备忘录：商业的未来（基础设施）

The future tends to resemble the past. Railroads, bridges, and highways democratized the American economy; eCommerce infrastructure will do the same.

When considering the impact of eCommerce, look beyond the brands, marketplaces, blanding, and pixels. Instead, see railroad planks and westward tent towns as far as the eye can see. Commerce is what happens when infrastructure meets opportunity.

Between 1871 and 1900, over 170,000 miles of railroad tracks were laid, fortifying the five transcontinental railroads, the first of which was completed in 1860. By 1900, the other four had been developed, connecting the Pacific coast to the eastern states. Along the way, centers of commerce developed around railroad hubs.

Chicago built its first rail connection in 1848 to connect the Windy City with the lead mines of Galena, Illinois. Later lines connected the city with Detroit, Cleveland, Cincinnati, New Orleans, St. Louis, Kansas City, Omaha, and St. Paul. The sudden rise of rail-based commercial transportation corresponded with Chicago’s post-Great Fire building boom. [2]

For the majority of North America, the online retail industry of today is analogous to the infrastructure of old: It has the potential to change one’s surroundings. The development of eCommerce capabilities will influence much of the rest of our lives, including how we live, how we buy, what we eat, where we work, how get there, and where we shop.

Chicago became the center of commerce in the West as constructed railroads, bridges, and automobile travel formed new patterns of agglomeration and consumerism. The infrastructure of its day captured new opportunity where there was none. Today, eCommerce is the infrastructure that will quietly influence industries from real estate to telemedicine.

We must begin viewing investments into our eCommerce infrastructure no differently than our predecessors viewed their investments into roads, bridges, and tunnels. The rest of the digital and physical economies will depend on that infrastructure: databases, financial technology, warehousing, logistics, privacy systems, and trust. Each are hallmarks of the eCommerce industry, but rarely do we consider how they can impact industries that have long been without these norms.

Democratization: The true benefit of eCommerce

In one day, I experienced three interactions that will be influenced by eCommerce infrastructure in much the same way that quiet towns grew to booming cities after the arrival of railroads.

The disappearing sleazy salesperson. By 9 a.m., I was at a car dealership for an oil change. The conversation of a new car purchase arose. And when the dealership felt that I was a serious buyer, a contract appeared on a table. The trade-in price was determined by a person who was incentivized to minimize the value of my vehicle. Knowing this, I made a call to another dealership who then offered 7% more for the same exact vehicle. The existing dealership agreed to the true value of the trade-in, but only after it was revealed that they undercutted my price to boost their own profits.

Tesla and Carvana are among those fixing a retail institution that’s built on an extraordinary lack of trust. Traditional dealers are not far behind. A recent report on a major English automobile dealership franchise proves as much.

Recent research conducted by automotive industry IT services and consultancy NTT Data found that one in six people are looking to only use online platforms for future car purchases. Its findings represent a 500% increase on those that have previously bought a car entirely online. [5]

The disappearing housing bias. End-to-end eCommerce may promote the democratization of where and how we live. Moments after opting out of the purchase, I drove to a plot of land in a suburb of Columbus where my family is building a home. The concept of “sanitized urbanization” was inspired by this area and covered in an August 2020 edition of 2PM:

Polycentric development is a pattern of transport connectivity, urban planning, mixed-use development, and progressive design concepts. The result of these accelerations, interruptions, and inventions is a new classification of suburban development that will become more commonplace as younger earners continue to flee cities. In kinder terms, sanitized urbanization takes the best parts of urban renewal and imports them to upper-middle class and wealthy exurbs. Dublin, Ohio’s Bridge Park is a great example of a polycentric development, featuring a member club, modern hotels, and top restaurants. [2PM, 2]

I sat in my car as I read a report from our local business press on the housing market in the area:

Several residents submitted comments that said they worried about increased traffic a “change in demographic” that renters would bring in a neighborhood that is largely owner-occupied. [3]

I am that change in demographic. The homebuilding process and its politics have not been easy over the past year. In The Opendoor Policy, I explained: “The path to middle-class home ownership is rife with unspoken obstacles and time-hardened customs. For immigrants and minorities, the obstacles can be even higher.” [2PM, 4] I wonder what innovations the democratization of eCommerce can bring to the often-twisted forces of human subjectivity.

