of perception AI and ambient computing, which I covered in my piece about AI hardware last year. Just imagine the changes in:

• Home health, safety, and assisted living.

• Patient monitoring and support in hospitals and other settings.

• General AI co-pilots and assistants.

• Manufacturing processes and quality control.

• Enterprise cross-functional collaboration.

This is a high-level view. Ultimately, machines will be able to anticipate (perception AI) and fulfill our needs without prompting (ambient computing). As scary as it is, that Boston Dynamics robot may be the best assisted living nurse we’ve ever seen. Let’s wait and see …

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I didn’t really edit this piece so please excuse any typos. As always, thank you for reading! If you’re new to online-offline, make sure to subscribe.

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I gave a keynote this month at Boys Club’s /brandnew summit during SxSW. It was my first talk in many years and I explored a new philosophy about the future of AI in culture. This is a summary of that talk.

The public

Two centuries ago, in April 1836, a woman was found brutally murdered in her room. Her head was bashed in and her bed was set on fire. The woman, Helen Jewett, was discovered by her madam in the early morning—you see, Ms. Jewett was a prostitute in a New York City brothel. One of her regular clients, Richard P. Robinson, quickly became a suspect based on witness accounts. Mr. Robinson was betrothed to another, an Upper East Side socialite, and maintained his innocence … Even though this case occurred nearly 200 years ago, we have all the details because it was sensationalized and received detailed press coverage in the New York Herald.

At the turn of the century, printing press technology was evolving and led to penny papers, which produced daily news for a cent. By using the general public as a muse, with true crime at the center of coverage, these penny papers grew readership and supplanted local papers. The New York Herald was an early pioneer and by 1845, it was the most popular and profitable daily newspaper in the United States.

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Notably, these emerging media properties realized that “the common man would rather be entertained than edified.” Naturally, as motion pictures evolved from silent to talking films, the American muse became the celebrity.

The celebrity

A lot can be said about the emergent celebrity culture of the 1950s, but the most interesting trend that followed what we now call Old Hollywood is midcult (middle culture).

I’m thinking about Andy Warhol and his fine art paintings of Campbell’s Soup. He took something high-brow (art) and something low-brow (canned soup) and made it appealing to both groups. This seemingly small act acknowledged the middle class.

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Similarly, one of America’s greatest fashion designers, Halston, signed a $1 billion licensing deal with JC Penney in the 1980s to make affordable and accessible collections of his high-end brand. It was controversial. But now everyone does it—the idea of midcult lives on in premium mediocre brands like Away Luggage and products that please the HENRY (High Earners, Not Rich Yet) contingent.

Midcult can pass itself off as high-brow to the untrained eye. The same cannot be said for masscult, which now goes hand in hand with mass media and pop culture.

Masscult offers neither emotional catharsis nor an aesthetic experience. It’s low-effort. It’s meant for mass distribution. It’s not entertainment, but a distraction. In masscult, everything is a commodity that’s mined for money. Masscult is anti-art.

If mass media has flattened culture, then AI will obliterate it. More on this in a bit.

The creator

I’d be remiss if I didn’t give a quick shout to our current muses: creators/influencers. Thanks to the internet and social media, almost anyone can shoot to stardom online and build a community of fervent followers. Distribution and reach are king, with video as the dominant medium. The fact that Mr. Beast has a company dedicated to content production rivals what some celebrities were able to accomplish under contract to MGM in the 1950s.

The bots?

All of this brings us to the present moment. And the future we’re slowly, but surely, realizing.

Did you know that some people are proposing to their AI girlfriends? Or, that AI girlfriends are now a viable option for people seeking emotional intimacy? (I want to, but I won’t go on a tangent about how prescient Her, the movie, was.)

AI bots are the next muses.

Beyond AI girlfriends, we’re seeing autonomous agents deployed across enterprises, autonomous cars in San Francisco and Los Angeles, robot attendants in parking garages, and better autonomous home systems—and this is barely scratching the surface. In the next decade, we will live and work alongside autonomous bots.

While no AI is truly anthropomorphic, it is made in our (human) image. Generative AI seeks to be as or even more creative and productive than people. But, culture typically rises from the youth, there’s no such origination with AI. Cultural artifacts and references are key to technology. If AI comes up with a meme, no one will care. Hypebeast Pope and Will Smith eating spaghetti were viral memes because of the context and origination. Both reference a cultural figure and our understanding of their place in the world. Technology will always rely on humans—for example, without the perceived human characteristics, AI companions wouldn’t be as accepted and popular as they have been considering their short time in the market. People want experiences that replicate their consciousness.

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If AI muses take over, we will return to prioritizing craft. AI is masscult on turbo—making images, music, and even video will be pure commodity. There’s a creator on TikTok named Nara Smith who’s gone viral for making all of her meals from scratch. She made Oreos from scratch! Her content resonates because of the craft and care she takes with each dish. AI can write a basic novel, but can it express the depths of human emotion like Dostoevsky? AI can generate a video, but can it do pirouettes? With AI as the next muse, the way we live is going to drastically change, akin to life after the industrial revolution.

As Marshall McLuhan aptly noted, “any technology gradually creates a totally new human environment. Environments are not passive wrappings but active processes.”

Further reading:

+ "Masscult and Midcult" (1959) Dwight Macdonald

+ "Avant-garde and Kitsch” (1939) Clement Greenberg

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Special thanks to Boys Club and everyone who influenced thinking on this essay. I didn’t really edit this piece so please excuse any typos. As always, thank you for reading! If you’re new, make sure to subscribe.

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Everything is expensive.

The new Dune movie cost $190 million to make. In 1977, Star Wars premiered with a mere $11 million in cost ($56 million adjusted for inflation). Not to compare the two movies, but … that’s crazy.

According to Vanity Fair, “TV show budgets now range between $6 million and $25 million an episode, not including marketing costs. Most mainstream movies now cost between $100 million and $250 million to make.” And they’re all superhero movies and remakes and sequels. Hollywood is spending too much money to make the same movie over and over and over.

Yet, there’s a palpable optimism about the future of storytelling with AI. The bull case? A single person will someday make a feature film by generating the script, score, and other media. And it’ll cost nearly $0 relative to today’s budgets. If this happens, we’re a decade away from commercial success. I’ve been playing with gen AI tools for years now and it’s much harder than regular content creation (of course). I can open TikTok and record a video using an airbrushed filter, alter my voice, generate captions, edit, and post in less than 30 minutes. With gen AI, it takes incredible dedication to produce a 30-second trailer.

To create generative videos, people must turn to what I call the “generative content stack.” It aligns with the traditional filmmaking process—from an idea to editing/post-production.

I’m still looking for a tool that captures the end-to-end creative process. LTK Studio, from the makers of FaceTune no less, shows some promise. But I’ll take any and all suggestions. I’ve always wanted to produce a short film, AI or otherwise, so this is my moment! I’ll give you a shout when I accept my Palme d'Or du court métrage award!

With innovation comes change. Sometimes, change is (perceived to be) bad.

As I write this, I wonder—will Hollywood experience the same issues as the music industry two decades from now? The actors and writers strike established terms for generative AI that protected creative workers. But what happens three years from now when these terms are up for renegotiation and Sora by OpenAI can generate a movie scene using Timothée Chalamet’s likeness in seconds?

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Will AI be able to write better stories? Will personalized movies and shows become prevalent—a gen video playlist if you will? (If you work at Spotify, I have a great idea.) Was Quibi too early? Will there be a gen AI Quibi or is human storytelling pertinent to our connection to content so TikTok will never die?

This week, my friends at Dream Machine and General Catalyst hosted a 10th-anniversary viewing of Her. It reminded me that machines seek to be more human; they’re designed to speak like us, think like us, and produce like us. But they lack inherent human limitations. AI can analyze all the tweets in the world and write a fun script that appeals to the average person, but that doesn’t mean it’s a better story. It’s entertainment meant for mass production instead of art, a story that personally impacts everyone in varying but meaningful ways.

Tried something new this week and freewrote so please excuse any typos. As always, thank you for reading! If you’re new to online-offline, make sure to subscribe.

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I recently read that writing should lead to more questions instead of providing answers. Instead of sharing a key insight today, I’m posing a few questions.

Who’s making generative videos & products?

I’m obsessed with the next era of generative AI: video. In the past few months, I’ve been playing around with a few AI video tools—Runway and Pika for example—and the fun I could be having is capped by the 4-second output and tricky prompt engineering. I just wanna make cool shit without learning video editing and whatever else, but that’s not possible today. Making a 30-second movie trailer? Possible but the clips will look like a bunch of stock imagery spliced together. A short film? Also possible, but only if you use other tools to generate the story, audio, music, etc. But this is only the beginning. There’s innovation on all levels of the gen. video stack from infra to apps, and things are moving quickly enough that the TikTok FYP could look very different in a few years. I’ll save you an entire essay because I already wrote one here: Generative Video: The Next Frontier in AI.

EDIT: I was supposed to publish this essay yesterday but I’m glad I waited an extra day because OpenAI just launched Sora, their text-to-video model. It looks incredible and the outputs can be minutes-long?? And it has varying camera movements and angles??? Can someone get me access to test this out? I’ll dedicate my first AI short film to you. TY!

Prompt for the video below: A beautiful homemade video showing the people of Lagos, Nigeria in the year 2056. Shot with a mobile phone camera.

Will AI make content creation cheap?

Everyone seems to think that generative AI will lower the cost of content creation and I’m inclined to disagree. I’m thinking about my friends who are building consumer apps and paying ($1/user/day) to OpenAI—eventually, they debate the open-source route and fine-tuning a free model. However, reaching meaningful scale while maintaining quality output is a challenge. Value may accrue to incumbents (eg. Adobe, ByteDance) that can manage the cost of inference and survive long enough to see the cost of computing decrease. Either way, generated video is miles away from standing on its own, let alone in competition with the most viral TikToks. Runway and Pika are great, but you can’t generate more than 4 seconds of video. How can we talk about cheaply made content when the best AI video models haven’t mastered space and time?

The caveat here is AI use in traditional media and entertainment where it can generate efficiencies and cost reductions in comparison to CGI for example. Still, the 2023 actors and writers strikes are evidence that movie stars will still demand big checks, at least for a while.

Related, how will IP play out?

Getty Images is suing Stability AI, New York Times is suing OpenAI and Microsoft, UMG is suing Anthropic … Basically, each mega-AI company has been sued at least once.

Should AI models be able to train on copyrighted material? Who owns the model outputs? While humans design a model’s architecture, they don’t optimize model weights, so can weights be legally protected?

The question of IP goes beyond creative fields. What happens when you use AI to produce new compounds, new medications, or to design new hardware? How is that IP valued? As of February 13, AI-assisted inventions are not categorically unpatentable but they hinge on significant human contribution according to USPTO. The guidance and enforcement is relatively vague—how does one measure human versus AI contribution?

These open questions should be solved sooner than later. In fact, there are over $7 trillion reasons to prioritize it, especially in the US where industries that intensively use IP accounted for 41% of domestic economic activity/output and 44% of all employment in 2019. If an economist or lawyer has any opinions on this, please reach out. I have about a million questions for you.

