👋 A round-up of the latest and most remarkable stories at the intersection of ecosystem innovation and platform organization.
The Crypto Story
The crypto system has attracted a lot of smart people who want to solve these problems, in part because they’re intellectually interesting problems and in part because solving them will make these people rich. But another part of the answer might be that the real world—growing food, building houses—is a smaller part of economic life than it used to be, and that manipulating symbolic objects in online databases is a bigger part. Modern life is lived in databases. And crypto is about a new way of keeping databases (on the blockchain).
A 200 min Book, capturing all Crypto movement - by Matt Lewine
Zuckerberg’s empire collapses
There’s an obvious problem with Zuckerberg’s vision: who wants to wear a clunky virtual reality headset, watching outdated graphics that induce nausea? In a world where most of us use the internet via our mobile phones, can this really be the future? The figures suggest not: Meta expected 500,000 active monthly users on its VR platform, Horizon Worlds (which is accessed by VR headsets), by the end of this year; the current figure is fewer than 200,000. Leaked internal documents show that most of those who visit Horizon tend not to return after the first month. Meta staff themselves are reportedly unsure of the product: ‘The simple truth is, if we don’t love it, how can we expect our users to love it?’ wrote Meta’s metaverse vice-president Vishal Shah in a memo last month.
🔮 The modern Steve Jobs, or a vision that is not rooted in reality? - by James Ball
The Billboard Article
Music is a business. People like to think of it as art, but that’s not how the major labels see it. They look for an edge, just like the people spamming you with e-mails and texts. They employ leverage, trade on their size and catalogs, but in today’s world, everything they bring to the table isn’t working: “‘The market’s dry as fuck,’ declares a veteran major-label A&R executive who requested anonymity to speak candidly. ‘There’s less and less shit working. The front-line label business, signing new artists, is in trouble.’ ‘I can honestly say right now that nobody — nobody — knows what’s going on,’ another longtime major-label A&R says.”
⛰️ In a more distributed world, the audience distributes itself. Perhaps it's the end of music hits? -in the Lefsetz Letter
Forget everything you know about brand purpose
I looked to create models or a different framework, and the one key question is “Who can you help people become?” It’s a completely different way of looking at leadership. It’s not about the the brand or leader looking at themselves as a change agent, but it’s really the brand believing in each and everyone as the agent of change. I think this is where real change happens. Because the best leaders in my life have been the ones who helped me grow, it has not been the Steve Jobs type leader who is like “This is my vision, I’m the captain, if you don’t like what I believe in, go find another ship.”
Beware of the Hero Trap - in What Next?
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