Announcing Something New
I’ve written casually for a while, but I never thought it would go this far.
Today, I’m introducing something new: my Twitter agency.
Despite neglecting the growth of my own Twitter, I’m good at driving engagement for both myself and for other people. So why not try to start a business on it?
Transparently, there are a few other reasons:
I want to make more money,
I want to spend more time doing things I enjoy (i.e. writing and talking to interesting people),
and I think it’ll be hard.
Now, if I’m honest, I have no idea if it’ll succeed. I suck at sales, I’ve never run a services business, and I’m not sure how much I can widen the operating margins or rely on others to scale. But I may as well try.
With that said, I’ve already done some good work for my existing clients. In under two weeks, one of them has grown by +4,300 followers, received >3.5 million impressions, and been retweeted 2,600 times. We’ve also seen amazing growth:
+43% higher average tweets/month
+325% average impressions/tweet
+198% average engagements/tweet
+184% average likes/tweet
+131% average retweets/tweet
+100% average replies/tweet
Average stats per tweet at the two week mark
Amazing all around.
And to make sure it wasn’t a fluke – he already has a big audience, which I thought may have skewed the data – I reached out to one of Noah’s friends and gave him a thread I had written. He posted it, and it also outperformed his other tweets.
I might be onto something.
For now, I’ll cater this offering to founders and creators – typically, people with existing content elsewhere (e.g. YouTubes, blogs). And as I continue scaling the business I’ll update you here!
Wish me luck,
Gabe
Avoid single points of failure
One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned in business is that you should avoid unnecessary risk. It sounds obvious, but it deserves attention.
One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned in business is that you should avoid unnecessary risk. It sounds obvious, but it deserves attention. Know your systems, solve for your customer, and don’t lose money. Only when you ensure those things can you focus on the upside.
The dumbest risk I’ve ever taken was exposing myself to a single point of failure. In 2020, I bought a property in a small town (pop. < 2,000) in British Columbia, planning to put it on Airbnb. At the time, it was a huge investment for me but the numbers worked. I believed in the market (still do), the price was great, and the potential upside was enormous.
The thing I failed to consider, however, was the almost non-existent supply of cleaners and handymen in the market. Since I planned to operate the Airbnb remotely, I needed a dependable staff to keep the lights on and put the fires out. I was looking for a needle in a haystack.
Amazingly, I did find this person. But I also knew that if they called in sick or had to leave town, it was money and reputation down the drain. They were my single point of failure.
Whenever I research an investment today, I figure out my operations first. I decide who does what and ensure there are replacements, in case I need them. Through my own ignorance, I’ve learned how to put out the fire before the fire starts. I hope you do too.
Good cities are irreplaceable
When I moved away from Canada, I explained to a friend how much I would miss it. I’ll be back someday, I said. Vancouver and Montreal had been my homes for the past six years and I had attachments to both cities. In my mind, they were irreplaceable.
When I moved away from Canada, I explained to a friend how much I would miss it. I’ll be back someday, I said. Vancouver and Montreal had been my homes for the past six years and I felt connected to both. In my mind, they were irreplaceable.
Curiously, he responded, “Why wouldn’t you just find a comparable city in the US?” I’m American, so living in Canada might seem illogical. Why not find a city like Vancouver or Montreal in the US, where I can live without the legal hurdles required to live internationally? The answer: it doesn’t work that way. You can’t substitute one great city for another.
While all bad cities are alike, each great city is great in its own way.
In Paul Graham’s essay Cities and Ambition, he talks about how great cities speak to you. They each communicate a different message. For example, Vancouver says Get active. In summer, the city’s unique combination of mountains, ocean, and vibrant urban activity begs you to go outdoors and explore the landscape. Conversely, Montreal is so stubborn and proud that you couldn’t replicate its pigheadedness anywhere else in the world. It says Do it my way or f*** off – something I find charming, like the Italian grandmother who runs her familiar, four-table restaurant exactly like her grandmother before her.
