From a Wired review of an Evan Williams speech.
The main point: Stop creating things cause they’re new and cool. Instead, find something everyone OBVIOUSLY wants, see how they’re currently getting it, and make it easier, faster and cheaper.
…the internet is “a giant machine designed to give people what they want.”
Williams created Blogger and Twitter and will be a billionaire soon…so he knows how to give people what they want.
“We often think of the internet enables you to do new things,” Williams said. “But people just want to do the same things they’ve always done.”
The Internet will become a digital representation of the real world. If you carry that thinking far enough, we may cease to exist as physical organisms (see Tron).
Increasingly, everything that happens and everything we do, everyplace you go and check in, every thought you have and share, and every person who liked that thought… is all connected… and it keeps multiplying relentlessly.”
The Internet is about convenience, and convenience is speed and “cognitive ease”.
In other words, people don’t want to wait, and they don’t want to think — and the internet should respond to that.
See Google (finding things), Amazon (buying things), Apple (communicating things), and Facebook (also communicating things?).
The key to making a fortune online […] is to remove extra steps from common activities as he did with Blogger.
See also Uber (getting somewhere). Chris Sacca calls it closing the loop.
The Internet is not utopia. It’s more like…modern agriculture:
“[Agriculture] made life better. It not only got people fed, it freed them up to do many more things — to create art and invent things.”
Modern agriculture has downsides (eg, animal abuse, overeating, environmental damage) and so does the Internet (eg, mental health, media addiction).
A Dave McClure quote sums it up:
“Great companies do 1+ of 3 things: Get you LAID (= sex). Get you PAID (= money). Get you MADE (= power)”