The disappearing obstacles to preventative care. Later that afternoon, I experienced a small medical emergency that I was able to identify early thanks to a combination of wearables and available bloodwork. As I rushed to a medical facility with a resting heart rate of 168 beats per minute, I prepared myself for the succession of questions from a nursing staff and the attending physician. Neither had access to data from companies like Levels, Whoop, or Base, a health tracking system that measures vital systems through in-home lab assessments. Without context, they searched for the problem rather than finding a solution to what had already been identified.

Integrated healthcare and preventative medicine may become the technological issue of this decade. The technologies, no longer just for overzealous weekend warriors, have moved into the mainstream for anyone who wants to better understand their own health in a cost-effective way. In response to thoughts on the need for these integrated technology and care, a medical doctor replied:

Access was greater when your contact point was in the same place as your doctor. “Press one to make an appointment. Press two for billing…”

In each case, eCommerce can systematically democratize key functions of our lives by removing the gatekeepers. Much like railroads provided access and commerce, new technologies can simplify the purchase of a car, remove bias from the purchase of a home, or provide peace of mind without dialing a number to make an appointment with your physician.

While brands, marketplaces, and concepts like Stitch Fix, Allbirds, Amazon, DTC, HENRY, and Shopify define eCommerce today, they won’t forever. The merits of eCommerce will be at its fullest potential when digital transactions become enjoyable, objective, and universally available. When you think of eCommerce, consider roads, railways, and bridges. And then remember how those tools connected an expansive, underdeveloped nation to opportunity and greater freedoms.

作者：Web Smith | 编辑：Hilary Milnes |关于 2PM

一封公开信关于社区

 

Community building isn’t easy. This weekend, everything went wrong.

It started with a weird bug that was causing us a few problems. Here and there, a paying customer would write to ask “Why am I receiving a rejection email?”, or something similar. We would explain it away and change a setting to prevent it, but it kept happening. And then on Saturday at 3:15 a.m. EST, a deluge of angry, confused or sad emails bombarded my inbox.

Behind the scenes, the 2PM Inc. organization is seven people large. I am the only full-time worker, like Sahil Lavingia’s lean strategy at Gumroad. That’s not to slight our team, however: four contractors and two paid interns are incentivized and capable of doing great things with the time that they share with the company. The 2PM team is so talented and consistently productive that the company would have to be venture-backed to afford each of them. I am working to get to the point where cash flows can support them. They are the best at what they do. We scrappily do the work of many, three days per week. If memberships are low for one week, I can at times feel like I disappointed them. This weekend, I disappointed far more than my team.

Why am I being rejected from something that I didn’t apply to?

In that moment, your entire business rests in the balance. Dozens upon dozens of loyal members opted out of auto-renew, angry at the insult. One email reply was: “You’re dead to me.” Another member wrote: “A real polymath would be smart enough to turn off automated emails before deciding who they want in their stupid little club.” He would later reply: 

I should have given you the benefit of the doubt and instead I sent a mean email. Thanks for clarifying. I enjoy your work so I was extra sensitive.

They were not mad because they were interested in joining 2PM’s growing community but because the email itself was incredibly callous. The subject line read: “You’ve been rejected from Polymathic.” And in the body of the email: “A staff member rejected your account.” Neither were true. Our community software sent that email from its servers with our branding but without any of the following: our permission, copywriting, or basic understanding of how 2PM’s community works.

Discourse, an open source community software, sent thousands of emails that we didn’t author after an admitted API bug between their backend and Memberful’s membership and paywall software. I emailed their support but the office is closed on weekends. By that morning, I had to send an email addressing the issue. It would be the first time that I’d ever send an email of that sort. I moved as quickly as I could, hoping that the vast majority of those offended would see it.

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The one and only ⁦@web⁩ wrote this for your swipe files. Put it under “how to apologize when something beyond your control goes wrong”. We’ve all been (or will be) there. Well done, Web. pic.twitter.com/z97dH3zu2p

Meanwhile, communication between 2PM and Discourse’s teams moved slowly back and forth through email. I tried to communicate the severity of the situation; they tried to communicate how inconsequential the trigger that caused the fallout was. It would be 20+ hours of synchronous communication before this stalemate broke.

By this morning, Jeff Atwood, the Co-Founder of Discourse, chimed in, perhaps the first sign of affirmation that our hosting company recognized the severity:

We’ll be happy to send out individual apology emails to all affected users, taking FULL responsibility for that erroneous email – because that was absolutely our fault! I can offer to personally send them signed Stack Overflow stickers, if that helps (not sure if your audience uses / knows Stack Overflow, but I was a co-founder). I will write these apology emails myself, and send them from my personal email account.