And even more questions

You can generate pretty good fake IDs using AI—no, I won’t tell you how or where! Are NFC and cryptography the solutions here? Will we finally get the AI and crypto merger we’ve been dreaming of?

What new jobs will emerge? Everyone is a DJ these days, but that wouldn’t have happened without the invention of the phonograph, sound systems, mixers, and much more. Each innovation makes way for new avenues of production. AI, similarly, will create new jobs.

Will human creativity and production become more meaningful? Will we see the next Michelangelo and Sistine Chapel? Will IRL make a comeback? (I hope so)

Will someone get me access to Sora by OpenAI? (I really hope so)

Thank you for reading! If you’re new to online-offline, make sure to subscribe.

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A few years ago, a mother bought her young son a bouncy house and, instead of unbridled joy, it brought pain and medical visits with 17 doctors in three years. The boy displayed broad symptoms: unusual chewing, tantrums, stunted growth, anatomical imbalance, migraines, exhaustion, and more. None of the doctors made the correct diagnosis, leading the desperate mother to sign up for ChatGPT. She input her son’s medical notes and AI output tethered cord syndrome. To find more answers, the mother joined a Facebook group for families of children with the condition. The stories she read confirmed her suspicions and her son was finally diagnosed with the condition by a new neurologist soon thereafter.

These kinds of stories are not uncommon. They became prevalent following the arrival of the internet in the 90s. For the first time, patients had access to in-depth medical information and research about their conditions. In tandem, medical distrust began to grow and there are some valid reasons:

• The Tuskegee Syphilis Study conducted on nearly 400 African American men between 1932 and 1972 by the PHS and CDC

• Nearly 800,000 Americans become permanently disabled or die annually because of misdiagnosis. 15 diseases account for about half of all annual disabilities and deaths

  • An estimated 371,000 total deaths occur, making diagnostic errors #4 on the leading causes of death in the US

• The persistent underfunding and lack of care for women’s health

• Rising healthcare costs with and without insurance

• Mis- and disinformation following the Covid-19 outbreak

I could go on, but I’ll stop here. Simply put—people distrust intuitions and the people who run them. With an abundance of information and increasingly limited access to healthcare, many are taking ownership of their health.

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Huberman-Goop General Hospital

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the rise of medical media personalities who’ve helped disseminate medical information to the masses even better than Google.com can.

Women have Goop. Men have Huberman Lab. And vice versa, of course.

While Goop (Gwyneth Paltrow’s lifestyle brand) is often criticized for misinformation and pseudoscience, its popularity is a stark reminder that women’s health is systemically ignored. Many studies show how doctors dismiss women’s pain and reproductive concerns, and subsequently misdiagnose or fail to treat ailments. It’s no surprise that Goop made alternative, and sometimes questionable, medical practices mainstream. Women want and need answers.

And then there’s the Huberman Husband. He wakes up early, sits in the sunlight, and waits a few hours to have his morning coffee. Each week, he listens to a 2-hour long podcast by Dr. Huberman, a neuroscientist and professor at Stanford’s medical school. Huberman is credentialed, so he’s legit. The podcast, Huberman Lab, breaks down complex medical illnesses, studies, and concerns—like how alcohol impacts your health over time. The good doctor (PhD) has over ten million followers across social platforms. People want transparency and clear communication when it comes to health, and he’s masterful at both.

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Healthcare’s new cultural operating system

The increase in media consumption and decrease in medical trust has led to very motivated patients. These people and their families get up to speed on the latest research/treatment and become more knowledgeable about their conditions than their general practitioners. From some experience, the process looks a bit like this …

1. Research. Lots of research on Google, Reddit, Discord, medical journals, personal blogs, and ChatGPT

2. Community. Seeking out others who’ve experienced the same or similar medical issues on Reddit, Facebook groups, listserves, Discord, and forums

3. Specialized Services. Finding a service/product that’s focused on the ailment. It could also mean longevity services (eg. Remedy Place), functional doctors, and behavioral therapy

Ultimately, patients want to feel heard and taken care of. Researching and finding community is good—patients should participate in their wellness journey.

Consumer demand is shaping healthcare

One look at the trends in the last decade—bone broth, supplements, soft 75, and keto—shows the lengths people will go to improve and manage their wellness. We shouldn’t disregard traditional medicine but we consumers can challenge healthcare institutions. For example, the demand for more convenient and specialized care spurred the rise of retail, membership-based clinics like One Medical and Parsley Health. The former did so well that it was acquired by Amazon for a $3.9 billion all-cash deal in 2023. Consumer demand has similarly led to changes in insurance and care delivery.

This bottoms-up change will continue. In the next decade, there will be longevity for the masses, more research on women’s health, a closer look at environmental and climate impact, and much more. If talk therapy is supply-constrained, people will try new modalities like MDMA or neurotech, early but promising solutions that I’ve written about and hope to invest in.

In many ways, medical information is becoming open source. This trend could and should change how doctors, hospitals, and insurers interface with their patients.

Further reading

+ New Modalities in Mental Healthcare by me!

Special thanks to Kanyi Maqubela, Andy Weissman, and the Weill Cornell Surgery team for inspiring my thinking. Thank you for reading! If you’re new to online-offline, make sure to subscribe.

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I attended Instagram’s inaugural Creator Innovation Summit last week and it inspired me to finish this essay that’s sat in drafts for far too long.

As I listened to the summit's headliners, Adam Mosseri and Marques Brownlee, I was struck by how much creators still informed Instagram’s product. In fact, we could put creators on equal footing as small and medium businesses. It’s time we start thinking of creators as corporations—and top creators as conglomerates.

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One Hundred Years of “Creators”

Everything that’s old is new again.

In the late 1800s, an expert traveling salesman called David McConnell started a perfume company that would eventually become Avon, the beauty company. He enlisted women as the salesforce—he figured that housewives would trust ladies more than men. Although the Avon Ladies’ reach was restricted by geography and phone book, McConnell was right. Avon became very successful and expanded both product and country lines.

While Avon ladies went door-to-door, celebrities lent their names, images, and likeness to endorse consumer products. Converse launched the first ever documented celebrity endorsement for a shoe when they signed Chuck Taylor in 1934 (for those who don’t know, Chuck was a basketball player). Converse had a vision and other companies like Adidas embraced this model, especially in the 70s and 80s. Still, reach was limited by television and radio broadcasts, events, and publications.

But then the internet came along. Thanks to social media, influence has been democratized for the last decade. Ordinary people can now amass large audiences and become creators. Ordinary people can build their own Avon-like communities and endorse products as if they were celebrities; which, to their followers, they may very well be.

Megan Lightcap and the Slow Ventures described this moment well in their “Why People Deserve Capital Too” essay:

Technology has unlocked distribution and rendered traditional gatekeepers irrelevant – anyone with a wifi connection can reach millions of people, at scale, at near-zero cost. Not only can individuals achieve the same reach as massive corporations, but also consumers can frictionlessly seek out like-minded leaders and participate in communities and interest groups. Because of this, a single individual can wield cult-like influence, and the impact can be seen across business, culture, commerce, and even politics.

Creators have better distribution than most companies as evidenced by the amount of money they command for marketing products to their audiences. Unlike companies that typically have a product seeking a customer, creators have a built-in audience seeking products and/or experiences. That’s an advantage and the new way that the next generational companies will be built.

The Creator Conglomerate Framework

The framework is rather simple and is already in motion by several creators (and celebrities!). Successful creators grow communities by adding some kind of value to their lives—this can begin as short- or long-form content, but a strategic creator elevates their offering to complementary classes, products, and/or experiences. With that said, here’s the creator to conglomerate journey:

1. Build an audience and turn it into a community by adding symbiotic value

2. Ship products and services that are aligned with your community

3. Turn these products into (complementary) businesses in several industries

4. House the businesses under a parent company. This creates a conglomerate, which usually has a parent company that owns and controls subsidiaries that are legally independent but financially/strategically dependent on the parent company

When done right, a creator can become akin to Bernard Arnault of LVMH, except at a much smaller scale and through sheer groundwork instead of M&A.

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I should note these concepts aren’t new. Traditionally, media and content giants like Disney become conglomerates encompassing production, resorts and parks, consumer goods, publishing, and other subsidiaries. In the last few decades, we’ve seen athletes and celebrities adopt a similar model. Lebron is a great example. In 2020, he founded the SpringHill Company to house three separate entities: SpringHill Entertainment (production company), the Robot Company (integrated marketing agency), and Uninterrupted (athlete platform/show). Creators are up next.

The Next One Hundred Years

I’d like to do something different today. Instead of sharing my thesis of what’s to come, I want to pose questions and open the floor for discussion. So, below is a list of things I’ve been deliberating as I watch the evolution of the “creator economy”:

• Will creator-led businesses become LVMH-level, multi-national, billion-dollar businesses? Or will they remain “lifestyle” businesses?

• Are these venture-backable businesses? Will traditional management companies (eg. WME, CAA) actually be the winners? Or is bootstrapping enough?

• For creators who are artists—are potential investments predatory? (eg. investing in an individual and getting a cut of their future production) What creator personas do investments really work for?

• How will privacy regulation, third-party data changes, and Apple’s App Tracking Transparency impact creators, if at all? Will generative AI lead to small lean teams that build large conglomerates?

I’m curious to hear your opinions on the above and other thoughts you have about how work and traditional business models are changing. It’d be fun to revisit this topic in the near future and include your perspectives!

Further reading

+ HoldOn, A HoldCo? by Megan Lightcap & the Slow Ventures team

+ Avon Ladies by Nostalgia Central

Thank you for reading! Special thanks to Besi and the Instagram team; and Megan and others for the conversation that inspired this piece. If you’re new to online-offline, make sure to subscribe.

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What an exciting week for personal hardware!

Humane debuted their Ai Pin at Paris Fashion Week with Coperni.1 If you’re a fashion fan, you’ll remember Coperni for spray painting a little white dress on Bella Hadid a few months ago—experimenting with new tech is their thing. I wish the Humane debut was similarly interactive. Other people thought the debut didn’t make a big enough splash, but it felt intentional for the Ai Pin to feel like part of a garment like a broach.

Rewind Pendant also debuted. It’s a wearable that captures what you say and hear in the real world. The company says it’s privacy-first. It offers features to ensure no one is recorded without their consent and stores recordings locally only. It looks like an amulet and hangs from your neck.

And then there’s Tab, another amulet that you can talk to. It computes the way you think. In the demo, founder Avi Schiffmann asks the device to recall dinner conversations and a diet recommendation. The responses are displayed in a chatbot/app UI.

Finally, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that Sam Altman and Jony Ive, former chief design officer at Apple, are allegedly joining forces to build a consumer device for Open AI.

There are many other device announcements this year from Meta to neuro startups—AI has revitalized how we think about form factor and personal computing. We can and should go beyond mobile phones.

Yet, the question is … do people want this?

The popularity of products like AirPods, smartwatches, and even Tesla shows that people are ready for new computing experiences, especially if they take natural form factors. We’re slowly inching toward a world of ubiquitous technology. Google Glass was a casualty along the way; people had privacy and safety concerns with the device. These concerns will persist but can be mitigated, especially if wearable devices create a better world than the mobile phone.

