@FPWellman What's your take on this classic, Nick?

1/ new essay: What's next for marketplace startups? Reinventing the $10 trillion service economy, that's what. Co-authored with @ljin18 https://t.co/fgKbrHTnH5. A short thread 👇

2/ Marketplace startups have done incredibly well over the first few decades of the internet, reinventing the way we shop for goods, but have been less successful services. It's bc services are complex, subjective, fragmented, and often in real life. Makes it hard

3/ There's been 4 major eras at making the service economy work online. The Listings Era, the unbundled Craiglist era, the Uber for X era, and the Managed Marketplace era

4/ Each era has added more value than the last, and utilized technology innovations, from internet to social / "read/write web" to mobile. The "Unbundling Craigslist" era was particularly epic at generating startup ideas

5/ The problem is, all the low-hanging fruit has been picked off. The techniques that got us to here won't get us to the next phase. So we have to do some pretty different things. That's why "Managed Marketplaces" have been a big deal - hire folks as W-2s, certify quality, etc.

1/ Something strange is happening with people’s sex lives. 20-somethings are having sex later and less frequently than previous generations. I spent several months digging into this for @theatlantic. https://t.co/5ehzmWY9wi

2/ This phenomenon—I’m calling it a Sex Recession—really surprised me. It seemed improbable in the age of Tinder, digital porn, and attitudes that are generally permissive and sex-positive.

3/ What’s happening isn’t exclusively American: Similar trends are being observed in other countries, including Japan, Australia, the U.K., Finland, and the Netherlands.

4/ One cause is obvious: Adults under 35 are less likely to be living with a partner than in recent decades, and more likely to be living with their parents—which, it’s safe to say, isn’t great for one’s sex life.

5/ But I also found other explanations, each with profound implications. The first, unsurprisingly, has to do with internet enticements. Netflix and other online entertainment may be substituting for sex.

1/ Something strange is happening with people’s sex lives. 20-somethings are having sex later and less frequently than previous generations. I spent several months digging into this for @theatlantic. https://t.co/5ehzmWY9wi

2/ This phenomenon—I’m calling it a Sex Recession—really surprised me. It seemed improbable in the age of Tinder, digital porn, and attitudes that are generally permissive and sex-positive.

3/ What’s happening isn’t exclusively American: Similar trends are being observed in other countries, including Japan, Australia, the U.K., Finland, and the Netherlands.

4/ One cause is obvious: Adults under 35 are less likely to be living with a partner than in recent decades, and more likely to be living with their parents—which, it’s safe to say, isn’t great for one’s sex life.

5/ But I also found other explanations, each with profound implications. The first, unsurprisingly, has to do with internet enticements. Netflix and other online entertainment may be substituting for sex.

A distillation of what @naval said on Clubhouse last night:

What you call chaos I call spontaneity.

A regimented life is like a heartbeat that's non-chaotic; it's a system that’s too ordered. It doesn't have any life to it. And real life has lots of ups and downs, some of them very extreme.

I over-plan, but planning is pretty useless. What tends to dominant life are a small number of Black Swan events in both directions, positive and negative.

Expose yourself to asymmetric upside and lots of good options: things that can become massively important for you.

And you want to avoid the asymmetric downside: anything that can end the game, whether it's through financial ruin, or reputational ruin, or physical ruin.

That requires a certain amount of chaos and spontaneity.

If nothing else, 2020 taught the power of optionality.

We think about planning as linear and controlled, but that's not how the world around us works anymore.

The world is dominated by nonlinearities, so understanding options value is far more important.