Welcome to Monday.
Knowledge
Clubhouse, the social audio app, hit another new high in its early hype cycle this week with appearances from Elon, Zuck, and more. I can’t make up my mind about whether Clubhouse is the future or not. In my Twitter bubble, it’s being called a future $100B company. They have great traction and incredible growth in pockets around the world.
All that value from a simple idea with a simple interface. Here are a few reasons why.
Simplicity: the best ideas are often brutally obvious in hindsight. Hidden due to a blind spot in mainstream discourse, leading to a massive opportunity. In this case, social audio. It’s been done before, but never well. This time, the ingredients were right: a certain level of smartphone penetration, faster internet speeds, better headphones, more free time. On top of that, the execution was simple: an easy to use app intended for a global audience, following the Twitter playbook. Limited features around a core functionality with built in network effects. That’s all it takes to build a winner in a vacant space.
Serendipity: people visit Twitter to read interesting, entertaining fragments of information. Profiles, replies, threads, and links allow for deeper dives. They visit clubhouse to hear interesting, entertaining fragments of information. The deeper dives are built into the conversations, enabling real-time exchanges to occur. Plus, anyone can drop in at any time, pushing you to pull the slot machine frequently on rooms with interesting guests.
Exclusivity: first slowly, then all at once. That’s how the exponential nature of the Clubhouse invite system works. When new users each get a handful of invites, the word of mouth compounds into massive results as everyone scrambles to jump into the hype cycle.
Wisdom
We’re in the data age. It’s the new oil. Few things remain which can’t be quantified, mapped, and projected.
In any analysis, detailed information is now a given. To raise money for a company, you can tell investors exactly what you make on every sale, how much it costs to acquire a new customer, what your growth is going to be this year — your business, quantified.
All of those data points matter. But only to you. Why? Because you have more context than anyone else. To you, the numbers are features of a broader story. To others, they’re merely numbers on a screen. Cold and lifeless.
For anyone else to believe the story, they need to understand the context. The numbers need to be woven together into a narrative that brings them to life.
“No one ever made a decision because of a number. They need a story.” — Daniel Kahneman
Kahneman is a behavioral economist who understands individual decision-making more than most. He recognizes a simple truth: that numbers aren’t an effective way to evoke the emotions which lead to a decision being made. We’re evolved to encode information into verbal stories, not spreadsheets.
Stories survive because they stick. They inspire. They drive decisions.
Numbers need a narrative. Start weaving.
Inspiration
Tom Brady just won another championship. Last season, after a disappointing loss to the Titans that dashed Super Bowl hopes, he talked about how failure isn’t about losing. It’s about not putting in the work. Put in the work, and you can’t fail. This is inspired by Teddy Roosevelt’s Man in the Arena speech:
"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”
This week, dare greatly.