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What really matters? Contextual computing

The Pendant and Tab are new versions of a product that’s had many lives since 1994. The first personal assistant, the “Forget-me-not”, recorded people’s interactions and stored the information in a database. Beyond the recordings, the device had limited context about where people were located, with whom, or why. The Forget-me-not couldn’t provide its users with personalized information or experiences. Well, that’s all changed thanks to AI developments over the last decade.

The most interesting thing about the devices that launched this week isn’t what they look like or how they were debuted.

These devices are important because they will usher in a new era of contextual computing. They contain sensors that can capture data about the physical world and use NLP, computer vision, and machine learning to capture and process data to build contextual understanding.

According to computer scientist Anind Dey, “A device is context-aware if it uses context to provide relevant information and/or services to the user, where relevancy depends on the user’s task.” When Humane previewed the Ai Pin at Ted earlier this year, the device illustrated this definition. Let’s break it down:

Task: “Can I eat this?”

Context: The user holds a chocolate bar, allowing the Ai Pin to identify the relative object. The device knows the user’s food preferences/allergies.

Relevant information: The device replies that the user should avoid the chocolate bar because it contains an ingredient they have an intolerance to, thus completing the task

I wonder if the other devices that launched this past week will similarly be context-aware. They should! Especially when we’re at a point where devices have memory and can anticipate and fulfill users' needs, give personalized recommendations, and adapt to users' changing needs and preferences over time.

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The next era of software, driven by hardware

“The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it.”

The legendary Mark Weiser was on to something when he said this in 1991. We are moving beyond iPhones, which are relatively ubiquitous, to wearables, which can remind us when we’ve sat for too long and even track our sleeping patterns. Devices are starting to form connections and deduce like humans.

Our goal should be to make hardware disappear. We shouldn’t even have to unlock a phone for example—having to type a 6-digit code or to hold up a device for a face ID is friction. Clicking the ChatGPT app and typing a prompt is also friction. Hardware should be almost ambient, seamlessly integrated, and integral to our lives. Like the chair. Then we’ll know it is really successful.

Further reading

+ The Computer for the 21st Century by Mark Weiser

+ Towards a Better Understanding of Context and Context-Awareness by Anind K. Dey and Gregory D. Abowd

Thank you for reading! Special thanks to Laurent for the artwork; and Tammy for the conversation that inspired this piece. If you’re new to online-offline, make sure to subscribe.

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This week Apple announced the Apple Vision Pro, a VR headset with AR elements that’s touted as the future of spatial computing. The device looks like a pair of goggles strapped on your head with a cord attached for power—the device has a two hour battery life.

The Vision Pro is a technological feat and probably a paradigm shift. 23 million pixels across two displays may accurately digitize the intricate details in real life. But I’m more impressed by visionOS, the new spatial OS that tracks your eyes and hands, and the new Apple R1 chip that enables perhaps the lowest latency we’ve seen in this kind of device. And, building on the spatial audio experience that Apple introduced with AirPods, the Vision is personalized to your ears dimensions and uses raytracing to adapt sound to your room’s physical materials and acoustics.

It’s all, to put it mildy … really cool shit. These specs are the most interesting thing about this launch and may be the catalyst for more useful products in the future. But when it comes down to it, Vision Pro is a solitary device that costs $3,499 (minimum!) and isn’t that useful to the average consumer.

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The anti-social social club

iPhones are a vessel for connectivity. Apps like Google Maps, WhatsApp, and Snap shattered time and space on a global scale in the first five years of the iPhone launch. A decade later, you can use your iPhone to explore these apps while on a walk, when streaming Netflix, or quickly in between meetings—even better, you don’t have to look at the screen if you have AirPods or an Apple Watch. These products are certainly distractions, but they integrate seamlessly into your life and leave room for serendipitous eye contact with strangers and shared IRL experiences.

In contrast to the iPhone, using a Vision seems like living in a large computer, occasionally opting into real life. Imagine missing your child’s first steps because you were on a 3D FaceTime call? Or being stuck in your 500 square foot apartment moving floating objects on a blank wall for 8 hours daily? Or laying on the couch with your partner who’s upgraded from the PS5 to Vision and can’t see your face or read your body language? The device seems incredibly isolating and only appropriate for niche use cases. But these niche uses may enable the tide to turn; historically, virtual and mixed reality headsets have high churn, low utility, and caused motion sickness. The optimistic take is that today Vision Pro is a replacement for the television and computer, but in a decade it may replace many of our gadgets, including the iPhone. Just like how smartphones displaced the computer over time due to their capabilities, but mostly because they were mobile.

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I think it’s a mistake to discuss the mainstream adoption for the Vision Pro. It’s called a PRO device for a reason—a developers playground (for Unity at least, TBD on Unreal), an extension of Apple R&D to explore the horizons of a mixed reality. Perhaps Apple will develop a portable Vision akin to MacBook Air. This will only matter if it’s 1) cheaper 2) has a more mobile form factor, and is 3) multi-player. Without #1 and #3, it only makes loneliness in US worse; without #1, it has low international appeal; and, without #2, it has fewer everyday and enterprise applications.

AI & ML, and the next era of computing

I’m more interested in the potential for augmented (or even mixed) reality & AI/ML. The use of computer vision and “advanced machine intelligence” in the Apple Vision is impressive for their first VR device—you can select things with your eyes and then flick and pinch to open and interact with spatial objects. Best of all, the super advanced ML allows you to create an avatar in your likeness that reflects face and hand movements in real time.

It makes you wonder how we’ll advance in the next decade, especially when everyone seems to be playing the same game differently. Facebook leaked Zuckerberg’s thoughts on Apple’s launch yesterday and in summary—Meta wants to create social and accessible mixed reality products.

When people visit the VR graveyard, they often remark on Google Glass. Personally, I always said I wanted to live in Snap Maps. Hear me out! What if my Spectacles not only captured special moments in my life, but they improved my everyday life. If I’m walking around the city, I can get personalized ads when I near my favorite store, get alerts when a close friend is nearby, identify objects, set reminders … There was something really special about Snap’s app and how it could interplay with future versions of the Spectacle. The social and commercial use cases were endless—in an era of App Tracking Transparency (Apple strikes again), a localized and immersive experience leads to first-party data for SMBs. Obviously that dream is dead now. Thanks, Spiegel.

But, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention Humane, a company I admired long before I joined Kindred Ventures (disclaimer: Kindred is an investor in Humane). I can now point to their Ted video, which showcases their device and software. It’s contextual computing, natural in the way it accesses and adds to a universe of data, media, and applications. It’s also spatial computing. And it’s much more that the team will share in due time.

Each company—Apple, Meta, Humane, and others I didn’t mention—has a different vision and approach for the next era of computing. We should be excited about that! Who knows the kind of innovation that will beget the competition. I fully expect to have a gallery wall of spatial generative video art that I bought as NFTs by the end of the decade, and you should too.

Thank you for reading! Special thanks to Abena & Tammy for editing this essay; and Isha Kasliwal, jstn, Reggie James, Sam Ewen, Jordan Kutzer, and Casey Blue for engaging in conversation that inspired this piece. If you’re new to online-offline, make sure to subscribe to join the conversation.

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A few weeks ago, I came across an excellent essay in LIFE Magazine titled The Emptiness of Too Much Leisure that summarized a key concern in the 1960s: automation resulting in a shorter working week. Everyone, the government included, was scrambling to fill the imminent idle time. As if doing nothing, resting, or being bored isn’t an activity itself.

With an average 7 hours of daily screen time spent consuming content and playing games, idle time is now filled with entertainment. The consumption is both work and leisure. Some people create content while others support them by subduing to algorithmic wonderlands. Society has become primarily entertainment-based. The subsequent result, if cultural critic Neil Postman was right, is the degradation of idiosyncratic and critical thinking.

We’ve progressed from social graphs to interest graphs to powerful AI models like GPT-3. Recommendation algorithms were certainly influential before, but recent advances in AI have made software exponentially powerful.

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“For You”

When I think of AI products, TikTok immediately comes to mind. I think about how influential the For You algorithm is, how the app has its own policies and questionable moderation, how its employees can decide who goes viral …

Mostly, I think about how users get stuck in their own echo chamber of content that’s driven by their own behaviors—but, are they really? I’m a resident in the TikTok rabbit hole and I’ve noticed that certain editing styles, ways of storytelling, and aesthetics are standard. All seemingly new ideas converge into a standard or a fleeting trend. Consider that people’s mimetic desire is compounded by a meticulously designed algorithm; though TikTok is said to be more authentic than Instagram, at some point, the platform suppressed content from users it deemed “unattractive, poor, or otherwise undesirable.” It’s twisted, but the content creators who are the most desirable or meet a certain standard are at the forefront and are the product.

Platforms motivated by profit seem to have a similar veneer—the promise of self-expression. There’s a belief that TikTok promotes differences and subcultures because the For You page is personalized. Sure, you’ll see videos from a variety of niches but you don’t really tell TikTok what you want to see, it tells you. You can choose to engage or not. Either way, virality is determined by the sum of engagement from other users with similar interests.1 It’s consensus; everyone has to agree the content is funny or cool or educational or whatever. The positive? Shared consciousness. The problem? The return of the mainstream and exclusion of fringe ideas.

For example, shared consciousness on #Booktok means people suggest the same five books, often something written by Colleen Hoover, which helped her sell more books than the Bible in 2022. Return of the mainstream means the same author, Hoover, held 6 of the top ten best seller spots on the New York Times paperback fiction list in 2022.

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Monoculture

What if we mirror a similar scenario in products like ChatGPT or Artifact, the upcoming AI news app from the Instagram founders?

“These systems are a reflection of a collective Internet. People put their ass out there and this thing scours them in such a way that it returns the generic average. If I’m going to return the generic average of a murder mystery, it’s gonna be boring.” — Ben Recht, Could an A.I. Chatbot Rewrite My Novel?

Gone are the days of scouring Wikipedia or reading books to create a cogent argument or opinion … And, who knows if we’ll still use “Googling” as a verb. People can feed ChatGPT the same prompt and get a book summary, create a recipe, or fix code. Humans will have superpowers, armed with a suite of AI apps (we’ll dive into this in part 2 of this essay). I think we’ll collectively put too much trust in these products, even though we shouldn't. In the end, everyone will have the same writing tone, visit the same places on holidays, listen to the same music, keep watching superhero movies, and so on. This is already happening—just look at coffee shops around the world, Marvel’s box office dominance, and today’s music production. Social media introduced monoculture by the people for the people. With AI, it’ll only get more pronounced.

Monoculture has typically been tied to physical or time-bound presence, but for a generation that lives on the internet, shared consciousness means shared interests resulting in viral, consensus-driven content that exalts popular tastes and behaviors, and the cycle continues. Asynchronicity can be the default today because data is forever and can be shaped, algorithmically, into popular themes that bring familiarity online and offline.

