Lots of things I already knew, many things I did not (for instance, the founding of Square and the strategic positioning intersection between bits and atoms). Chris Anderson is the author of The Long Tail — also called ‘power law distribution’ — which has been adapted by other great minds in business and entrepreneurship; such as Peter Thiel, Nassim Taleb, and Seth Godin. Although this book was written in 2012, we are only on the cusp of many of its predictions; which are just starting pick up traction en masse in 2020. This is especially true in wake of COVID-19, and how the pandemic has shifted both supply-side and production-side demand via public sentiment and heated geopolitics.
The role of bits vs. atoms is an extremely important concept that almost NO ONE else is talking about — except for Thiel — who never misses a chance to languish on the fact that progress in atoms has severely stagnated compared to that of progress in bits (in his own view, at least). The reason for the hyper-focus on bits rather than atoms, especially by investors in Tech (which is now a buzzword that has become synonymous with software, programming and code) is because they represent the low-hanging fruit of wealth creation via digital products with zero marginal costs of reproduction + infinite leverage; all of which frictionlessly flow over vast data networks allowed by undersea fiber optic cables — which form the foundation or the plumbing behind the global internet as we know it (or as Silicon Valley star investor Marc Andreeson puts it “software is eating the world.”).
Read per Jack Ma’s recommendation. Did not disappoint!
(p.s. I personally ended reading the last 1/4 at 0.8x speed, as there was so much content to take in and the narrator seemed almost rushed in his delivery)
Christopher Armstrong,
Author of The Maker’s Field Guide: The Art & Science of Making Anything Imaginable