Authors Balajis.com
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A solo media founder like Rogan or Mr Beast can make as much money as a strong tech founder, with significantly less managerial stress.
Tech created this ecosystem but there’s a historical cultural bias in tech towards media as unprofitable. That changed a long time ago.
Many more angels that invest in people will invest in media founders. Many traditional media people will *become* media founders.
But not necessarily big companies. Just solo individuals or small groups doing content, like Notch doing Minecraft. Because media scales like code.
Increasingly feeling like “keeping the team size as small as possible, even to one person” is the unarticulated key to making media profitable.
Substack and all the creator tools are just the start of this ecosystem.
The process of converting social influencers into media founders (a trend that has been going on for 10+ years at this point) will be increasingly streamlined.
V1 is link-in-bio, Substack, and sponcon.
V2 likely involves more angels & tokenization a la @tryrollhq. What else?
Why lack of awareness? Influencer monetization numbers are not as public as tech numbers.
There isn’t a TechCrunch & CrunchBase for media founders, chronicling the valuations of influencers.
But that’d be quite valuable. If you are interested in doing this, please DM with demo.
Tech created this ecosystem but there’s a historical cultural bias in tech towards media as unprofitable. That changed a long time ago.
Many more angels that invest in people will invest in media founders. Many traditional media people will *become* media founders.
But not necessarily big companies. Just solo individuals or small groups doing content, like Notch doing Minecraft. Because media scales like code.
Increasingly feeling like “keeping the team size as small as possible, even to one person” is the unarticulated key to making media profitable.
Substack and all the creator tools are just the start of this ecosystem.
Useful concept: the media stack for content creators
— balajis.com (@balajis) January 20, 2020
- Spotify, iTunes for podcasts
- Descript for podcast editing
- Figma, Canva for graphics
- YouTube for video
- Twitter, FB for distribution
- Substack for newsletters
- Makerpad for nocode
- Ghost, Medium for blog
What else?
The process of converting social influencers into media founders (a trend that has been going on for 10+ years at this point) will be increasingly streamlined.
V1 is link-in-bio, Substack, and sponcon.
V2 likely involves more angels & tokenization a la @tryrollhq. What else?
Why lack of awareness? Influencer monetization numbers are not as public as tech numbers.
There isn’t a TechCrunch & CrunchBase for media founders, chronicling the valuations of influencers.
But that’d be quite valuable. If you are interested in doing this, please DM with demo.
The defi matrix
As each asset class goes on-chain, it can be stored in a digital wallet. And it can be traded against other such assets. Not just cryptocurrencies, but national digital currencies, personal tokens, etc.
We’re about to enter an age of global monetary competition.
The defi matrix is the table of all pair wise trades. It’s the fiat/stablecoin pairs, the fiat/crypto pairs, the crypto/crypto pairs, and much more besides.
Uniswap-style automatic market making for everything. Every possession you have, constantly marked to market by ~2040.
More liquidity, less currency?
This is an interesting point. Cash doesn’t make you money. In fact, it can lose you money in an inflating environment.
Reliable, 24/7 mark-to-market on everything is hard — but if achieved, means less % of assets in cash.
AMMs boost BTC. Here's why.
- All assets trade against all assets in the defi matrix
- Automated market makers give liquidity for rare pairs
- Everything is marked-to-market 24/7
- Value of cash drops, as you can liquidate instantly
- The new no-op is to keep your assets in BTC
Basically, automated market makers like @Uniswap boost BTC in the long term, because they allow *everything* to be priced in BTC terms, and *anyone* to switch out of BTC into their asset of choice.
Though in practice this may mean WBTC/RenBTC [or ETH!] rather than BTC itself.
As each asset class goes on-chain, it can be stored in a digital wallet. And it can be traded against other such assets. Not just cryptocurrencies, but national digital currencies, personal tokens, etc.
We’re about to enter an age of global monetary competition.
The defi matrix is the table of all pair wise trades. It’s the fiat/stablecoin pairs, the fiat/crypto pairs, the crypto/crypto pairs, and much more besides.
Uniswap-style automatic market making for everything. Every possession you have, constantly marked to market by ~2040.
More liquidity, less currency?
This is an interesting point. Cash doesn’t make you money. In fact, it can lose you money in an inflating environment.
Reliable, 24/7 mark-to-market on everything is hard — but if achieved, means less % of assets in cash.
Thus less use for currencies as people can more easily store their wealth into assets and easily trade them.
— Pierre-Yves Gendron (@pierreyvesg7) February 24, 2021
AMMs boost BTC. Here's why.
- All assets trade against all assets in the defi matrix
- Automated market makers give liquidity for rare pairs
- Everything is marked-to-market 24/7
- Value of cash drops, as you can liquidate instantly
- The new no-op is to keep your assets in BTC
Basically, automated market makers like @Uniswap boost BTC in the long term, because they allow *everything* to be priced in BTC terms, and *anyone* to switch out of BTC into their asset of choice.
Though in practice this may mean WBTC/RenBTC [or ETH!] rather than BTC itself.
Health and Wealth
We have bad metrics as a society. Rather than GDP, GDP-per-capita, or the stock market perhaps we should have dashboards of:
- life expectancy (health)
- net worth (wealth)
A good leader is one who improves these metrics for individuals & society as a whole.
Reasoning:
- Most people can't tell you how to compute GDP
- But they can tell you what net worth and life expectancy are
- So they know what it means for those numbers to go up
- And they know that making them go up is valuable
If these numbers went up for you, life improved.
By adding health, we add Andy Grove's paired metric. We don't just focus on economics alone, because you can optimize & distort financial metrics at the expense of health.
For example, it's been hypothesized that the rise in diabetes is due in part to sugar subsidies.
Btw, some people have mentioned HDI. This is actually a bad metric because it's hard to explain and reason about, and it's not a simple ratio-scale variable.
You can understand 72.3 years of life expectancy. You can't understand 0.614 HDI. https://t.co/jylH7qm3Ev
We have bad metrics as a society. Rather than GDP, GDP-per-capita, or the stock market perhaps we should have dashboards of:
- life expectancy (health)
- net worth (wealth)
A good leader is one who improves these metrics for individuals & society as a whole.
Reasoning:
- Most people can't tell you how to compute GDP
- But they can tell you what net worth and life expectancy are
- So they know what it means for those numbers to go up
- And they know that making them go up is valuable
If these numbers went up for you, life improved.
By adding health, we add Andy Grove's paired metric. We don't just focus on economics alone, because you can optimize & distort financial metrics at the expense of health.
For example, it's been hypothesized that the rise in diabetes is due in part to sugar subsidies.
Btw, some people have mentioned HDI. This is actually a bad metric because it's hard to explain and reason about, and it's not a simple ratio-scale variable.
You can understand 72.3 years of life expectancy. You can't understand 0.614 HDI. https://t.co/jylH7qm3Ev