Maybe if powerful AI models were public goods instead of private products, things would play out differently. Ultimately, the incentive structures exist to drive growth and revenue, meaning standard, or popular, content will prevail. This environment will push different perspectives further into the fringes, particularly those that break policies; this can be ethical, but can also be a disservice to the marginalized. Curators, cultural critics, and domain experts can sustain subcultures but I think artists and heretics might save us all. After all, the machines need new ideas to feed from.

Stay tuned for part 2, a deeper exploration into work and leisure in the age of AI.

Thank you for reading! Special thanks to Abena for their feedback. If you’re new, make sure to subscribe to join the conversation.

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Twitter is dead.

If I were to write a eulogy, I may ruminate about how it was the best job with the best people. Perhaps I’d talk about my old boss and the standard of excellence they set, the indelible culture, the global impact the product had, why people drank the salt juice, and, ultimately, why Twitter is the yardstick with which I’ve measured every opportunity since.

But, I’ll spare you. I still hold a flurry of emotions best reserved for group chats.

Instead, consider this a commencement. The end of an era but, hopefully, the beginning of another.

Long live Twitter.

Twitter

Five years ago, I fell down a crypto rabbit hole prompted by the promise of a peer-to-peer electronic cash system. As a global citizen, I couldn’t fathom the inefficacies in remittance; bitcoin provided the perfect solution that begat more questions … What about identity? How do we bridge online and offline? Is this as realistic for people in America as those in rural Kenya?

I joined Twitter’s strategy team soon thereafter. With this promotion from user to employee, the link between social identity and money crystalized.

On the early internet, nobody knew if you were a dog. You could use unidentifiable pseudonyms to spin up a personal blog or communicate with others. Sure, IP addresses could link your internet activity but personal identifiable information (PII) wasn’t prevalent online until the advent of online advertising and ecommerce. As people signed up for email, online advertising took form; early email clients like HotMail stored name, mailing address, email address, account number, and phone number. Businesses sought to market to new customers using this internet data. Later, sites like Amazon and Netflix connected online and offline by mailing books/dvds. Social media, particularly Facebook, showed that identity and money are inexorably linked through masterful targeted advertising. Your identity is the amalgamation of what you communicate to the world. Money is an implicit form of communication. You say who you are and what you care about with your purchasing behavior.

Driven by financial incentives, the internet entwined legal identity (data you find on a passport) with online handles, avatars, behaviors and clicks, and communities. However, you shouldn’t have to reveal your PII to exist online (I previously wrote The case for pseudonymity). Twitter, Tumblr, and Reddit are prominent platforms where one can exist pseudonymously. So when I started my gig at Twitter, I kept wondering—what would it look like if I could present as my Twitter handle on the internet but securely connect it to PII that I could share voluntarily on various websites? My Twitter handle at the time was a silly pun and not my first name, so this made perfect sense then. There exist standards and products that address specific parts of what I envisioned, for example:

• People use OAuth to give one app (eg. Clubhouse) limited and revokable access to their data on another app (eg. Instagram) without sharing their password. This is an industry standard that’s been used 1B+ times and few know they’ve interacting with it.

• On the other hand, people use Keybase to link their online identities across Twitter, GitHub, Reddit, Hacker News, Mastodon, Bitcoin wallet addresses, and more. To prove ownership, Keybase users sign a public, verifiable statement. They can then use Keybase to send messages to other users using their online aliases (eg. Twitter handle). Keybase was acquired by Zoom in 2020.

To put it simply, I wanted to own and permission my online data but nest it under an alias, my Twitter handle.

I remember talking with the verification product manager in 2019 and asking when they would put Twitter, and verification, on chain. The guy was trying to get cross-functional stakeholders to align on literally anything and here I was asking crazy questions. The philosophical questions I was asking introduced me to decentralized identifiers (DIDs) and verifiable credentials (VCs). DIDs are basically digital aliases. They are associated with a DID document that contains verification methods, personal data, and more. VCs represent offline credentials like your passport, college degree, or work history. This data is secured cryptographically and linked to a DID. Fully realized, this standard could verify that people aren’t bots at scale. Even better, it could be can be adapted to any modern blockchain. More on this later.

Verification on Twitter has been unsolvable for as long as it’s existed—why not use cryptography to allow people to confirm their legal identity and credentials without doxxing themselves, without centralized and seemingly arbitrary policy, and in a way that allows consumers to own their namespace. Twitter certainly had the scale and distribution to make this a reality. However, considering the company’s shipping speed and the work that goes into creating a sound protocol, a decentralized Twitter was, honestly, blue-sky thinking ((see what I DID there? (I’m so sorry)).

Fast forward three years and Twitter is going private, verifications might cost $8 a month, and there are talks of Twitter payments … I think it’s time to revisit this galaxy brain idea.

No one is talking about Bluesky and I think that’s weird.

In December 2019, Jack Dorsey announced “Twitter is funding a small independent team of up to five open source architects, engineers, and designers to develop an open and decentralized standard for social media. The goal is for Twitter to ultimately be a client of this standard.” This last sentence is endgame.

Jack shared guiding principles for why Bluesky (and decentralized social) needs to exist. I agree with some and want to elaborate on other ideas:

• Identity: people should be able to own their data, choose who can access said data, be able to monetize it as they see fit, and opt-into experiences that align with their interests. Today, you cannot easily migrate your content from Instagram to TikTok and that’s hostile (cross-posting is allowed for Twitter, Tumblr, and FB). Meta is financially incentivized to make people create and post on their platform and not competitors. With centralized lock-ins, data integrity and security is critical. If Google+ (lol) didn’t centralize personal data for example, perhaps 50M+ users wouldn’t have been compromised in 2018.

• Governance: people and communities should create policies and moderation that adhere to them. We’ve seen centralized entities create blanket standards that don’t account for cultural nuance, diverse identities, or an ever-evolving digital landscape. It’s evident that having one arbiter of truth doesn’t work because truth is an open question with varied and often contradictory answers.

• Incentives: user-generated content is the backbone of the modern web and certainly of social platforms, yet users get a sad fraction of advertising dollars. Your interest graphs and seemingly minute behaviors like time spent power titans like Google and Meta. I’m particularly fascinated by Instagram AR filter makers; technical artists who get paid nothing yet are a core element of the app. Why shouldn’t they have a marketplace and sell their filters across the web? Why shouldn’t developers and creators and everyday people and small businesses? Conversely, maybe we should reorient social from an attention-based economy to a public good. To be clear, this isn’t a web2 versus web3 take (you can read my thoughts on that in my essay Web3: the internet’s 3% difference).

The independent Bluesky team recently unveiled the AT (Authenticated Transport) Protocol, a new federated social network technology that uses ideas from decentralized technologies. Notably, AT isn’t a blockchain. And it isn’t the only project that aims to establish standards for decentralized social networks.

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The promise of decentralized social

There are three compelling projects working toward decentralized social: AT Protocol (ATP), Farcaster, and Lens Protocol. Two are compatible with DIDs: ATP and Lens. Two are onchain: Farcaster is currently on Görli (an Ethereum testing network) and Lens is on the Polygon blockchain. I will not cover Mastodon here because, frankly, it’s not something I see gaining mainstream adoption. Anyway, let’s get a bit technical. I reviewed each project’s developer documents and tried my best to distill the information here. Below are core concepts so we’re on the same page:

• Centralized: one single entity has control

• Federated: various connected entities where individuals retain significant autonomy

• Decentralized: various connected entities where individuals retain full autonomy

• Interoperable: ability for different protocols or blockchains to actively communicate with each other

• Public & private keys: a pair that allows you to interact with blockchains. These keys determine your wallet address (or, account). The pubic key identifies you and the private keys verifies you

AT Protocol

AT Protocol is made for large-scale distributed social applications. Uniquely, ATP is federated, which means it functions like email does. If Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter were a federation, you could communicate between and move your information/account around them flawlessly. ATP uses DIDs for identity and has no blockchain elements, though it sounds like it’s designed to mimic the decentralized nature of blockchains. Still, that doesn’t mean that apps in the federation can’t add that element. Curiously, the TBD team at Block is working on a decentralized finance protocol and using DIDs. If you put ATP and TBD together, you get the beginning of a decentralized superapp. There’s not much revealed about ATP because it’s still in progress, but we do know that the team is working on a social app called Bluesky that uses ATP. If Twitter was indeed a client of ATP in the future, then then no one person (Elon or otherwise) would be in charge. Wouldn’t that be glorious?

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Farcaster

Farcaster is a sufficiently decentralized social network. The team believes your identity (Farcaster ID and name) should be onchain but your social data can be managed. While it was free to register my account (@holla), people may need to pay a fee to register both ID and name (handle) in the future. Names have an annual fee—maybe they’ll cost $8 a month or something. Expired names, similar to expired domains, will be purchased at auction for up to 1000 ether. That’s a little over $1M.

I interviewed beta testers and most cited the intimate experience as their favorite aspect; there are only ~8,000 profiles. People like the quality of conversation, archetype of early members who are in crypto or builders, and the lack of bots. It’s unclear if Farcaster can scale meaningfully and maintain this vibe. Of note, the app has yet to reach the ethereum mainnet, which is likely the reason some of my friends lost their IDs/names in a recent migration. The vision is motivating but still WIP.

For me, the NFT aspect of Farcaster is underutilized. Most if not all beta users hold community or art NFTs, which means projects like Bored Apes or Doodles could create apps on the Farcaster network and users could move easily across them. On the monetization front, advertising and sponsorships can be realized as brand NFTs proliferate and usage grows. Farcaster already has an ecosystem of apps that feel more like features you’d find in a more developed app. My favorite is the dashboard; apparently Farcaster beta users hold an estimated $61M in their crypto wallets.

Lens

Lens Protocol is a decentralized social graph. With Lens, you own your profile, where you use it, how you use it, and even how you monetize it. Lens has a Profile NFT that functions similarly to a DID document. This Profile NFT holds your handle, follow settings that enable you to you monetize your profile, delegation settings, and your content history. Your wallet address can hold several Profile NFTs. I got a walkthrough of Lens and, honestly, it’s pretty cool. There are several apps built on the protocol: Lenster is like Twitter but you can monetize your profile and posts like Patreon, Lenstube reimagines YouTube, and Troop is a payments app.

Lens is built by AAVE, a decentralized finance protocol. Am I the only one seeing the pattern between money and social? Anyway, it’s no surprise Lens is unapologetically web3, meaning that it started as fully onchain; users had to sign off each post they made in their ethereum wallet. That’s like confirming cookies each time you Tweet. Obviously this was a point of friction for the user experience and it’s been amended—you can now select which content goes on chain just like you can select which content is monetized. Spam is another challenge. Profile NFTs allow you to mitigate spam and app can set their own moderation policies, also. Ultimately, there are valid criticisms for fully onchain (and immutable) social—the right to be forgotten, latency, and economic feasibility. It’s difficult to imagine Lens at the scale of Instagram with over a billion monthly users. However, the protocol also supports DID, apps in the ecosystem pay for >98% of non-monetary transactions (gas fees), and you don’t have to put everything onchain. Lens may be the most comprehensive solution yet.

