Thread by @larsiusprime

Gonna riff off of this idea for a sec:

So many investor types are totally blinded by obsessing over "moats" that they can't imagine there's another way to do business

Protip -- vulnerability can be a strength. Try it sometime.

https://twitter.com/larsiusprime/status/1408914703430995970

Why are Substack and Ghost and Supercast doing so well?

Because they allow you leave at any moment and take your customers with you, AND you don't have to take their word for it.

This deliberate "weakness" helps them gain creator signups in the first place!

Being so focused on what you're going to do once you already rule the entire world is going to hinder you from getting out of your basement.

Here's an example from game theory -- you're playing a game of chicken. How do you win?

By ostentatiously ripping out your steering wheel

The other guy sees you've ripped it out. You no longer even have the ABILITY to steer away even if you wanted to. You are absolutely committed.

Other guy can either get out of the way or both of you die.

You should never play chicken, it's a stupid game, but you get the point.

We are living in a world where individual content creators have been so consistently screwed over and manipulated and abused by platforms that we know what having to trust platforms is worth. We don't want assurances, we want ostentatious gestures of deliberate weakness

Every two-bit startup that did a seed round has a plan to take over the world and lock everyone in the dungeon as soon as they're done with the engage phase and it's time to extract.

If you want people to sign up for YOUR platform, the innovation is to give us the dungeon keys

Better yet, make us owners rather than tenants

"But Lars! We need to make 10X returns! How can we do that if we cut off our upside in advance???"

Look, the entire premise of your model is you take all these wild risks b/c nobody can know for sure what the best payoff will be. Just take one more and bet on vulnerability.

To use VC silicon-valley speak, you're over-indexing on strategies that were optimized for fighting the last war

Besides, everybody is playing the same basic meta with the same basic appeal AND the same base suspicions from the creators they're trying to court

Ten years ago a bunch of us were naive and hopeful and even trusting. Some of us trusted FACEBOOK for pants' sake

You are in a new low trust age. Trust has to be EARNED and PROVED

Better yet make it so we don't even have to have trust, because we just have commensurate POWER and LEVERAGE naturally in the relationship.

People will say I don't get how the game is played and I'm being naive and pie-in-the-sky but honestly that's what makes me either a visionary or a crank

(I'm arrogant enough to think I'm both)

Like:

A: do nothing and accept the status quo and we'll get exactly the pessimistic terrible future everybody expects

B: try to articulate an alternate view for the future and try to push on whatever levers I can, and maybe something happens, otherwise goto A

C: someone better and smarter than me figures this out instead and we don't get A, which would be great