From the podcast
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You will get rich by giving society what it wants, but does not yet know how to get at scale
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as Danny Hillis said, technology is just the set of things, that don’t quite work yet. Once something works, it’s no longer technology. So, society always wants new things.
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add in lots of code and media and podcasts and content to get it all out there
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the beauty is when you combine all of these three. That’s where tech startups really excel.
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where you take just the minimum, but highest output labor that you can get, which are engineers, and designers, product developers.
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Then you add in capital.
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You use that for marketing, advertising, scaling.
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That is a magic combination, and that’s why you see technology startups explode out of nowhere, use massive leverage and just make huge outsize returns.
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Every great software developer now has an army of robots working for him at nighttime, while he or she sleeps, after they’ve written the code and it’s just cranking away.
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An army of robots is already here. It’s very cheaply available. The bottleneck is just figuring out intelligent and interesting things to do to them.
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There’s the army of robots within servers and then there’s also an army of actual robots and people that are being manipulated through software.
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A User Model for Social Software
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users
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want sex. If they can’t have sex, they
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want food. If they can’t have food, they
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want fun. If they can’t have fun, they
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leave
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You should try and get into a business where making Widget Number 12 is cheaper than making Widget Number 5, and making Widget Number 10,000 is a lot cheaper than the previous ones.
- technology products especially, and media products, where creating another copy of what you just created is free. Where they have zero marginal cost of reproduction.
- Network effects: value grows as the square of the customers
- A network effect is when each additional user adds value to the existing user base. Your users themselves are creating some value for the existing users.
- You should always be thinking about how your users, your customers, can add value to each other because that is the ultimate form of leverage.
Magic combinations
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code
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satisfy primitive human needs (food, sex, fun)
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network effects (bots and users add value to each other)
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media (podcasts)