Takeaways

If I was starting a social platform or if I had to strip an existing platform’s codebase and start over, I’d be tempted to use Lens but would likely use ATP. Of the three, it appears the most easily scalable while allowing the option to add onchain elements. Step 1) figure out identity for the platform and step 2) add crypto payments. If done right, you could make a global superapp. There are many criticism for decentralized social, some of which have merit. Decentralization may result in fragmented communities with conflicting rules, is not consistently brand safe, and is difficult to monetize. The App Store has its own rules, for example, that necessitate a standard for apps that aim to reach the iOS consumer. The criticisms are fair and I don’t have the perfect rebuttal. If advertising is impossible, the answer may lie in subscriptions or, maybe, social media should’ve been a public good after all.

Okay, so … what now?

As I type, Twitter is down to ~1,000 employees in a matter of weeks. Some say the site may shut down soon—entire infrastructure teams are gone and usage hasn’t necessarily slowed down. People are migrating to Farcaster and even Mastodon, while others are surrendering to Instagram. Me? I’m hoping some smart developer(s) will scale a delightful social app or five with one of these decentralized options. Until then, I’m holding on for dear life on the bird app.

I’m also thinking about the second Harry Potter movie—the scene where Harry visited Professor Dumbledore. Harry walked into Dumbledore’s office and saw a beautiful bird from across the room. He inched closer, admiring the bird and happy as ever to see it. But, the bird looked very ill. It busted into flames in seconds and left a pile of ash. Harry was mortified, but Dumbledore explained that the bird was a phoenix; they bust into flames when it’s time for them to die and then they are reborn from the ashes. That’s Twitter.

Will Twitter have a rebirth? Yes. Will it decentralize? I don’t know, but I sure hope so.

And with that, I’ll leave you with this.

#OneTeam

Thank you for reading! Special thanks to Abena, David, Keeks, Packy, Daisy, and Raihan for their feedback. If you’re new, make sure to subscribe to join the conversation.

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It was kismet how Marty and I finally met IRL—enjoying a cool Miami night with 212’s familiar house beat still reverberating on my eardrum after an Art Basel party (listen here!). It was a fun night and even more so when I realized I was in the presence of a creative genius. Marty Bell is a lifelong founder and purveyor of good vibes. He previously co-founded a clothing and nightlife brand, a lens (eyewear) experience company, a fintech company ... All of these ventures culminate in Poolsuite (fka Poolside FM), an internet leisure corporation making waves IRL on the beach via the Vacation® sunscreen and URL via the legendary music platform and NFTs.

From the 80s/nostalgic art direction to the esteemed NFT drops to the magical offline experiences, I’ve admired Poolsuite for a long time. Today, I get to obsess about the project and convince Marty to divulge some secrets (or, alpha as the crypto kids say). Let’s get to it!

The beginnings: Poolside FM

Almost a decade ago, Marty stumbled upon super-happy, genre-spanning music. “I loved it so much; it felt like (and still does feel like) a direct hit of serotonin straight to the brain to me.. I thought ‘I could build a playlist and share it with people.’” And, he did. With a gang of developers and designers, Marty curated a destination with carefree and positive vibes centered around music ... You could spend 15 minutes on the site and emerge refreshed and happy as hell. The goal was to recreate the nostalgia of laying on a beach in 1980s U.S.—I wasn’t around for that but if it felt anything like the music on Poolside or looked like it ... please find me a time machine.

The evolution of the Poolside→Poolsuite brand

Thanks to the web’s digital archive, WayBack Machine, we can peruse the Poolside (to Poolsuite) evolution over the years. I did and found some fun treasures.

Back in 2018, the site featured merch including a Poolside keychain. Now I have one sitting on the counter in my entryway. It made me wonder how the inspiration for the experience has persisted, refined, and transformed over time. Notably, the site went from Poolside FM to Poolsuite due to a trademark issue. This was an auspicious challenge because the team knew they wanted to pursue projects outside of music. In Marty’s words ...

“Landing on ‘Poolsuite’ helped define exactly what we were going to become; a suite of tools for the good life, on & offline. That’s where we’re heading now.”

We’ll refer to the corporation as Poolsuite henceforth.

Holyn: I went on a little Poolsuite rabbithole to remember what the vibes used to be like. I saw familiar objects like the keychain but also some that have yet to come to fruition. At least, not yet. How has inspiration persisted over time? How do you pick what will come along and what’s great for only a moment?

Marty: Pre-NFT it was mostly just building whatever came to mind that was personally exciting or funny to me or someone on the team. There was no revenue, no customers paying for anything, just a group of people on the internet building stuff just because; no roadmap, no KPIs. The primary considerations were (and largely still are) ‘is this incredibly fun for us to work on?’ and ‘will our community be madly in love with this?’. We kinda put stuff out there and see what sticks. If people go wild for something we’ll keep it around and build it out. If the hype dies out quickly, we’re onto the next. Right now, we’re heavily focused on building out our suite of products & experiences that we hope will make Poolsuite something very exciting to be a member of.

Holyn: You put the idea of a Poolsuite flip phone out there back in 2019, but you’ve yet to launch hardware. I have to ask ... Will the people be getting a green flip phone soon?

Marty: I want to do hardware so much. I DM’d a friend who runs hardware at Ledger the other day asking if we could do a limited edition run of Motorola Dynatac phones retrofitted to be working Ledger devices (sadly still waiting on a hard yes response on that one). It’s so far from my skillset though. If anyone wants to make hardware with (for?) us, we’re extremely down. I also want to make some kind of physical box for my living room with 10 buttons on it, that’s just a hardware version of voice notes, with 10 pre-set friends you can async voice message, picking up the messages like a 90s answerphone. Got some vintage wood & gold box in my head with no screen. Is that a really bad idea?

Holyn: It’s a great idea, but it has to be in a conversation pit—you know the kind I’m talking about—with no tech allowed except the gold answerphone. But let’s switch gears and talk about touching grass—outside. Specifically, sunscreen! It’s a perfect IRL extension of Poolsuite. But of all the leisure-friendly products, why did it make the most sense to pursue?

Marty: I’d been pitched so many product ideas for Poolsuite (then Poolside FM) over the years but they always felt too obvious—swimwear, a branded beer, pool floats, etc. It just didn’t feel exciting enough, I thought if I just kept holding out and building the brand & audience, the right thing would come along. I thought it was going to be events. But when I started speaking to (future collaborators) Lach Hall & Dakota Green about sunscreen, I realised that sunscreen as a product has all of what made Poolside FM go viral in the first place; layers of experience & nostalgia. It’s not just ‘this swimwear looks like it's from the 80s.’ You have a lot to play with, from complex scents made up of various notes designed to inspire deep nostalgia, the rub-in experience, the design of the packaging, the tone of voice on the website and our social interactions, etc.

Holyn: The sensory experience makes it a standout amongst other sunscreens and I’ve tried a million at this point. It’s almost like you can touch and smell Poolsuite—it brings me back to lounging on a floatie and drinking a marg in Miami each time.

Marty: In credit to Lach & Dakota, going hard on fragrance was their idea, I just became a collaborator alongside them and the great minds/noses at Arquiste Parfumer to craft exactly what that scent would be. We really wanted to be known for the scent, and for it to be so good people would want to smell like it even when they’re not in the sun, so we made a standalone Eau de Toilette (“VACATION” by Vacation®) to really hit that home. And it has gone down a storm! Multiple advisors told us we shouldn’t do this as it distracted from the sunscreen. It made up a large % of our revenue in year 1 and was picked as one of Vogue favourite products of 2021.

Holyn: Vacation’s in over 1,000 stores now … I think Nordstrom, Kith, and Ulta, right? Obviously something is working! I don’t know if I should admit this as a skincare nerd, but I tried the sunscreen on my face the first time I used it ... Thankfully, it blended into my brown skin pretty well and didn’t break me out. It was dumb, but I was in Miami and feeling almost as bold as you did when picking such a regulated product to start with.

Marty: Sunscreen has a pretty big moat in how difficult it is to get off the ground from a regulatory perspective, so we knew competition wouldn’t be as rife as in other categories. I think some of the best brands in the world were ‘80s sunscreen brands, most of which still exist but as very sad, dry versions of their former selves. It’s an extremely exciting challenge to recreate one of those in the modern day.

Why Poolsuite embraced Web III

Holyn: Looking at your background, it’s no wonder that Poolsuite emerged. I always think about Steve Jobs taking a calligraphy class and learning about typography, which later influenced the design of Apple products. Connect the dots for us—you’ve designed products and curated experiences. How did you stumble upon crypto?

Marty: I’ve been buying Ethereum since 2015, backed dozens of ICOs in 2017 of companies I haven’t heard from since, got my ass handed to me in 2017 with my alts portfolio sitting at -95%. I never saw that world merging with where my personal passions lie; in throwing parties, making art, funding real-world properties, or creating a membership pass to an eclectic product studio. It all just clicked out of nowhere, and I’m so so glad it did.

Holyn: The dots always connect, even if you have to get rugged by an ICO along the way. Poolsuite feels so nostalgic, like a throwback to a time before “the internet.” Yet you jumped into the future by launching NFT membership ... Why embrace Web3?

Marty: I’ve been trying to find a way to monetise projects like Poolsuite for years. An organisation that’s focused more on having a good time and building things for/with a fan base vs. trying to build a hyper-growth tech startup that’ll sell in 5 years. I just wanna build hot shit with some of the most talented people I know, serve it up to our community with a smart, sustainable economic model powering the whole thing. If it feels like we’re moving slowly to anyone, it’s because we’re thinking long-term in the way we build. I want to work on Poolsuite for the rest of my days. That means nothing we do is to make a quick buck, it is all to build a brand and offering that can last for decades to come. Before we dropped the NFTs, I’d mapped out a big game plan powered by Patreon. It was to create a product playground funded by monthly subscriptions. Then I stumbled upon an NFT being used like a membership pass and it was this huge fucking light bulb moment. It’s everything I’d been looking for, and I jumped in head first to rework our plans to fit this world.

Holyn: Web3 can be a technical and hostile experience, especially for first-timers. One thing that stood out about Poolsuite is your decision to add membership cards to mobile wallets. Mine is in my Apple Wallet now. How did this integration come about?

Marty: One of our giga-brain developers (Ryan) just said one day “I think I could put these in Apple Wallet... give me a couple hours to mess around” and just like that he had a demo working. He had a good idea and the environment to make it happen, and a project that the functionality makes complete sense for. Everyone on the team has so many good ideas it’s kind of overwhelming to decide which we do. I think Poolsuite is great because people can come into it, and as long as it makes sense within our brand world, they can kinda make whatever they want if everyone else is excited about it and it makes sense for the community. We also want the community to play a part in submitting ideas for the things we make too, that’s coming soon.

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Holyn: I can’t wait to ambush you with all my Really Good ideas. Aside from collaborating, what else can the community expect? When can I use my Poolsuite card? Dare I say ... What’s the utility here?

As our name might suggest, we’re building a suite of tools for the good life. Some of what’s on offer now, and a hint of what’s to come as part of the ‘suite’ for our community:

• Guestlist: we just held our first two invite-only parties in London & NYC in the last 2 weeks with a line-up of exceptional artists like Breakbot, Natasha Diggs, Artwork & DJ Holographic. These events were the beginning of our IRL community and they really did feel like the start of something huge. We’re scaling our events up into a worldwide series with big name artists at unique & iconic venues, which will be ticketed to the public but always complimentary for our NFT holders. We announce our next event later this week!

