The Passion Economy (Guest essay by Li Jin)
Argues new platforms let individuals monetize their individuality rather than commoditizing labor, reshaping marketplace design.
Recommended Reading
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Hierarchy of Marketplaces — Level 2
Explains how marketplaces move up the hierarchy by increasing ters and defensibility once initial liquidity is achieved.
The Hierarchy of Marketplaces — Introduction and Level 1
Introduces a layered framework for building enduring marketplaces, starting with focus on a single high-value use case.
The Passion Economy and the Future of Work
Introduces the concept of the passion economy, detailing how new digital platforms allow individuals to monetize their unique skills and personalities, fostering a new creative middle class.
The Hardware Lottery
An essay arguing that the direction of machine learning research is heavily constrained and guided by which ideas happen to run efficiently on current hardware architectures.
Status as a Service (StaaS)
Social networks succeed by operating as social capital games where humans act as status-seeking monkeys optimizing for proof-of-work and utility.
The Occupational Impact of Artificial Intelligence: Labor, Skills, and Polarization
Develops a novel methodology to link AI breakthroughs to specific occupational abilities, providing empirical measures of labor market exposure.
How to Kickstart and Scale a Marketplace Business – Part 2: Cracking the Chicken-and-Egg Problem
Details supply-versus-demand sequencing tactics used by top marketplaces to bootstrap a two-sided network.
What's next for marketplace startups? Reinventing the $10 trillion service economy, that's what.
Traces the evolution from listings to managed marketplaces and argues the next wave will digitize regulated service industries.
Introduction to the Economics of Artificial Intelligence
Provides a structured overview of the economic questions surrounding AI, framing it as a shift in prediction costs and outlining research agendas on productivity, jobs, and policy.
The Network Effects Bible
Comprehensive taxonomy arguing network effects account for 70% of tech value creation, cataloging 13+ distinct types.
The Network Effects Manual
An exhaustive taxonomy detailing different types of network effects, illustrating how marketplaces can build defensive moats around supply-side, demand-side, and local network dynamics.
The Race between Machine and Man: Implications of Technology for Growth, Factor Shares and Employment
Establishes a task-based framework to analyze how automation competes with the creation of new complex tasks to determine labor demand.
Invisible Asymptotes
Introduces the idea of hidden growth ceilings that companies must anticipate, using Amazon's shipping-fee asymptote as the case study.
Self-organisation in commons-based peer production: About DAOs and the emergence of decentralized collaborative organizations
A study on how DAOs and blockchain systems can support self-organisation and peer production, analyzing the governance models of decentralized collaborative organizations.
The Dynamics of Network Effects
Explains how network effects strengthen or weaken over a company's lifecycle and how to measure and nurture them.
Egalitarian Society or Benevolent Dictatorship: The State of Cryptocurrency Governance
An analysis of the real-world governance structures of major cryptocurrencies, investigating power distribution, decision-making dynamics, and centralization trends.
AI and Compute
A landmark analysis showing that the amount of compute used in the largest AI training runs has been doubling every 3.4 months, far outstripping Moore's Law.
Artificial Intelligence, Jobs, Inequality and Productivity: Does Aggregate Demand Matter?
Examines whether macroeconomics and aggregate demand matter when analyzing the impacts of AI and automation on jobs, productivity, and inequality.
Why Decentralization Matters
Decentralized networks use crypto-economic incentives to stay open and aligned with users and creators, avoiding the inevitable attraction-to-extraction pivot of centralized platforms.
Artificial Intelligence and Economic Growth
Integrates AI into long-run economic growth models, exploring automation of invention processes and potential new growth regimes.
The Meaning of Decentralization
A foundational essay that categorizes blockchain decentralization into three distinct dimensions: architectural, political, and logical.
What to Expect from Artificial Intelligence
An analysis of AI as a prediction technology that lowers the cost of prediction, transforming business decision-making and economic forecasting.
Toy Unboxing, Social Media Entertainment, and Platform Capitalism
Analyzes the phenomenon of toy unboxing channels on YouTube to map the intersections of child labor, media commercialization, and platform capitalism.