30 chunks · 23 episodes
In ecosystems, the physics set the constraints, but the living things are most important. The atoms and forces matter, but only indirectly. What matters the most is the ecology. Does the ecosystem spring to life? If not, the ecosystem is just a gruesome corpse. Everything is about getting the ecosys
You can't build a living thing. A living thing can only be grown. An ecosystem is a living thing. The fact that it's alive is what makes it so valuable and important.
Some products are just about themselves. Other products are designed to catalyze an ecosystem that extends wildly beyond the product. The people who invest their time and capital into those kinds of catalytic products are the ones who should be excited to invest in other things that grow in the ecos
You can't force an ecosystem to grow. You can only create the conditions where it might thrive Growing an ecosystem is an art. A highly intuitive, vibes and experienced based art. "Wait for it... wait for it... ok NOW! Give it a dash of paprika. And now, a dash of coriander". Like alchemy, brewing a
If the thing finds resonance, invest more time. Resonating with other people, with the situation, with an ecosystem.
An upside of aggregators is convenience, a downside (for the ecosystem) is control. It's possible to get the upside without the downside.
No one will use another person's hyper-bespoke situated software. For example, everyone loves their own complex spreadsheet but hates everyone else's. But people will reuse other's building blocks. If you're searching for just the killer app for the ecosystem, you'll miss the killer building blocks.
You can't build a platform by yourself. You need to discover an ecosystem of users and coevolve it with the ecosystem. Many of the world's great platforms did not start as platforms, they were products that found PMF and then expanded the lower technical layers and opened them up to others.
You can't do magic with emergence in a system without second-order (or beyond) thinking. A rare few know how to apply the principles of ecosystems to catalyze emergent outcomes that could not be built. Emergence is a form of magic. Loving emergence is learning to love the mess. Emergent systems are
Coherence means that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. Coherence can be cheap ("automatically cohering") or expensive to create. The expensiveness of the coherence is how much effort must go into coordination to get a coherent result. Coordination gets super-linearly more expensive as