Paul talks about how he loved living in Cambridge, but he couldn’t stand the cold winters. With that in mind, he moved to Berkeley, which, as far as he could see, was just a warmer Cambridge. Both cities boasted top universities, large tech industries, and intelligent, progressive people. But after a while, he still didn’t feel about Berkeley the way he felt about Cambridge. It spoke to him differently. As he recalled, “Cambridge with good weather, it turns out, is not Cambridge.”
For the same reasons, I won’t try to find another Vancouver or Montreal, despite how much I hate the Canadian winters. You can’t replace one city with another and hope for the same.
We’re building copy-and-paste cities
Our cities are becoming boring. What were once melting pots of cultures, ideas, and designs are now models of scalability and reproduction – indistinguishable asphalt jungles. They’re losing their souls, and we’re losing ours too.
Our cities are becoming boring. What were once melting pots of cultures, ideas, and designs are now models of scalability and reproduction – indistinguishable asphalt jungles. They’re losing their souls, and we’re losing ours, too.
Over the last century, the United States defined human progress. We went to the moon, cured diseases, and created revolutionary technologies. Our achievements were exceptional and our cities reflected that. In a twenty-year timespan alone, we erected the Golden Gate Bridge, the Empire State Building, Grand Central Station, and the Chrysler Building. Our skylines were testaments to our greatness. Yet, something happened in the past few decades: we’ve moved backward.
In recent years, urban populations have exploded. The mass migration of tech workers and skilled labor to cities has caused housing demand to mushroom – a real estate developer’s dream. To keep up, they rapidly assemble apartment building after apartment building, like legos in the hands of a toddler on a Halloween sugar high. Each tower is identical to the next.
As a consequence, our skylines have become predictable. What were once beacons of local character are now monuments to capitalist efficiency, dominated by recurring glass, steel, and stucco facades, mistakable for the work of a single dystopian architect. We’re building copy-and-paste cities.
The problem isn’t in our growth. It’s in the way we measure our growth. Over time, we’ve forgotten the ideals that make us human and we’ve substituted profit in their place. David Perell explained it in his essay The Microwave Economy: “The world loses its soul when we place too much weight on the ideal of total quantification. By doing so, we stop valuing what we know to be true, but can’t articulate. Rituals lose their significance, possessions lose their meaning, and things are valued only for their apparent utility.”
In our quest to maximize square footage and capitalize on rents, we’ve ignored the importance of the things that make our places unique. The qualitative is mistaken as subjective, and the subjective is dismissed as imaginary.* Our streets are becoming sterile and our sidewalks less alive. Every city is becoming the same.
In a nation of creativity and individualism, monotony is death. We thrive on being different. In cities, we express this creativity through public art, unique architecture, and regional cuisine that come from our hearts and souls. What’s the point of seeing a new city that looks exactly like the last three? We seek out experiences we can’t get anywhere else. So if every city becomes the same, our serendipity in exploring new cultures and places will vanish.
Paris illustrates this perfectly. It’s the city of love: cobblestone streets, romantic architecture, and a river that flows through the heart of it all. Yet, in 1925, famed architect Le Corbusier wanted to tear it down. He proposed a city redevelopment called “Plan Voisin” that would replace large swaths of Parisian city blocks with skyscraper apartment buildings. The project was designed to be an urban utopia, housing more than three million people across social classes in the heart of the city. And though the project was designed in good faith, it was vehemently rejected. It would have destroyed the character that made Paris unique! Without its grand boulevards, enchanting neighborhoods, and sidewalk cafes, the city’s spirit would’ve disappeared.
Le Corbusier’s “Plan Voisin”
Instead, the city did the complete opposite. It prioritized its individuality above its profit and strengthened what the world already loved. Since denying Le Corbusier of his plan, Paris has built more bike lanes, designed more parks, and envisioned a place in which each neighborhood is a vibrant, self-sufficient organism. The cobblestone streets weave throughout the city, the sidewalk cafes dance with exuberance, and the public gardens are in full bloom. Paris is alive and its character is stronger than ever.
