Invest in Your Networks and They'll Invest In You

Today, everything I’ve been working toward for six years has started to pay off. On the balance sheet, it’s almost nothing. $42/month, a single paid subscriber. If we compress it to MRR, I’m worried about survival. But it’s not MRR, it’s trust and belief in the model I’m building toward. It’s hard to build anything meaningful. Especially in a world focused on rushing everything. So instead of leaving it at $42/month revenue, I turned it into a job.

Last week, I turned writing into a job for myself. That’s what makes me better at communicating. Now I’m turning my first subscription into a different job. I’m a talent scout for the Wolfram Institute now.

I’ve spent a long time learning how to scout, develop, and place talent into different networks because I realized that people are at the heart of the economy.

At the current rate of change in technology, human networks become the stable piece. You have to design systems that allow trust to build up over time without watching them constantly.

If Steph wanted to hire me full time, he couldn’t. My individual attention is too expensive for his current budget. But he is exploring possible future budgets, and those budgets will have talent needs. So we’re arbitraging the cost across time and networks. He’s putting a small amount of energy and trust into the system so I can build the network up, and when he is ready to look for people, I’ll have a network grown for him that is rapidly searchable and will have lots of information.

For only $42/month. And he doesn’t need to actually do anything to generate it. I actually started trying to ask him about the software he’d like and I realized I didn’t even need that. There’s no UI needed except human conversations.

The economy is designed to minimize the cost of human coordination, and the rapid pace of change blew up that structure, because human coordination became expensive. Everyone is using different abstractions of reality they’ve spent years getting used to.

But we’re in a new era of software now. Personalized software that gives humans ultimate leverage. I have a highly tuned AI system I spent months building, testing, and measuring.

Right now, it’s helping me measure talent.

And develop that talent.

And Steph just noticed the opportunity first. Not surprising, since he’s been watching Quai and is at the heart of the Wolfram Institute. He’s early to a lot of really interesting new things.

I went to the furthest possible future I could find and there was exactly one person there who could see my art.

But before we look there, let’s go back to the past, to the first paper I wrote. The Memetic Foundations of Human Value.