• Bottomless early access to all Poolsuite drops: there’s no end to the number of weird & wonderful ideas on the back burner, but to highlight a few (current and upcoming) …

  • Wallet Service: The first Apple Wallet NFT integration, which we’ll make use of at our aforementioned events

  • Manor DAO: access by default to the property and various holder-only perks—so to be part of this project requires no extra funds or input for current NFT holders (although there will be the opportunity to back Manor DAO separately for further access & perks)

  • Palm Report: An eclectic twice-monthly newsletter (launching this week) with ‘insider memos’ for holders

  • An upcoming identity & virtual fashion-focused NFT offering, complimentary for holders

  • A stream of perks such as gifts and discounts from ourselves, our friends, and our brand partners

• But most importantly, the Poolsuite app. Our existing music app, Poolsuite FM, which has a sizeable user base, will soon begin to transition to become the home of all the seemingly disparate things we’re building, where it all clicks together… more on that soon!

The future of leisure & commerce

If I could teleport back to any NYC era, it would be the Studio 54 / Factory era when creativity, indulgence, and discovery were abundant. There’s a NYC legend that Bianca Jagger rode a white horse to Studio 54 for her 30th birthday party, though she simply rode it inside the club. It’s an iconic nightlife moment, so it’s only fitting that Poolsuite had a (prop) white unicorn at their NYC party about a week ago. There were also disco balls glistening above a pool, which some people were bold enough to wade into.

The IRL Poolsuite experience is special—the music syncs with your heartbeat, the crowd embraces you with abandon, and small details like a pool or disposable cameras cocoon you against gravity and the worries of the world. As I reflected on the NYC party, I realized the parallels between Marty and Ian Schrager, creator of Studio 54, PUBLIC and EDITION Hotels, and the boutique hotel concept. In one of my favorite quotes by the hospitality mogul, he says …

“All that you have to distinguish what you are doing is in that magic you are able to create, that excitement, that revelry, that fun, that abandonment that you’re able to create. And it’s quite exhilarating when you see a few thousands people on the dance floor almost operating like one single organism.” — Ian Schrager

While Schrager wouldn’t prescribe to exclusive nature of an NFT collection, I’d argue that Poolsuite has similar magic to what he’s created around the world. In fact, I believe Poolsuite’s impact is only in its first inning (yes, I can make sports references, too), evident by the recent resurgence of 1980s serifs and copy in brand/product ads … I could pontificate for paragraphs about how influencial the Poolsuite/Vacation brand is, but I’ll spare you. Beyond design, Poolsuite occupies a unique space between online/offline and lifestyle/commerce, all of which are threaded by a social community. The product studio aspires to bolster its offline presence starting with Manor DAO, which it announced earlier this month.

WTF IS MANOR DAO? I’m glad you asked! Imagine a lavish mansion in a warm European country, probably somewhere close to a beach. There are 10+ rooms, a pool you can swim laps in, a renowned chef, exquisite art decorating the walls, and the most fun and eccentric guests. This guest makeup will be similar to the NYC party: a mix of Poolsuite NFT holders, Manor DAO NFT holders, and non-members who seek a life of leisure. I honestly don’t remember discussing crypto once at the NYC party—fashion, furniture-making, travel plans, food, and the pool/music dominated my conversations. I saw tastemakers and crypto nerds and beauty people … People didn’t lead a conversation with their careers, a welcomed aberration from the typical NYC gathering.

Poolsuite is carefully curating the Manor’s cultural advisors. You can imagine lounging by the pool next to icons who aren’t of the crypto persuasion—if anyone has Drake’s, Gwyneth Paltrow’s, or Lewis Hamilton’s contact, please let me know. This is my vision, though—the project is a DAO, so every NFT holder will get a say on manor location, art, programming, token economics, and more. Marty and the team are being intentional about the launch by working with projects like Boys Club (a women-focused DAO) and pushing out educational web3 content to bring a greater variety of people into the fold. May good taste prevail!

Poolsuite has a lot more in store. I don’t have all the details (SHOCKING, I KNOW) but some friends and I have some Really Good ideas:

• Token-boosted Vacation products—engrave my name on my Vacation perfume bottle for free, please

• Get a partnership with Delta that gives Executives NFT holders a 5% discount on flights to the Cayman Islands

• Let me select the month’s DJ—my sister Jeilah DJ’s house and has an exceptional ear soooooo … I love Tensnake but what if listeners can contribute to music discovery?

• “A cassette tape (and player) with the most popular streamed tracks on Poolsuite.” — Charles

• “Credit Card Loyalty Program (e.g. Amex, Chase) could be a simple scalable way to provide Poolsuite folks a ton of IRL experiences through a single partnership.” — Sam

• “The whole premise of Poolsuite seems to be re-writing history through their unique lens: the past, present, and future of internet leisure. Poolsuite could create an ever-evolving "history book", released in a Nouns DAO format. One moment (in any medium of media) that captures "internet leisure" released every 24 hours or every 7 days, forever. The content could even be co-created by outside brands or current Poolsuite holders. All collectors are tied into "Leisure DAO" with 100% of proceeds going back to the DAO. Collectors get to vote on what moment is expanded upon.” — Tylr

• “Classpass-type member perks to beautifully curated leisure-making in select cites like tennis pass at some of the worlds best tennis clubs or figure drawing classes at some beautiful palace/institute etc. DAO members could propose their own immaculate-taste hosted experiences along the lines of skill-making but make it leisure-making.” — Nisreen

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Poolsuite has been a journey since 2014; many dots connected and culminated into the online/offline experiences we know today. From launching the Poolside FM internet radio to getting rugged by ICOs, to creating a sunglasses brand, to perfecting scent with Lach & Dakota, to the NFT gold rush of 2021 … All the cards fell perfectly to create what is one of the most ambitious and creative endeavors in web3. Poolsuite doesn't depend on notoriety, stunts, or financial engineering. Instead, the internet leisure corporation creates magic.

Poolsuite doesn’t feel like the internet or web3 technology—it feels like the purest atoms of being human. It feels like coming home, like letting go, like choosing peace and embracing freedom … Leisure is freedom. They also say decentralization (web3) is freedom. Imagine deciding you’d rather enjoy a margarita-filled jacuzzi than anything else? As captain of the so-called jacuzzi, I’d say there’s nothing you deserve more. We all deserve the leisure and freedom Poolsuite purveys.

This sentiment is incredibly hard for any corporation to achieve, whether online or offline. The fact that Marty and Poolsuite understand what people seek, beyond and within the confines we sometimes create for ourselves, sets the stage for a generational brand that I hope my children experience. Poolsuite will enable leisure both online and offline in a way that brings anyone onchain by thoughtfully imbuing web3 (and other) technology into its suite of products.

Welcome to the good life.

Thank you for reading! Special thanks to Marty for granting me this interview and to Packy, Nisreen, Bobby, Charles, Tylr, Sam, Miguel, & Rliriano for your feedback. If you’re new, make sure to subscribe to join the conversation.

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Poolsuite Links:

+ Website // Twitter // Instagram // OpenSea

+ Manor DAO

+ Vacation

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I wrote my first essay for CoinDesk in early March. The process was foreign to me—waxing poetic about opinion about the state of crypto and consumer, and letting an editor refine my work (which I consider an art tyvm). As part of the process, we replaced my example of how I think web3 builders should rethink custody (we went with a Poolsuite example instead, read here). I’ve published the original example below as it’s lingered in my mind since. There’s a lot to say about the state of web3 and why we should remain optimistic about a future beyond financial speculation …

Web3 should rethink custody

“Starbucks is a bank” – not legally, but theoretically. Starbucks has a reward card that you can preload using cash/card and use for in-app purchases to earn 2x rewards. This money cannot be withdrawn for cash, since Starbucks isn’t a bank, resulting in a balance of over $1.5 billion. What if Starbucks had a custodial wallet? The company could leverage its payment onramp to bring consumers into Web 3, incentivizing loyalty by rewarding purchases with $STAR tokens or stablecoins. Starbucks could create its own economy for customers around the world.

— “What Web 3 Can Learn From Steve Jobs” Draft, March 2022

With the fall of the $UST stablecoin this week and the falling floor prices of NFTs ... it’s no wonder the general population is skeptical about crypto (or, web3 as we call it). Yet, my conviction that NFTs will gain wide adoption—primarily through commerce—continues to strengthen.

This week, Instagram launched a beta test for NFTs for select creators and collectors. The announcement focused on creator ownership, which I’ve been a staunch advocate of for many years now. There wasn’t a lot of hype about it, but I consider it a quiet leap in a seemingly uphill battle for consumer adoption. One that I hope Starbucks helps us win with the launch of their brand NFTs later this year—this isn't speculation or a leak, Starbucks finally announced the project in late April. Can I see into the future? Yes, we’re already in it. Let’s break it down ...

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Starbucks already has a strong reward/loyalty program as stated above, but it’s simply transactional. By leveraging NFTs, Starbucks can cultivate its community, resulting in more sales and brand equity. Starbucks also elevates itself from the 90s coffee shop of yore to the “metaverse” ... a balance of offline/online existence if you will. Consumers will purchase a branded NFT to gain access to exclusive events, experiences, and other rewards. There are three key benefits of loyalty/reward NFTs for brands and consumers alike:

1. Brand custody. Most web3 maxis will argue that everything should be truly decentralized and non-custody, but that’s a burden that most consumers would rather not carry. Brands, on the other hand, benefit from token custody since they can monetize using esoteric instruments. Most people don’t remember their passwords. We should ease them into remembering a 100-word seed phrase. By then, maybe Apple will let you hold all of your NFTs in your wallet. Better yet, the general public may be ready to embrace non-custody wallets. The north star should always be decentralization.

2. Partnerships. Today, brands are struggling to reach customers as advertising costs soar and their results crater. The solution is brand building to convert and keep customers; community is one way to increase value and partnerships are another. Brands can open their ecosystem to complementary partners. Imagine being able to purchase a fancy espresso machine at a discount because you hold a Starbucks NFT. Token-gated products are already out in the wild on Shopify.

3. On-chain data. I haven’t stopped hearing about personalization since some tech guys discovered just how valuable internet data is. Once brands launch NFTs, they will combine their off- and on-chain data to provide exceptional consumer experiences. With privacy laws like GDPR and browsers moving to block third-party cookies, on-chain data will become increasingly valuable. The more that consumers use their NFTs across the web, the more brands can learn about them. NFTs are the one way to understand and build for consumers while allowing them to retain ownership over what they share and when. Zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs), which “let someone prove that they know or have something without giving up any information about what they know or have,” will be a web3 game changer. Here’s a great explainer on ZKPs by Packy & Jill.

