Somebody should build the Sonos for home audio-video setups.
Here's what people need:
∙ High-definition camera
∙ Crisp audio quality
∙ Easy sound level management
∙ Bright, but soft lighting
It should be easy to set up, all without the tangled wires and usual complexity.
Remote work and home video production are growing trends, so you'll have a global market of people who just want something simple and easy-to-use.
But just like classic home audio setups, the standard solutions are expensive and confusing for average people.
If you want market research, here are my texts with a friend this morning.
I dealt with the exact same issues and still don't love my setup, even though I've spent a small fortune on it.
I like hardware businesses that differentiate themselves with a software layer on top.
That's what you could do for audio and video. Auto-brighten the lighting and automatically improve sound quality — with the ease and quality of an iPhone camera.
I know it sounds too simple to be true, but one of the best ways to foster innovation is to make it easier for people to be radically different
One of my biggest worries about the Internet is that the feedback loops are too fast.
Thinking differently requires years of independent wandering, which often looks unproductive in the short-term even when it leads to long-term breakthroughs. The Internet may inhibit this.
Internet forums like Twitter aren’t very good at responses like “you’re mostly wrong, but you’re wrong in very interesting ways that could eventually be productive, so let’s work together to improve your thinking” which is the kind of collaboration that fosters creativity.
I'll start with one of my all-time favorite essays from William Deresiewicz. It argues for the importance of being alone, so you can silence the barrage of other people's thoughts and listen to your own.
This essay is the best argument I've seen for manual labor.
Work humbles us and puts us in our place as frail human beings. Long and repetitive days of hard work are meaningful because we become one with our tools as become the builders we're born to be.
A superb two-part series on America's geography and how it shapes the country's politics.
America has many structural advantages, such as big oceans to the East and West and more navigable internal waterways than the rest of the world combined.
The transition from youth to adulthood is the end of chasing the magnificent and the beginning of appreciating the mundane
Surely, the magnificent has a place in adulthood but not like it does in adolescence.
As an adult, you confront the idea that everyday moments are the stuff of life. Rituals, routine. All that jazz. Maturity marks a transition from lusting for grandeur to relishing the everyday.
People like to say that “you have to look for the magnificent in the mundane,” but it’s not as true as the cliche implies.
The joy of adulthood is that it’s intensely *interesting.* My career is a quest to maximize interestingness, and share the joy of that quest with others.
The creator economy is shifting from thinking of itself as a cash-generating industry to an equity-building one, where creators can build wealth that grows once they stop working
The problem with being directly paid to share ideas online is that if you don’t publish, you don’t get paid. But creators have two valuable resources: trust and attention. They should use that influence to build companies that grow in value once their creator-career is over.
Paul Graham has a famous essay called ”Makers Schedule, Manager‘s Schedule” where he shows that different people have different ways of working. The same is true for wealth generation. Generating short-term cash and building long-term equity are different mindsets.
Minimalism is a child of our obsession with utility and efficiency.
But in all it's dominance, we've forgotten that buildings used to be a mouthpiece for our collective ambitions. For example, the lobby of the Chrysler Building celebrates the majesty of human achievement.
On our quest to spark another Roaring 20s, we should take inspiration from the Art Deco movement of the 1920s.
It represented luxury, exuberance, and faith in technological progress. Then it glittered with chevrons, zigzags, wings, and geometric designs.
It translates to leisure. But it’s not an American sit back and watch TV leisure. It’s a laugh with friends, read great books, listen to marvelous symphonies, and contemplate life’s most important questions kind of leisure.