Paris realized that we are our cities. The collective spirit of the people is the spirit of the place. So if the places we love lose their characters, we lose our own. We’ll no longer be proud of the places we live and we’ll have no reason to stay.
If our past has shown us anything, however, it’s that we get to control how our cities evolve.
Instead of continuing to build tasteless apartment blocks and uninviting places, we can choose to stand out. We can embrace the quirks of our local cultures and bring our cities back to life. We are what makes our places special and we need to show that. The future of our cities is in our hands.
UPDATE (12/26/2021): While I still agree that urban beauty is paramount and it massively informs the way we perceive our societies, it’s less critical than having abundant, quality housing. In the current moment, multifamily development – in any form – should be prioritized. Lack of housing supply in major US cities has caused rents to skyrocket, leaving working-class residents without hope of finding affordable housing near work. Without this housing, these residents will be pushed further into the wealth-evaporating holes they’ve been trying to escape. See why the average teacher in San Francisco spends 64% of their monthly income on rent alone.
Therefore, while I really don’t want to see Le Corbusier’s Plan Voisin enacted anytime soon, we need to strike a balance between beauty and the speed and supply of development. And strong preference should be given to the latter.
*This idea originally came from Lewis Mumford’s book The Culture of Cities.
Special thanks to those who helped edit this essay: Daniel Sisson, Paul Mills, Efty Katsareas, Gayatri Taley, Chris Wong, and Gillian Liu
Never before seen
I’m constantly amazed by how it seems like every niche market in existence has been monetized. Like there’s no more gold in the mine. There are products, media, and services that stretch across every corner of the internet as if almost every possible idea has been exploited, and yet, there is still an abundance of opportunities waiting to be realized.
I’m constantly amazed by how it seems like every niche market in existence has been monetized. Like there’s no more gold in the mine. There are products, media, and services that stretch across every corner of the internet as if almost every possible idea has been exploited, and yet, there is still an abundance of opportunities waiting to be realized.
Derek Sivers explained this well in his essay Obvious to you. Amazing to others. In the essay, he talks about the number of ideas passed over simply because they seem too obvious. How so many people say, “That has to exist.” Only it doesn’t. Either no one else has ever thought of the idea, or everyone else has passed it over just like you’re about to.
Once it’s imagined, an idea might be ignored for one of two main reasons: either 1) it’s taken as obvious and therefore assumed to exist somewhere or 2) it may not be ‘worth anyone else’s time’, maybe even mistaken as un-monetizable. If your idea falls into either of these two camps, explore it. This might be the time to pounce.
Sure, the idea could very well be of no interest to anybody, but it could also be amazing to somebody. Some of the biggest companies in history were the products of these ideas.
Take Stripe, the online payments platform. To the Collison brothers, the business idea was obvious. It just required tackling a problem no one else wanted to solve: back-end payments. Had Google, Amazon, or Microsoft really cared, they might have blown stripe out of the water. But, to them, it didn’t seem worth the effort or investment. Who really cared about back-end payments anyway?
The founders of Stripe went for it, and today the company is worth $36 billion. *Update (Feb 2021): Stripe is valued at over $115 billion.
So, next time an obvious opportunity approaches you and asks to be explored, take a step further than you might otherwise. Though it seems obvious to you, it might be amazing to others.
And amazing sells.
You are not your resume
The separation of the professional self from the entire self isn't taken seriously enough. They are not the same. People are not resumes. People are personalities with unique emotions, ideas, and opinions, and, unless one’s career fulfills their life’s mission and they are content with nothing but work, a job title alone does not suffice for a biography. Your LinkedIn profile should not be tied to your self-worth.
