Every week, we put together a list of our top 5 articles of the past week. Happy reading!
Market-Making on the Internet Ben Thompson (reading time: 10 minutes)
The internet’s scale is hard to comprehend. The number of businesses and creators that can flourish is almost endless and interestingly, always evolving. Ben Thompson depicts how these markets came to be and how they can change over time. The most recent one is enabling more & more creators and small businesses to succeed.
Who Disrupts the Disrupters? Packy McCormick (reading time: 27 minutes)
Web3 might represent the only threat to disrupt the world’s most powerful tech companies.
Web3 blends the lines between creators, consumers, suppliers, and investors, and lets projects pay people to use them, whether directly or via tokens that might grow in value over time.
In line with Ben Thompson’s previous article, the internet has enabled new types of businesses to be built on top of new platforms (shopify, facebook, etc.). Packy talks about the new trend of Web3 which is about the potential next wave of disruption. Yes, it’s based on crypto and blockchain but these terms will surely fade into the background.
Founding vs Inheriting 1729 (reading time: 7 minutes)
Where heirs failed, founders succeeded. The internet stayed up. The state couldn’t deliver checks, but Amazon could deliver packages.
In this thought provoking post, Balaji writes about the inherited nature of institutions on the East Coast of the US. He argues that they are a read-only culture and is a big reason for their failures in the past year.
The Big Lessons of the Last Year Collaborative Fund (reading time: 7 minutes)
Risk is what’s left when you think you’ve thought of everything
There are many great tidbits of wisdom in this article. Morgan Housel as usual uses history to reframe the pandemic and the lessons learned (or maybe lack thereof). My big takeaway is that life is actually not that bad for most people despite the pandemic.