There’s No Market For This Post
I’d like to think writing on this blog is an active dialogue with readers, founders, and investors. I tend to write about things I’m trying to better understand, be they curiosities, investment theses, emotions, or otherwise. I always thought of writing on this blog as opening up a conversation. I think I was heavily influenced early on by Fred Wilson’s shape of writing. I miss the comments section of his blog. The way he wrote when I first started reading him, posts felt like invitations to participate, think together, collectively explore a concept or technology…and that’s what I wanted to do with my readers too. He wasn’t saying I am the authority and you all should listen, but rather “I care about this, here’s how I see it so far, what do you think?“ That’s not how VC content works today. Now, everybody wants to be the authority. The shape of the writing is predominantly declarative. “I mapped this entire ecosystem and this is how it is,” “Let me explain Zk-SNARKS to you, because I am an expert now and have something to teach you,” “The only metric that matters is burn multiple and if you aren’t measuring it then you are not a good founder.” It’s not that this writing lacks substance, but rather that the author pens it through the mental model of one holding a megaphone. I never thought of writing that way. If anything, my mental model is more of a telephone…I can call out, people call back…and I love talking to the market that way. Comments on blog posts used to be interesting, and when comments stopped being a thing, intimate public discourse on Twitter served a similar function. There is no longer intimate public discourse around content on Twitter. What passes as engagement around even the best content is defined by a reader’s hyperawareness of how her engagement explicitly influences the algorithm on the platform. My heart of your post means “I am going to boost it,” not “I love it and here’s why.” People in our ecosystem don’t advance each other’s written thoughts any more. At least within my information diet, the author is the final word, that is either polished enough to please the algorithm or not, and there is little to zero community around a piece of content. To me that’s a shame…it’s zero sum…it’s boring…and I believe it stifles the available collective progress the internet affords us. So there’s an opinion piece…penned through a telephone, not a megaphone, feel free to call me back: jordan@pacecapital.com
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