Decoding Camila Cabello's frequent moon references
Hi friends,
Writing this in 100 degree heat. Thinking fondly of the great midwestern polar vortex of early 2019.
This week:
the promise of fewer browser tabs
Talmud for the internet
social media doing something good for democracy
a new language
Notion wants to resolve all the tab-switching friction of the modern workplace with one easy-to-use platform.
This company tells their own story extraordinarily well on their about us page (a rare feat: bear witness). Here’s the short version: when the industrial revolution occurred nearly 200 years ago, we scrambled to create tools that would help us manage the new work we created for ourselves — think of the filing cabinet, the typewriter, the telegram. A hundred years later, 21st century corollaries of those inventions emerged: Google Drive, Microsoft Office, email. Today, when you start your computer at work, you most likely open a separate tab for each of those systems: a tab for doing your work (a text document), a tab for storing your work (Drive), a tab for talking about your work (Slack/email), and maybe a tab for keeping track of the work you have yet to work on (generic productivity tool). All day long, you go from tab to tab, an experience so prevalent a world of memes has emerged to reflect it. Notion is screaming at the top of their lungs that this multi-platform, multi-tab behavior is an anachronism. Before computers, there were actual material constraints forcing work-related tasks to be a part of separate workflows: a filing cabinet, for example, could not be the same thing as a typewriter. In the digital world, we face no such limitation. Notion reflects this. On their platform, all of your work tasks live under one hood, one tab. For proof, check out the very cool live demo on their website.
Notion is hiring in design, engineering, and sales.
Genius started off trying to explain the brilliance of rap music. Now they want to become “the internet Talmud.” This is perhaps the most surprising product development trajectory we’ve written about in 4CJ to date.
You have probably heard of Genius — they are integrated with several streaming platforms and often populate lyric searches on Google. Their goal is to bring “music intelligence to the masses:” they publish song lyrics and then crowdsource explanations from the public and the artists themselves. The results are sometimes pretentious, sometimes humorous. It’s a space for Lil Nas X to explain that “Old Town Road” is about the fact that he feels “limitless;” it’s where Camila Cabello listeners can ponder the significance of her frequent moon references. In the end, the promise of Genius is the construction of a new layer of experience on top of a text. This logic can be followed far beyond song lyrics, and Genius has already begun: today, their library includes books, court cases, Obama White House speeches, and more. A16Z partner Ben Horowitz hypothesizes that this company can ultimately do for the internet what the Talmud did for the Old Testament: provide context, insight, and discourse in a supra-textual space. Somewhat surprisingly, this ambitious transition has been well-received. The Wall Street Journal, for example, proclaimed their pursuit “worthy of Age of Enlightenment sages like Diderot and Voltaire.”
Genius is hiring in design, operations, and engineering.
Countable is social media for civic duty.
The internet and its features — network effects, information transfer, virality — are not inherently bad for democratic society; the combination just hasn’t really worked out well so far. Countable is trying to change that. The platform builds democratic engagement into a familiar online workflow that looks and feels like a bustling social media. Instead of tweets or pictures or text posts, Countable’s homepage is an “issues” feed. Topics range from Dodd Frank to mining permits, and users are prompted to learn about them through plain-language summaries and a comments section. Subtle design changes make a big impact on the feeling and tenor of political debate: headings, for example, qualify user statements as “Mary’s Opinion,” “John’s Opinion,” etc. The platform also lets newly-informed users impact change on issues they care about through letters and crafty videos to legislators. On the flip side, zealous advocates and organizations can use the platform and it’s network effects to publish and educate on their own causes.
Countable is hiring a journalist, an engineer, and a clients success associate. Some positions include equity.
Some start-ups use emerging technology to build or update tools; other start-ups use emerging technology to rethink paradigms. Mosaic belongs to this latter group.
The distinction is one between innovation and disruption (we’ve avoided this cliche for nearly 3 months at 4CJ, but it’s time); it’s the difference between thinking of Spotify as an upgraded CD player versus a shock to the phenomena of music. In the construction world, increased computational power and improved device infrastructure might prompt an innovative start-up to build drones or robot-tools. Mosaic balks at this task and asks a bigger question: “what could the notion of computation really do for construction?” From that, the two Stanford/MIT founders built from scratch a programming language that translates technical blueprints into instructions: give it an architectural rendering of a house and it will tell you the order in which construction tasks must be completed to achieve the design. It is then able to turn project objectives into individual workflows: when the company is building the foundation, the system will print out differentiated instructions for Engineers A, B, and C. All of this disruptive potential is being put toward Mosaic’s mission of building real communities amidst post-Suburbia drudgery.
They are hiring engineers, designers, and construction officers. Also recommend paroozing the truly weird and in-depth set of essays that explain their values.
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Love,
Lea