Abhishek Madhavan: Why Distribution Still Matters in the Internet Age. The most valuable public consumer internet companies in the world are all Aggregators. (more)

Visakan Veerasamy: "solve for distribution" is a phrase I came up with to talk about marketing without using the word marketing (more)

Serverless Stack raises $1M for open-source application framework. Open-source framework startup Serverless Stack announced Friday that it raised $1 million in seed funding from a group of investors that includes Greylock Partners, SV Angel and Y Combinator. The company was founded in 2017 by Jay V and Frank Wang in San Francisco, and they were part of Y Combinator’s 2021 winter batch. (more)

Alex Schroeder on Writing alone, together. In a way, this page is a follow-up to Wiki culture and The potential of interaction. (2023-10-11-SchroederWikiCulture, collaboration) (more)

Alex Schroeder on Wiki culture. What is “wiki culture” and how do wiki contributors get to know each other? (more)

Peter Kaminski on Git Branching and Pull Requests for Collaborative Writing (group email). I can sense that there will be growing need for collaborative work on agreements, most of which will live on the Lionsberg Wiki and therefore be in markdown. We have been using HackMD for collaboration - is there a way to track and comment on changes? (more)

Boris Mann: Networked Orgs and tooling. I am hugely inspired by Protocol Labs and their “versioning” approach to company and organizational evolution. This current version sees the birth of the Protocol Labs Network, or #pln, to which Fission is lucky enough to have been invited to become a member of. (more)

Brologue on Zettelkasten: An Antidote for Boring Notes. I wasn’t a prolific note taker in Uni. Don’t get me wrong, I took notes (more)

Brologue: On the Journal as a Prosthesis. Besides this blog and my Zettelkasten, I’ve been keeping a journal regularly for nearly two years. (more)

Will Manidis and John Kennedy: Asset-light Software Businesses: The New Paradigm for Startups. When we started our companies in the late 2010s, we heard the same advice about how to raise money from venture capitalists in the pursuit of fast growth: Founders would need to raise significant sums of venture capital to incur fixed costs like software developers and sales reps that would pay back over time. This paradigm is now saturated. (more)

Alex Schroeder on Personal software. Wondering about people writing the software for their personal site – a blog or a wiki or a digital garden or a Zettelkasten – running software the authors wrote themselves or got from a friend. (more)

Alex Schroeder: Struggling with cooperation. I’m a bad reviewer, an opinionated editor, I don’t work well with people because I have very specific ideas and I’m stubborn and easily distracted (more)

Vaclav Smil has Bill Gates’ ear, which is part of the problem with Gates’ climate change actions. Smil is one of Gates’ favorite analysts, but unfortunately Smil gets a few things wrong about energy. (more)

Andrew Chen: Startups need dual theories on distribution and product/market fit. One is not enough. A common startup situation. A team busts their ass for months building the first version of their product. It’s almost done. Now a big question emerges — how do you get the first people to use your product? Hmm… If you find yourself at this moment, then you are already in a bad place. (more)

What Is Markdown, And Why Should You Use It Instead Of MS-Word? Writing has become an important, ubiquitous part of our modern-day life, and having essential skills in not only putting words down but also in formatting the written word quickly and efficiently is a vital component of just about every job or venture imaginable. (more)

Kevin Lipe: Guest Post: Markdown is the new MS-Word 5.1. There were contemporaries to AppleWorks, though. Around the end of the Classic era, Microsoft came out with Office 98, which was an awful abortion, but it was also a direct result of a terrible moment in Macintosh history: the replacement of Word 5 by Word 6. It was at this point that “standard word processors” stopped being minimal and work-oriented and started pandering to mothers making sixth-grade-class newsletters. This is the first point at which word processors started mirroring the increasing complexity and distraction of computing environments in general, and the point at which I started having trouble using them for writing. (more)

Nations and Nationalism is an influential 1983 book by the philosopher Ernest Gellner, in which the author expands on his theory of nationalism.[1] O'Leary describes the book as "Gellner's most elaborate statement on the subject (of nationalism); because it is largely an expansion of the themes first sketched in Thought and Change.... he never repudiated any of the core propositions advanced in these texts", but he clarifies and qualifies some of them further in his Encounters with Nationalism (1994). (more)

Cosma Shalizi reviews Dan Sperber's Explaining Culture. Roswell is certainly worthy of contemplation: like Lourdes, it has become famous for something which never happened. I refer, of course, to the infamous myth that a flying saucer crashed there in 1947, making the national news, (more)

Alexander Obenauer: The importance of personal computing. Personal computing is one of the most important things humanity has ever built. (more)

Patrick Dubroy on Casual programming. I’ve got three young kids. If you were to spend a day in my house, one thing you’d notice is that there are a lot of alarms going off. (more)