I chose to opt out of this email. For one, our members don’t need another email from Discourse – even if it does provide 2PM’s vindication. And unless they were willing to apologize for the copywriting and flaws that relinquish the control of their clients, I wasn’t interested in continuing the conversation.

What we’re building at Polymathic

Anyone who reads 2PM understands the value of deep generalism (or polymathy) as an educational pursuit. Each newsletter’s curations are broad and cross-disciplinary. The Polymathic community that we are building for members is the next step in this process. We encourage the sourcing of reports, data, and insights in economics to art history to the sciences or real estate. It is my belief that the study of broad subjects unlocks deeper knowledge of your own industry. I often share the obscure Henry Ford anecdote as an example:

Henry Ford’s great technological breakthrough didn’t come by way of his own Industry. He visited a Chicago meat packing plant, watched the disassembly process, and reverse engineered the idea for his factory’s manufacturing revolution.

It has been a slow build, sometimes just adding 4-7 people per month across a spectrum of professional and academic specialties. Each of these members share a desire to contribute and learn from the woman or man next to them. The goal is an ambitious one: Polymathic is to become a school of thought for thousands. One where any long-term Executive Member can one day join and contribute and learn. In short, there are no rejections. That simply defeats the damn point of everything that I’ve worked to build.

When you are bootstrapping a company like this, you make several trade offs. In an ideal scenario, I’d build my own community server instead of whitelisting another’s but for the stage that the company is in, the current stack makes sense. Our technology stack consists of a number of outsourced solutions: WordPress, Memberful, Mailchimp, Discourse to name a few. But you never expect those platforms to do you active harm. The act of Discourse sending that email cost 2PM nearly $70,000 in short term business. The persisting problem with Discourse’s API connection to Memberful (who’s been a wonderful partner) is currently hindering nearly $1 million in long-term revenue for our company with no promise that it will return. But the lessons learned are far more important than money lost.

Community building is not easy, even when your software is working for you. I have never valued the grace and perspective of the 2PM community more than I do today. What it taught me was the power of the benefit of the doubt. Many in the community were apologetic after receiving the email that clarified what happened. An even larger number of community members waited for justification before assuming the worst, assuring me that I had done enough good with 2PM to know that we’d never send an email like this. But the most critical takeaway is that nothing matters more than the collective that you build around your products. In one weekend, five years of hard work was threatened. It was the community that kept it together as technology failed them.

作者：Web Smith

Here is Discourse’s official apology.

备忘录DeFi 和探险家原理

There is no more undiscovered physical land; there are only ideas that may develop into new land of its own.

Consider Bitcoin, the first blockchain, and the genesis story of decentralized currency. An idea became new land, albeit digital. On that land, systems were built and exchanges were founded. New products like fungible tokens and non-fungible tokens enabled trade. Explorers mined and profited off of a new land that literally came of nothing but an idea. Consider the conclusion of the Bitcoin white paper, released in 2009.

The network is robust in its unstructured simplicity. […] Any needed rules and incentives can be enforced with this consensus mechanism.

Unstructured simplicity, needed rules, and consensus. The land analogy holds true. Ideas can become so powerful that new ground to build upon can take shape. It’s time that we develop new systems around the mining of ideas and how we compensate explorers for them. Those ideas commonly lead to new opportunity.

The idea of ideas is misunderstood. We would, once, find a great thinker and wait for her validation. Before too long, the ideas would be co-opted by a larger, more official organization. The idea would be watered down and misappropriated, losing its original potency. By the third or fourth iteration of the original idea, the concept would lose its luster. The idea would meld into something that already existed, something safe and calculated and easy to communicate. And then no new land would be discovered.

Today’s land grab is different. We listen to new ideas from obscure voices on Clubhouse. Their ideas are transcribed and acted upon, losing their luster but not enough to hinder the well-resourced listener from profiting. We witness creativity on TikTok or SnapChat or Dispo that we could have never imagined. Then, the techniques, dances, or meme formats become public domain. We even attach ourselves to foreign creators who’ve captivated American audiences through their intensity, prolific work, and enthusiasm. And then we remove many of their mechanisms for compensation, leaving well-heeled pattern matched men to extract and refine, extract and refine.

The largest audiences of the early-internet era were the victors with the spoils, but the creator economy is surfacing new ideas at their very core. The convention of pattern matching is slowly giving way to the merit of the thinker. But thinking and merit are not enough. Ideas have never been more monetizable than they are today. Our financial systems should reflect this. Land discovery should go to whomever gets there first. The ideal is simple: we should be incentivized to pay our thinkers for the new land they’ve conjured from thin air.

