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May 2, 2021Liked by Byrne Hobart

If Chamath were asked the same question re: platforms today, do you think he would include more than three? Does Shopify now clearly make the list? Wordpress?

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On the network effects question, cultural memes and stories, e.g. American Exceptionalism, religious myths, "Don't be evil", etc. could be interesting to study. It's also interesting to think about it from the perspective of information contagion and exemplifying the good/bad qualities of network. For every new user that is onboarded, the cost of transactions/communication decreases while adding more legitimacy to the meme. For countries, it can be a net drive of high-skilled immigrants who can rise up quickly and contribute to national GDPs. For startups/companies, recruiting highly skilled employees, in turn, increases the equity value of existing shareholders and employees, etc. Marianne Bertrand et al. considered this to a certain extent: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=227610

Developer Tooling and Libraries are other interesting ones, which are sometimes underestimated by developers themselves, e.g. back in 2016 I remember having an argument with a lot of my excellent ML Engineer friends re how Theano will get destroyed by Tensorflow. Bloomberg was an interesting closed-source version of a similar type of network effect.

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May 1, 2021Liked by Byrne Hobart

On what’s next in payments: https://www.bis.org/speeches/sp210127.htm

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deletedMay 2, 2021Liked by Byrne Hobart
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