Finding Equilibrium #6: DNA Printers, Write of Passage, and the Facebook Outage
Hello Everyone!
For the past 4 weeks, I've been in a quirky and fascinating cohort based course: The Write of Passage. While primarily a writing course, it's really about building and scaling a portfolio on the internet. It was easily one of the most engaging classes and communities I've been a part of.
The course did a neat job of balancing both tactical and strategic approaches to writing. For example, it covered creating automated "information capture" systems, introduced us to the concept of "writing from abundance", and explored the entire process from idea generation through reviewing/publishing.
I even created a site here for all my writing. I'd previously dismissed the notion of having my own website, but the course made a pretty compelling case to push one out (though I am still wrestling with Squarespace to figure out how to refine parts).
But it also made me think differently about newsletters - instead of places for published essays, they should be "digital postcards" to be more dynamic. Here are some fun ones from mentors in the course: Charlie Bleeker, Salman Ansari
I used to tell myself I could only send a newsletter if I had an essay; instead, I'll experiment with this lightweight approach and slip in the odd essay periodically.
With that, here are 2 Reads, 3 Tweets, 1 Listen, and 1 Startup from the week:
My Work:
The Progressing Pendulum: Evolution through Oscillation
I took a more experimental approach with my essays in Write of Passage. The most recent one I wrote was an evolution of the Equilibrium model I introduced last year.
While Equilibrium captured lateral movements (like moving between bundling and unbundling products or between consumption and creation), this essay adds a third dimension: progress. It’s a 3 minute read (published here) and, because I discovered drawing on an iPad, includes the below artistry from me.
Reads:
This company is so cool. DNA synthesis is notoriously difficult, expensive, and error-prone. But Twist invented a platform to synthesize DNA faster, better, and cheaper. It's like a DNA factory - you provide inputs (A,C,T,G bases) in whatever sequence you need, and Twist prints out the resulting DNA. Their ordering workflow even resembles shopping online. Worth the full read, but here's two things that stood out: (1) Old technology has powerful lessons. To solve DNA Synthesis, Twist drew inspiration from the inkjet printer’s design. (2) With Biotech getting increasingly modular and programmable, it feels like Twist could be Biotech’s equivalent to cloud computing - if that pans out, I bet we’ll hear a lot more about them in the coming years.
A fun and illuminating thought-experiment on what Bezos would build if he was starting out today. It's a timely article because Amazon started at the beginning of Web 2.0's wave (when the internet shifted from read-only to read-write) and we're at the start of the Web 3.0 wave (an evolution of the internet designed to be more open, semantic, and immersive).
For a quick primer on Web 3.0 and the internet's history, you can also check out this article by yours truly.
Tweets:
Josh Wolfe on the Metaverse: Inspired by Ready Player One and enabled by vast improvements in a series of tech (notably VR and Crypto), the metaverse is quickly becoming the buzzword of buzzwords. It is very cool though, and this tweet storm lays out its progression, where it's at, and how we can more rigorously think about it.
The Reverse Test: I love this framework for thinking about innovation. If you're like me, it's very easy to get excited about new developments, but running this thought experiment can help tease out the hype. By simply asking "if this works, would I ever want to go back to today", you can get a gut check on how important something is.
Do I want to go back to waiting for cabs instead of calling an Uber? Nope.
Will I want to come back to today if another 5 streaming platforms emerge? Probably…
Explainer on the Facebook Outage: Super accessible explanation on the Facebook outage last week. Facebook basically removed itself from the internet’s “map” (BGP) and because they controlled their location, nobody else could fill it in for them. For a deeper read into it you can also check out this article.
Podcast:
Giana Bianchini - Helping Creators Build Communities:
With community-driven product growth and focused communities exploding, this is a fantastic interview with a founder building the "Shopify for communities.” It's also a cool example in how history repeats itself. Before Facebook took off, Giana had been working on tools to build smaller communities! Now that the pendulum has swung back in her direction (from large social networks back to focused communities), she’s taking another crack at it.
Startup of the Week:
Bubblehouse: An eco-friendly NFT (Non-Fungible Token) marketplace
Web3 needs accessible tools, and Bubblehouse is a step in the right direction. It takes the nascent end-to-end NFT experience (buying, engaging with a community, and displaying digital art) and bundles it into a beautiful, user-friendly tool.
That sounds simple, but here’s why it’s so important. Beyond owning digital art or a “piece of the internet”, NFTs are important for verifying benefits like exclusive community or creator access. But most tools focus on creating and buying NFTs, not the experience after buying one.
For example, when I experiment with NFTs I buy them on OpenSea (easy enough). But from there, I have to open Discord to get community access, Metamask to approve purchases, and Social Media to ensure the project has sufficient following. Then once I’m in the community, I’m inundated with spam and it’s painful to navigate high message volumes. A tool like Bubblehouse delicately counters all these issues, making it a far more enjoyable entry into Web3.
There are some drawbacks though. The crypto community will argue that its underlying blockchain, Polygon, trades off too much security for speed. There's also questions on repeatability - if intuitive design is the differentiator, how hard is that to replicate? Either way, I like the direction they're taking. Web3 has to get simpler to bring in the next wave of people. Something like Bubblehouse may just be that answer.
Thank you for reading through! As always, please feel free to reply and let me know what you did or didn’t like!
Until next time,
Aqil