Now, imagine having this superpower in all apps. I hold my NFTs in my web3 wallet (or Apple Wallet): Delta, Bebop, and others. I use my Delta NFT to rack up points for all my flights, my hotel stays, and even for my Lyft rides. If I have enough, maybe they’ll let me in the Sky Club for free or upgrade me to Lyft Lux Black. Does Lyft have helicopter service to the airport yet? I want that as one of my future perks.

What’s Bebop? A fictional second-hand marketplace with a rewards program; one $BOP earned for each dollar spent on the app. I can use my $BOP to subsidize future purchases, which are tracked within the Bebop app and the balance is held within my Bebop NFT sitting pretty in my Apple Wallet. Who doesn’t love a two-token model! After shopping till I drop, I go outside and touch grass. The data will be on-chain when I’m back online but at least this time I own it.

Going back to Instagram—today it’s all about creator NFTs, tomorrow it’ll be branded NFTs. IG is basically a mall now and adding an NFT layer where users are encouraged to make more transactions is a huge win for the company and Mr. Mark. And we cannot forget that IG is powered by Shopify, which is already experimenting with NFTs and commerce. I hope all the dots are connecting for you now as they did for me!

It’s easy to look at the rise of Bored Apes and think that NFTs are about media, money, and (ugly) art. Or to look at new projects like Moonbirds and think NFTs are about exclusivity, community utility, and (pixelated) art. I could go on and on, but the point is that NFTs have utility beyond monetizing art and community. In fact, everything will be an NFT: concert tickets, apartment keys, work badges, digital media, loyalty cards … The web3 world is in shambles right now as the markets crash, but those with vision will build through the chaos. I can't wait for the moment we no longer call an umbrella of things “NFTs” and the technology disappears into our everyday lives.

Thank you for reading and special thanks to Seyi Taylor for influencing my thinking. If you’re new, make sure to subscribe to join the conversation.

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Further Reading:

+ The Future of Commerce in 2022 by Shopify

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The first internet influencer died mysteriously in a cult 13 years ago.

Or so they say.

She emerged mysteriously five years ago with an eerie video. Only to go dark again.

lonelygirl15 was a teenage girl named Bree Avery who started a YouTube video dairy in 2006. Her videos captured her everyday life, adventures, and responses to other YouTubers at the time. Soon after launch, lonelygirl15 started to interact with her viewers through her MySpace and email.

It only took three months for lonelygirl15 to be revealed as fake—a fictional character from the minds of a screenwriter, a former doctor, and a lawyer.

It didn’t matter, though. The mystery of lonelygirl15’s authenticity created a cult following online with message boards dedicated to the teenager’s content. The character and her friends continued to get millions of views. Those were ridiculously high YouTube numbers at the time. Unsurprisingly, lonelygirl15 partnered with Hershey’s and Neutrogena for product placement; the start of sponsored content.

lonelygirl15 means a lot more to the internet than most people realize. Today, we have fictional TikTok characters and, soon, our lives on the internet will be so algorithmically generated that the only way to feel something “real” will be by touching grass.

It’s only real if you believe it

In her first TikTok video, an influencer named Sydney, who apparently worked at a dating app, gave tips on how to spot red flags on a dating profile. The tips were decent and the video got picked up by some UK gossip rag and NY Post. The issue is ... these publications didn’t clarify that Sydney was a fictional character. In fact, Sydney didn’t use the video caption to clarify that she was a fictional character either for the 100,000 people who saw her video on their For You page. You had no clue that Sydney was a bit unless you clicked into her profile to read her bio.

Sydney and 20+ other TikTok characters are part of a cinematic universe developed by a startup called FourFront. The concept reminds me of lonelygirl15. Sure, there are influencers who post poreless skin and rented cars, but there’s something more insidious happening that we’ve yet to discuss. What if the characters aren’t actors taking on a role? There are characters emerging online, aided by technology and masterful storytelling, who are changing our perception of reality bit by bit. For example …

Daquan, a meme character and aggregator popularized by IMGN Media.

Lil Miquela, an iconic CGI character and model created by Brud.

And the many deepfakes I’ve seen online in the last two years. Brian Monarch is a prolific comedian who shares deepfakes of iconic pop culture moments on Instagram and TikTok. And, speaking of Will Smith—because I know someone is still talking about him—he posted a really fun one from the Bel Air tv show premiere last month. How fun is it?

The AI is getting smarter

I’ve been fascinated with deepfakes for a few years now, primarily because I think they’ll bend our reality in ways we’ve yet to imagine. I wrote about this in my first-ever essay for this newsletter and we’ve seen incredible technological progress since.

Last week, OpenAI, a research and deployment company, launched their new AI system called DALL·E 2.

DALL·E 2 can create original, realistic images and art from a text description. It can combine concepts, attributes, and styles.

DALL·E 2 can make realistic edits to existing images from a natural language caption. It can add and remove elements while taking shadows, reflections, and textures into account.

DALL·E 2 can take an image and create different variations of it inspired by the original.

This is incredibly important.

We’re being promised the metaverse by web2 bosses like Meta and web3 upstarts alike. But are we going to create a synthetic internet on our way to this promised land? Maybe ... let's see how DALL·E, and other systems like it, could potentially impact our online lives.

1. Creation. I spent a couple of hours at The Met this weekend staring at art from around the world. What I found remarkable was the many hours of training and dedication that went into creating a single piece of art. For example, an artist like Frits Thaulow who wanted to be an impressionist had to train for 4-5 years before creating any original work: two years dedicated to drawing and 2-3 years dedicated to painting and color. Space, lighting, dimension, anatomy—artists had to master it all. Nude models back then held poses for days, sometimes weeks, to allow artists to develop these skills. Just a decade ago, it was the ultimate display of skill to spend hours on Photoshop colorizing black and white images, adding skin tone, makeup, shadows ... I have a few such images in my vault. For centuries, artists have poured hours into their paper and digital sketchpads. Today, that seems absurd. Today, you input the right prompt in DALL·E and skip years of artistic training. It’s bittersweet.

2. Storytelling. You can find AI-generated text, images, video, and audio in the wild. Most recently, Andy Warhol narrated his own posthumous Netflix documentary, The Andy Warhol Diaries. Well, technically it was voiced by an actor and then morphed into Warhol’s voice using Resemble AI technology. When it comes to DALL·E, Untitled Frontier wrote a great essay with visuals about worldbuilding using the technology here. Entertainment, books, and gaming will never be the same.

3. Identity. With DALL·E, you can design and redesign your entire home. You can create avatars. You can conceptualize an entire experience from thin air. Once we combine the powers of DALL·E, GPT-3, Resemble AI, and other technologies yet to be invented, the ~metaverse~ will become more than an idea. Andrew Niccol, one of my favorite screenwriters, received mixed reviews for his 2002 film Simone, a story about a director who creates a virtual actress to star in his movies. Watching the film today, however, feels prescient. Who are the characters we can create online? What are the ideas that we propel? How do they embed into our physical lives? Because they definitely will—houses may start looking like a blend of Victorian and modern styles and we’ll know where the idea came from. Critically, what are the ethics of such technology? One of the characters in the movie gave a decent answer—“we’re fine with fake as long as you don’t lie about it.”

OpenAI has considered the potential problems that DALL·E could amplify: existing biases, harmful content, and misinformation. The proliferation of AI-generated images necessitates better moderation tools, detection tools, and authentication. Most importantly, AI ethics should be at the forefront of how OpenAI and others continue to research and build.

My Twitter exploration of DALL·E this weekend, since I’m still on the waitlist1, brought me down an anthropological rabbithole of the internet. None of this is really new; it’s simply an advanced version of experiences we’ve shared in the last two decades.

For me, DALL·E emphasizes the importance of creating and building in the real world. The words you input in DALL·E today can vary your output completely and vice versa. For example, do you want to see “male nurse” or “nurse”? Because words can be gendered and DALL·E captures the world as it is, not as we envision it could be.

For a microsecond, I worried this new technology would render art an ambient noise instead of something that we actively participate in. Then I realized that a remix is rarely better than the original unless the original already sucks. In the next decade, artists will become more important than ever in shaping culture, politics, and more. Their work may be used as inputs for DALL·E and other technologies, which will only maximize their artistic impact. A century from now, we may visit museums in the so-called ~metaverse~, but I’m optimistic that original works will be just as prominently featured to define the moment we find ourselves now and for years to come.

Thank you for reading. If you’re new, make sure to subscribe to join the conversation.

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Further Reading

+ Synthetic Media Landscape by Samsung NEXT

+ Lonelygirl15: how one mysterious vlogger changed the internet

+ This Company is Revolutionizing TV Through TikTok

+ Meet the Mystery Meme-Makers Behind the Popular Instagram ‘Daquan’

+ Body Con Job: Miquela Sousa

+ DALL·E 2 Preview - Risks and Limitations

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I co-hosted a web3 dinner last night and it was such an illuminating experience. The attendees were 10% web3 builders and 90% otherwise—you all know how I feel about these distinctions. Anyway, the conversations we had were fascinating and more insightful than sitting on Twitter all day drinking the eth kool-aid.

One person talked about how confusing and consuming this new world was. Who has time to spend 20 hours on YoutTube or wherever learning about blockchains? Especially when they’re smart enough to quickly make thousands of dollars with their existing knowledge? What’s the point of trying to flip an NFT and risk getting rugged?

Speaking of risk, how do you assess it? If you’re lucky, you end up in great group chats that help validate a project. But, what if you’re not so lucky? Maybe your luck can run out. What are the odds that you won’t pay 25eth for a Mekaverse NFT only for the going price to be 0.4eth a few months later because the project has crashed and burned? Is everything just speculation and you hope you get in and out in time? Maybe so.

Mostly, we discussed how simply and easily people expect to experience products and experiences. I swear I didn’t seed this suggestion, but someone brought up Apple as a prime example of a company that made sense out of the complicated dial-up era of the internet. The suggestion reminded me of my favorite (design) principle: keep it simple, stupid (or, KISS). The idea is that most systems work best if they are kept simple rather than made complicated; therefore, simplicity should be a key goal in design, and unnecessary complexity should be avoided.

I can hear the crypto chorus now saying, “we’re so earlyyyyyy.”

Yes and we can still do better.

The question is … who are we making products for? And how can we keep them as the north star that guides the infrastructure and products we build?

This question is open-ended because ultimately everyone has different motivations. But if the goal is to usher in a new era of the internet, then certainly people, instead of money, should be the motivation, no?

Thank you for reading. If you’re new to online/offline, make sure to subscribe to join the conversation.

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Legendary technologist and Apple (AAPL) CEO Steve Jobs may have been better with words than he was with design. He recognized that “every once in a while, a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything.” From the printing press to the telegram to the iPhone – these products not only changed entire industries, they changed the world and the way we interact with it.

When Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone in 2007, he emphasized its innovative user interface that replaced the typical smartphone keyboard with a wide, multi-touch screen. As he predicted, this breakthrough product decision created a new standard for consumer hardware and led to competitive innovations. There likely would be no Snapchat or WhatsApp without the iPhone.

Today, enthusiasts hope that Web 3 changes everything. Its differentiating technology, smart contracts made up of immutable code and data on the blockchain, aims to cut out the need for middlemen in finance to help creators retain ownership and more. Similar to the iPhone’s trajectory, enthusiasts posit that smart contracts innovation will create new and improved industries and behaviors.