The separation of the professional self from the entire self isn't taken seriously enough. They are not the same. People are not resumes. People are personalities with unique emotions, ideas, and opinions, and, unless one’s career fulfills their life’s mission and they are content with nothing but work, a job title alone does not suffice for a biography. Your LinkedIn profile should not be tied to your self-worth.
Yet, it commonly is.
What probably worsens the issue is that society demands progress and praises status, yet defines both with broad, quantitative metrics because numbers are easy to track. Happiness can’t be measured… right? True individual success should be measured by metrics that are often personal and can’t be evaluated with numbers alone. Despite this, we assess ourselves against the people beside us instead of against our own potential. We chase the goals we’ve been given and run away from ourselves in the process.
Here’s an analogy to illustrate my point.
We often approach life like a series of mountains. Someone says, “Hey, you should climb that mountain over there! The view from the top is great and it’ll help you climb the next one!”, so you might go without much forethought. After all, who wouldn’t want a great view and more experience? We fail to ask ourselves, however, if that view is right for us and whether we actually want to climb the mountain behind it. Nonetheless, we start our climb.
Partway through the trek, we get a feel for what makes someone a fast climber versus a slow climber, and of course we want to be fast climbers, so we do everything in our power to speed up, regardless of whether or not we’re going the right direction. We benchmark ourselves against the people around us — those who are fast and those who are slow — to measure our progress. “Where is she now and how do I get there?” is dangerous because it implies that they’re ahead of us when, in reality, they’re hiking a different trail altogether. Their path is not ours and ours is not theirs. Just because their resume boasts the titles, achievements, and accolades of a great mountain climber doesn’t mean we need those same status markers. Can’t we succeed by being ourselves?
So, as you stand at the foot of your next mountain, ask yourself why. Why is view A better than view B, or why might you want to climb the mountain here instead of the mountain there? What will this summit offer you that no other mountain can? Intent matters. Until you’ve found the right trail, the number of mountains you’ve climbed does not. Scrutinize for character before quantity and you might hit fulfillment along the way. Assess yourself by the standards of others and you’ll guarantee failure. Your climb is personal. Judge it accordingly.
Asking ‘why’ helps you understand your motivations. Ask it enough and you'll discover your values. Maybe you value creativity or maybe you value altruism. Ultimately, the more you pursue mountains because they align with who you are, the more fulfilled you’ll feel once you reach the summit.
In choosing to do something because of internal motivation rather than external expectation, you’ll realize that no job title will ever say enough about you. You will never be your resume, and you’re better off for it.
Why Netflix should go into retail
Right now, Netflix makes money in one revenue stream: subscriptions. People pay to watch TV and movies directly from their computers, and the company is making a killing. But will the trend continue?
Right now, Netflix makes money in one revenue stream: subscriptions. People pay to watch TV and movies directly from their computers, and the company is making a killing, but will the trend continue?
Unless Netflix unlocks and integrates an unheard-of level of AI into their algorithm to influence customer experience, there’s a serious opportunity for Amazon and Apple to capture market share.
Scott Galloway, in his recent article LAnd of the Undead, went into detail about how users have no reason to visit and remain on Netflix’s platform aside from watching movies. While Netflix captures insane amounts of attention, its share of eyes is nothing next to the amount of human energy invested into Amazon’s and Apple’s products.
Galloway outlined how Netflix is going to fall behind because of their lack of distribution capabilities and the lack of attention spinoff into other revenue streams — e.g., in Amazon’s and Apple’s cases: Kindle and iTunes.
This is why I think Netflix should go into retail.
Hear me out.
Think about all the times you’ve seen a movie and you’ve thought the main character was a total badass, or maybe someone who you just really admired. If you don’t go as far as wanting to be them (trust me, I’ve been there), you at least want to be like them in one or more ways.
Now, what if Netflix offered you that opportunity directly from the movie? What if all you needed to do was click on the item of clothing that captured this person’s essence or select the piece of furniture you oh so badly wanted and you could have it at the touch of a button?