DeFi and The Explorer’s Principle

The creator economy is paywalled. Purchases are one-click. Audio is push notified. But like physical land, virtual land has boundaries. In The Smartest in the Room, I wrote about an obscure newsletter publisher from Honduras named Andrea Hernandez. A lot has happened in the nearly three months since. She’s gained enterprise clients, hundreds more subscribers, and a Clubhouse audience that will surely lead her to greener pastures.

A native of San Pedro Sula, Cortés, Honduras, her audience around Snaxshot has begun to transcend its niche. When she writes about CPG, I listen. Her ideas have been incredibly valuable and the Snaxshot brand will grow because of them. But like many others, I only recently began compensating her for her ideas through a Patreon link that she’s set up for her Substack.

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it’s so upsetting to me someone literally offered me a $25 Amazon Gift card to pick my brain for ONE HOUR is this what you guys think of me?

Hernandez cannot paywall her Substack because there isn’t access to Stripe in Honduras. Additionally, American corporations who hope to retain her coveted consulting services must pay through Paypal, but only after steep international taxes and other fees. She’s accomplished one of the toughest tasks in the global economy: building an American audience with nothing but consistency, enthusiasm, and ideas. When a resource is mined without proper compensation, it can feel like an exploitation. Hernandez was sure to point me to The United Fruit Company and the era of the banana republic.

She should be compensated for her impact and decentralized finance (DeFi) is the key. In a recent Clubhouse conversation with Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong, Initialized Capital co-founder Garry Tan shared an interesting thought:

The operating system of the global brain is booting up.

There is no operating system without transactions. One solution is DeFi, a financial system that allows for independent operation. The system doesn’t rely on banks, insurance, credit unions or any other financial intermediaries. Consumers can invest, trade, transact, and transfer using currencies like Ethereum and Bitcoin. To better understand the value of these two blockchains, consider that as of this week, the asset trade over the Ethereum blockchain surpassed $8 million in daily sales.

Ethereum, because of this added value, is now the world’s second-highest valued cryptocurrency by market capitalization. But this isn’t about the technology, just like retail isn’t about the store aisles and film isn’t about the physical theater. The value transferred in the store or theater is what defines the success of the store of value. [2PM, 1]

Digital assets can be transferred through smart contracts, digital agreements that trigger the transaction upon fulfillment of the agreement. And all creators should be able to benefit from their ideas in a platform agnostic manner, across any and every geographic region on Earth. The next great innovation in the creator economy is the DeFi layer that allows for the global brain to properly compensate its best cells.

The removal of any and all friction from online transactions, whether through fiat currency or cryptocurrency is one of the chief business conundrums of our time. One example of a company aiming to solve the problem is a small, intermediary financial tech company. Uquid believes that creators and retailers can grow quicker by reaching a broader cross-section of potential consumers.

Uquid has come a long way since its launch in 2016. The company describes itself as one of the earliest cross-border digital service providers with a blockchain-friendly payment system. A priority for the team has been to build the ecosystem organically while continually making improvements that ensure it is safe and secure for its customers. [2]

But even their technologies have their limits. Smart contracts, blockchains, and The Explorer’s Principle collide in predictable ways. But it’s the unpredictable nature of ideas and their originators that could benefit greatly from our new infrastructural systems that were merely ideas in 2009 (Bitcoin) and 2013 (Ethereum). Ideas are best carried forward by their creators, the center of today’s digitally-native economy. Whether they’re based in New Zealand, Honduras, Mexico City, or rural Wyoming: we should honor creators by providing them the resources to see their ideas through. As Tan said, “The operating system of the global brain is booting up.” We are long past intermediaries and traditional banking systems being able to support the global nature of our ideas and the commerce that follows.

Imagine if the Bitcoin white paper was published by a second or third-hand observer of Satoshi’s early ideas around decentralized finance. It’s likely that the revelation wouldn’t have been as poignant, useful, or lasting.

Find the creators with new and great ideas, subscribe to them, and pay them. There won’t always be breakthroughs with every conversation or newsletter. But you will eventually find the one idea that may change things and proximity to source is incredibly powerful. That creator will be passionate about the concept and how she fostered it from simple thought to brilliant essay. If we can do better by creators, I believe that we will see more ideas carried to the finish. And perhaps there will be another idea-turned-new-land for the rest of us to explore for ourselves. There’s no physical land left to explore; there are only ideas. There may be nothing more valuable.

作者：Web Smith | 编辑：Hilary Milnes |关于 2PM