However, products built using smart contracts are more analogous to early smartphones than the iPhone. They are miles away from decentralization, aggressively technical and composed of discordant user interfaces.

First, you have to research and choose the right wallet for the blockchain(s) you intend to use.

Second, you must write down your 12- to 24-word seed phrase (password) and keep it somewhere safe and never lose it. Then you must on-ramp fiat currency into cryptocurrency – mind the regulatory gaps, depending on your domicile.

You may or may not succeed. If you don’t give up you have to learn about gas fees, swaps, slippage, bridges and other concepts to buy or trade tokens. The reality is that people are accustomed to beautifully designed, frictionless products. Most will give up.

Simply put, Web 3 products today are not so smart and hard to use. There will be no widespread adoption until builders rethink everything and create with consumers in mind.

This is where I expect enthusiasts to point out upcoming technical updates that will make Web 3 cheaper and simpler. I’m optimistic, but those updates remain in progress. In the meantime, builders should rethink three key things: language, custody and utility.

1. Rethink language: The crypto-to-Web 3 rebrand did wonders for how we talk about Ethereum innovation. However, the language that builders use remains inaccessible to most people. What exactly do we mean by composable? Permissionless? Trustless? These terms sound more complex than they are. One of my favorite crypto wallets, a considerably consumer-friendly one, labels Polygon as a “sidechain with its own consensus mechanisms.” This means nothing to the everyday person without a deep knowledge of Ethereum networks. In fact, that language can be considered hostile and inscrutable. We need to change the way we talk about Web 3 products and technology, lest we discourage curious newcomers.

2. Rethink custody: 75% of respondents in a 2019 Google study expressed frustration in keeping track of their passwords, which tend to be basic. How does Web 3 expect people to secure and remember 12 or more random words that make up seed phrases? In the short term, builders should explore creative, custodial solutions that accommodate and incrementally change consumer behaviors. For example, an internet leisure organization called Poolsuite launched membership non-fungible tokens (NFT) last year with a key benefit: mobile wallet integration. iPhone users can add their Poolsuite NFT to their Apple Wallet and use the app to unlock future experiences. This approach shows how Web 3 can meet people where they are today while working toward a decentralized future.

3. Rethink utility: Several Web 3 protocols and products introduced in the last few months mimic existing platforms and features. Why? We don’t really need another Twitter, skeuomorphic wallet, or Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT derivative. Instead, builders should leverage novel technologies at their disposal to create new experiences for consumers. We’ve just begun to scratch the surface of generative artificial intelligence (AI) NFTs for storytelling and identity, the bridge between online and physical goods, and tokenized economies. How these ideas manifest will depend on builders pushing the limit of what’s possible with both software and hardware.

One could argue that friction is good for innovation. However, there’s entirely too much friction in Web 3 today and it’s detrimental to widespread adoption. Ultimately, Web 3 should feel like an iPhone – an intuitive and essential part of life. Changes in how we communicate, how people hold and use products, and Web 3’s realized value will make this reality possible.

Content originally published by CoinDesk, Inc. at www.coindesk.com.

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If you’ve followed me over the years on the bird app, then you know there are three companies that I really care about: Snap, Block (Square & Cash App creator), and Twitter (it’s complicated). To me, these three epitomize what consumer software should look and feel like.

I write a lot about consumer products (consumer social, social commerce, future of avatars, creator economy, but I digress). I’ve yet to write about consumer fintech. Today’s the day.

It’s finally time for me to obsess over Cash App!!

There are a million reasons (probably) to love Cash App, but today we’ll talk about three key ones that make it the best consumer (and crypto) wallet out today: consumer appreciation, cultural relevancy, and crypto dreams. Are you sick of me saying consumer, yet? Because ...

1. CONSUMER appreciation

A study conducted in 2020 by the Federal Reserve showed that 18% of US adults remain un- or underbanked. This means that millions of people may have access to banking services, but they are insufficient to meet their financial service needs. Notably, the study found that “unbanked and underbanked rates were higher among adults with lower income, adults with less education, and Black and Hispanic adults. The largest differences were by education and income level.”1

These findings are not shocking at all. Fortunately, none of these people have to open bank accounts, which can charge unknown fees and give limited access to funds due to a limited density of ATMs and physical locations. Instead, people can download Cash App ... and they have been for years. Cash App got its early traction in the mid-2010s from young un- and underbanked users in the southeast US. Since then, it has amassed almost as many users as Venmo and continues to grow its suite of products. The Google Trends below give a look into Cash App’s reach historically and today.

What started as a peer-to-peer (P2P) payment app now allows users to send, spend, bank, and invest.

• Send: you can send and receive fiat and crypto (more on this soon). If you choose, you can hold these funds in your Cash App, which allows you to ...

• Spend by designing your own debit card to pay for goods and services via the pool of funds in your account. This basically makes Cash App your ...

• Bank since you can also set up direct deposit for a gig you have and, if you have more than $300 coming in each month, you can use ATMs for free. Need to pay taxes on your earnings? No problem, you can file for free using Cash App Taxes. If you want to diversify your Cash App holdings and make those taxes a little more complicated, you can also ...

• Invest in stocks and bitcoin with as little as $1.

In addition to these features, Cash App began testing short-term loans of up to $200 in 2020. It remains to be seen what comes out of the limited beta test. Despite these features, Cash App still calls itself a financial platform, not a bank; services provided and debit cards are issued by Cash's bank partners.

Semantics.

Cash App has the most consumer-friendly financial management products—an ecosystem that could only rival Apple. The only reason we care, though, is because Cash App has managed to be part of the culture.

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2. Cultural relevancy

By now, we can agree that black culture eventually becomes mainstream culture. Cash App’s popularity began in the south and in Atlanta in particular—hip-hop’s center of gravity according to The New York Times. Not that we care what NYT says, but this was eloquently put.

It’s no surprise how prevalent Cash App is in hip-hop culture given its place in people’s lives. “Cash App is just such a big app at this point, it’s utilized by so many people, that it was always going to make its way into lyrics,” rapper Guapdad 4000 told GQ last year. Over 200 artists have mentioned Cash App in their lyrics. The Cash App team took notice and began partnering with iconic artists to reach existing users and, more importantly, acquire new ones.

A brief timeline: Travis Scott gave away $100k in 2018, Megan Thee Stallion gave away $1m in bitcoin in 2020 followed by another $1m in stock in 2021, and Lil Nas X gave away $1m (to anyone over 13 years old!) in 2021.

That’s a lot of money (to me, a human and not Block Incorporated). And, it should’ve indicated how seriously Cash App takes its role as an active supporter of the culture. Last year, the team decided to double down by launching Cash App Studios to help fund projects by independent creatives, including artists, musicians, directors, and designers. Let’s not even get into Square's (or, Block’s) acquisition of Tidal. That’s an essay in itself.

Beyond hip-hop, Cash App listens to its community. After Cash App launched $Cashtag, Twitter users started asking their followers to send them money for things like grooming. The community created #CashAppFriday before it was adopted by the company in late 2017 and become one of their best marketing tools. The first time Cash App stated $10k was the amount of the weekly giveaways, their Twitter engagement and followers spiked. The network effects pay way more dividends than the thousands invested in the weekly campaigns; Cash App’s customer acquisition cost is $5. In comparison, some traditional banks spend hundreds to acquire a single customer.

But, wait, there’s more—you can find Cash App on Roblox, sponsoring the Bitcoin 2022 conference, collaborating with lifestyle brand and gaming organization 100 Thieves, doing money affirmations on TikTok, and much more.

Cash App’s active role and investment in their existing community and their partners’ communities (eg. Lil Nas X fans) is a master class in propagating network effects that create organic flywheels both online and offline.

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3. Crypto dreams

“I used to think the public activity page on Venmo was so stupid, because it’s like a fake Blockchain ledger. It updates with all the transactions of people using the app, but not to make anything actually verifiable or to encrypt anything.” — Guapdad 4000, GQ 2021.

I’ll keep this one short. I’ve been waiting to see crypto payments go mainstream and Cash App is doing it. In 2018, the company added support for bitcoin trading. Last month, they integrated Lightning Network technology, meaning US users can now send bitcoin quickly and for free to:

• Friends and family in the US, except for regulated states like NY because I guess I can’t have nice things

• International family and friends who use other crypto wallets like Muun

• Businesses that support Lightning Network. Again, with ZERO FEES—take that, Visa and Mastercard

When I finally become a travel influencer, I can travel the world without caring about exchange rates because all the shops will accept a global currency called bitcoin (and maybe eth if/when the team adds support for it).

Cash App online and offline

How did we get here? This tweet. Apparently, people aren’t talking about fintech anymore because of web3? BOO, 🍅🍅. These are exciting times.2 Contactless payments have been around for decades, but COVID-19 led to widespread adoption beyond Europe and Asia. Consumers are now comfortable with the idea and retailers have contactless devices in-store. In the US, nearly 20% of all in-person credit or debit card transactions are now contactless; the UK is at ~50% adoption, which translates to 9.6 billion transactions.3

With this in mind, it’s a huge deal that Cash App launched contactless using Square terminals. I tried it this week and it was so quick and easy that I thought I did something wrong. For the millions of people who use Cash App as a bank already, being able to use the app for IRL transactions is a game-changer.

Cash App doesn’t consider itself a bank. But, in my very professional opinion, Cash App is better than a bank. As of Fall 2021, teenagers as young as 13 can use Cash App with parental oversight. These teens get access to P2P payments and the debit card, which they don’t even need if they’re visiting their favorite coffee shop and it has a Square terminal. These days, you simply need to scan the QR code with your phone’s camera and tap two buttons to check out with your $Cashtag/account. Considering there are over 2 million businesses that use Square, that’s a big deal.

But, why stop there?

Cash App has the same utility as Apple Wallet, but can be used on both iPhones and Androids ... In the near future, kids as young as 13 could use Cash App to transact. When they turn 18, they’ll access the full suite of products from check deposits to tax filing to stocks to cross-border payments to bitcoin. Will Cash App users pay for coffee using bitcoin? Yes.

Honestly, I was hoping the coffee shop I visited would let me pay using the bitcoin Megan Thee Stallion sent me, but I’m in NYC and, again, have accepted that regulation won’t let me have nice things. For now! I’m optimistic that things there’s a future where card processing fees and exchange rates and such are a thing of the past. It’s not #CashAppFriday yet but feel free to send bitcoin to $[redacted] so I can be fully prepared and capitalized when this future is realized.

Thank you for reading and special thanks to Tammy Winter for her feedback on this piece. If you’re new, make sure to subscribe to join the conversation.

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Further Reading:

+ How Hip-hop Helped Cash App Grow Faster by Trapital

+ Hip-Hop Loves Cash App, and That Might Be Why Jack Dorsey Bought Tidal by GQ

+ Square Cash App’s Viral Marketing Strategy Attracts Users by ARK Invest

+ Inside Cash App Friday by Money

+ Digital Wallets Are Adding Users at an Exponential Rate by ARK Invest

+ Why America is so behind in contactless payments by Ben Soppitt