Netflix could easily open a Netflix shop. They could sell fan swag, books that inspired the movie, and clothing/furniture that your favorite characters use. They would open another stream of revenue to diversify their wealth and capture a bigger share of the entertainment/movie geek market.
Could Netflix eat Amazon? Probably not. But maybe. In fact, in the long run, I’m fairly confident it’ll happen the other way around. I think the deciding factor will be in how each company leverages the data they’re given. How do they combine capture my biometric data and analyze it to determine which movies and products are going to make me tick?
Obviously, it’s possible that none of this will happen. It could be a horrible idea. I think it’s great. But it could be horrible.
If you read this, let me know your feedback; I’m keen to hear another point of view.
The city of the future
People are flocking to cities. Even with over 50% of people in urban areas today, growth projections estimate that more than two-thirds of the world will follow suit by 2050. The wave of new residents will create inevitable complications in managing affordable housing supply, reducing carbon emissions, providing clean water, and offering accessible and efficient urban transportation networks.
People are flocking to cities. Even with over 50% of people in urban areas today, growth projections estimate that more than two-thirds of the world will follow suit by 2050. The wave of new residents will create inevitable complications in managing affordable housing supply, reducing carbon emissions, providing clean water, and offering accessible and efficient urban transportation networks.
We aren’t innovating fast enough to keep up. Population growth and resource consumption are dramatically outpacing technological innovation, and impacts can be seen all over the world. Take San Francisco: the city’s influx of top-tier professional talent and its inability and unwillingness to efficiently produce affordable housing or alter zoning laws in favor of multi-family development have caused a surge in housing prices so dramatical that the average teacher spends 64% of their monthly income on rent alone; or, again, in Australia, where hunters are decimating populations of wild camels just to decrease competition for the country’s limited water supply.
Source: https://sfzoning.deapthoughts.com/
This raises the question:
How do you improve housing affordability and citizen health, reduce negative environmental impact, and ensure safety and security for all?
Some suggest the solution is a wealth tax. Others point to stricter regulations on things like rent, transportation networks, and energy consumption. While either option may be valid, the most significant impact may actually come from a less traditional solution: public-private partnerships.
Healthier cities are forged when the public and private sectors work together. Widespread innovation is made easier when the municipalities and companies combine resources and facilitate the deployment of public tech. Over the past few years, we’ve witnessed innovation in entertainment, payments, and eCommerce, so why not in cities?
For tech, the focus should be on connectivity. The few cities at the forefront of this next industrial revolution have already begun exploring how to best serve their citizens with apps, devices, and services that change the way they live, work, and move. The City of Madrid, for example, recently launched its mobile app MaaS (mobility-as-a-service) Madrid. It connects citizens with multi-modal transportation providers in a single tool. Built for both Android and iOS, the app combines information — timetables, maps, fares, traffic data — from public transportation, ride shares, bike shares, taxis, and scooters, and concentrates the data all in one place. The software not only saves people from searching through individual apps to find the best mode of transportation, but it also indirectly cuts carbon emissions, promotes healthy competition between vendors, and allows for a more enriching citizen experience.
MaaS Madrid
Similar platforms harness Internet of Things (IoT) devices to gather data needed to effectively manage physical, economic, and environmental assets. These systems are being employed in various ways, from energy resource management — making sure your home’s electricity and heating use the minimum amount of energy necessary — to traffic management, where IoT sensors optimize traffic lights and increase safety among vehicles. They’ll soon be ubiquitous. And provided that most incentivize healthier, cost-reducing habits, they’ll pave the way to a more connected future with higher standards of living.
It’s time to build. To achieve any progress, we need open innovation in every aspect of civic life, from urban infrastructure to climate change, all fueled by government support. Along the way, errors will be made, companies will fail, and change may be slow, but so long as we continue to iterate, the future will undoubtedly be better, brighter, and more resilient. Remember: the city of the future is the one that is well-designed today.
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Special thanks to Ali Dunn and Tammy McLeod for helping me articulate my ideas.