Historically, humans have organized themselves in a variety of ways: from tribes and councils, to LLCs, and C-Corps. But these forms of organization tend to be centralized in nature, and feel slightly out of place today. With so much of our personal and professional lives taking place online now, the real question is: what does an internet-native way of organizing ourselves and our resources look like? DAOs, or Decentralized Autonomous Organizations, are one compelling answer. In this...

How we portray ourselves online has become almost as relevant as how we portray ourselves IRL: Bored Apes and CryptoPunks are the new tailored suits and designer handbags. In years past, digital status-signaling was largely restricted to gaming communities but the post-COVID world has created a vibrant digital fashion scene with major fashion houses like Gucci and Dolce & Gabbana getting involved. More recently, this digital fashion world has also collided with web3 and NFTs—taking...

In this episode of our web3 explainer series, we take on an ambitious task: explaining Ethereum from the ground up. We unpack what Ethereum is, how it works, and why it matters. We spoke to Preethi Kasireddy, founder of DappCamp, which introduce students to the Ethereum ecosystem and helps them build their first web3 product in just three weeks. Preethi is an entrepreneur, writer, engineer, and educator who started her crypto career as a software engineer at Coinbase. Her essay,“How Does...

In this second episode of our new web3 explainer series we ask an important, and hard to answer question: is crypto *actually* destroying the planet? Over the last year, crypto has witnessed mainstream adoption, with billions of dollars of value exchanged across different blockchains. But this shift has created a pressing problem: the current process of mining blocks and validating decentralized networks is extremely energy intensive. This means that running popular networks like Bitcoin and...

For the next few episodes of Means of Creation, we are piloting a series of web3 explainers—unpacking some of the fundamental concepts of web3, from first principles. The goal is to explore various topics, trends, and projects that people want to learn more about but find confusing! Essentially, to ask the questions we’ve been too afraid to ask in public. If you want your questions answered, or have topics and/or guests you want to recommend, feel free to do so by tagging @Means of...

Pinterest is often written off as a digital mood board used to inspire purchases and future plans—a place for its 444 million monthly users to share recipes, DIY craft projects, home décor ideas, beauty tutorials, fashion, or just about anything else. But in reality, Pinterest is a dark horse in the creator economy. Many of those users have become influential visual curators, going on to build powerful personal brands as creators themselves.  Pinterest wants to further accelerate this trend...

A recurring theme on this show has been creator and user empowerment—more specifically, how founders can build scalable businesses that don’t just extract value from their users, but instead, allow them to directly benefit from the value they help create. In the past, web2 gig economy marketplaces have had to be extractive—imposing higher take-rates and lower payouts seemed to be the only way to stay in business. Many of them still struggle to be profitable. However, our guests for this...

In this episode, we were joined by Erik Forman, the co-founder of The Drivers Cooperative, a driver-owned alternative to Uber and Lyft. Erik spoke about how he got interested in the labor movement, his experience organising workers, what it means to be a socialist entrepreneur, and what a modern labor movement could look like in today’s platform-dominated economy. Erik has a deep understanding of labor theory. Besides being an entrepreneur, he has organised labor movements on the ground...

Nathan interviewed Li in this special episode of Means of Creation, where she talks about the $110M fund she recently raised with Jesse Walden and Spencer Noon of Variant. If you’re an avid fan of the show, you may have noticed how the podcast’s focus has shifted from platforms in the passion economy to user-owned networks within web3. In this episode, Li talks about how her passion economy thesis converges with Variant’s ownership economy thesis—a crypto enabled future where consumer...

Packy McCormick, author of Not Boring, one of the most widely-read analysts in tech. His newsletter now has more than 75k subscribers and he's raised a fund to back startups he finds interesting. In this conversation, we focus on how Packy went from crypto-skeptic to writing a post almost every week about crypto. We also talk about where power will accrue in the web3 value chain, the tribal nature of many crypto projects, and the possible deep connections between the idea of a 3d "metaverse"...

The hype around crypto-native communities such as Loot and Nouns DAO have taken over all our Twitter feeds. But how do these communities arise and gather momentum?  Our guest this week, Patrick Rivera, gives us an inside look into the social and financial motivations driving some of crypto’s most prominent communities. Being a part of these communities is so compelling, because according to Patrick, they are “a combination of a social hangout spot, an intellectual challenge, and a way to...

The creator economy is in constant flux, with DAOs and NFTs currently having taken centre stage. Our guest this week, Kyle Chayka, is uniquely positioned to understand these shifts. As a writer covering technology and culture, he is simultaneously involved in three very different worlds:  He is a contributing writer at The New Yorker, a legacy media organization, he writes his own newsletter Kyle Chayka Industries on Substack, and he also publishes a newsletter about entertainment called...

Jason Prado, Head of Product at the Drivers Cooperative, is bridging the gap between labor and capital

Within traditional games like RuneScape and World of Warcraft, there have always been vibrant economies where players buy, sell, and exchange in-game assets. But these traditional games are also closed ecosystems—none of them let players transfer assets across different games or exchange their in-game assets for money. Blockchain-based games totally disrupt this model. Not only do they make in-game assets transferable across games, they enable players to sell these assets for...

here’s a shift afoot at Twitter. The long-time microblogging platform has recently made a series of moves to position itself beyond just tweets, including acquiring the newsletter company Revue and introducing tools to help creators make money on the platform. When Twitter acquired Revue, the company declared that it was making a “better home for writers,” apparently doubling down on its mission to help people create and share content with a plugged-in audience. But are we ready for...

In this week’s show we’re welcoming Jarrod Dicker, a partner at TCG who helps drive their investments in blockchain, cryptocurrency, and technology that connects creators with fans. He was previously the Vice President of Commercial Technology and Development at the Washington Post and the CEO of blockchain startup Po.et. Jarrod has been at the forefront of creator communities and consumer crypto trends for a long time. In this conversation, we talk to him about how he’s currently thinking...

Spotify is doubling down on investing in creators. Within the past week alone, the music giant both launched its own live audio app, Greenroom, to directly compete with Clubhouse and acquired an audio news feed app, Podz, to improve creator discovery. But while these moves might seem sudden, Spotify’s Chief R&D Officer Gustav Söderström has been thinking about Spotify’s unique role in the creator economy for a while. Gustav has been with the company since it was a 30-person team in...

Alex Kantrowitz is a journalist who has spent years studying the inner workings of tech companies—how and why they make strategic decisions. He’s also a solo creator with a newsletter and podcast (Big Technology), and has written a book, Always Day One, in which he studies the internal decision-making frameworks within big tech companies. In this conversation, we talk to Alex about: - Why the creator economy went mainstream, and how Big Tech’s attitude toward it shifted - Why he is bullish...

Li and Nathan are joined by Kat Tenbarge, senior reporter at Insider. Digging into Kat's work as an influencer watchdog—including her recent expose on sexual assault allegations against David Dobrik's Vlog Squad—they discuss the importance of holding influencers accountable, what people don't always understand about the elaborate fact-checking and editing processes, and how the internet might move to a healthier content ecosystem. If you liked this, you'll like our newsletter! We publish an...

A few weeks ago, Linktree, a link-in-bio platform that serves as the de facto landing page for 12 million creators, announced a $45m Series B funding round led by Index Ventures and Coatue. Linktree is used by everyone from celebrities like Selena Gomez, Katy Perry, and Chrissy Tiegen, to large organizations like Shopify, TikTok, Facebook, and Redbull. In September last year, it was reported that 28,000 new creators were signing up every day to use Linktree. In this episode, we’re joined...