Suddenly able to put my finger on what makes this period like 1999. A lot of what went then were companies that weren't really internet companies. Sure, some of the wipeouts, were digital native, but they weren't internet companies. WeWork is not an Internet company, Uber is.
Apps made ride hailing possible from a phone, but there is nothing about WeWork that absolutely requires the Internet and couldn't have been done before. It exists in Internet era culture and leverages that, but doesn't need interconnected network technology, per se.
I suspect that what will survive this period are real Internet companies. These are not just technology companies (and often technology isn't that important for Internet companies) but ones that take advantage of the Internet and it's unique distribution opportunities.
A network of networks enables new forms of distribution, which is why distribution is critical for Internet startups, technology less so.
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Here is a recipe for how to build a place like this. Importantly, it has to be a recipe, not a design.
Establish a simple hierarchy like the human body: a head (here, the cathedral), and the rest. At building level either consciously use symmetry or consciously break it.
Have squarish spaces between buildings for people to interact. Put trees in them where possible.
Prioritise pedestrians over bicycles and bicycles and motor scooters over cars. Remove on street parking and remove bicycle lanes where spaces can be pedestrian first.
Fantastic thread. Why movies are full of recycling franchises like Marvel while innovation in indie fringes doesn't percolate up. I suspect reason for this is the following:
Mainstream is hyperconnected, over-dense network (groupthink, ossified) and is potentially disrupted only when overall network becomes a small world one (goldilocks area between connected and Balkanized) and stuff that appears in the creative niches can bubble up to mainstream.
Reason it isn't bubbling up to mainstream is that niches have also been hijacked with their own form of groupthink (Taleb's tyranny of the minority), meaning that alternative though or creativity is suppressed where the niches are in open forum or connect to the mainstream.
1. Crypto is a technical solution to pure Internet infrastructure, it can’t prevent laws against it. Financial services consist of a technical and regulatory component.
2. The adoption of Internet based currency tokens by central banks uses a crypto based technical solution to replace banking rails with the Internet. It doesn’t use the crypto aspect for regulation so is not decentralised.
3. DeFi extends crypto solutions to financial products and ownership more widely. Financial products are basically fungible contracts and ownership, transferable non fungible ones.
Coinbase is like Netscape. It's a well designed UI on top of a new network (Bitcoin/web) created using a new protocol (Bitcoin spec/HTTP). It's worth more than Netscape because it holds currency but maybe it should be valued based on financial services, not tech stock growth.
Like Netscape and unlike, say, Facebook, it doesn't own its own protocol. It's not a platform in the traditional sense.
Now you could argue that Coinbase is like Google which sits directly on the web and therefore doesn't own its own protocol, but Google monetizes its traffic not its deposits or their transactions.