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Greetings all,

In this week’s episode of Ventures, my guest Dave Parker and I discuss his new book, Trajectory: Startup - Ideation to Product-Market Fit. We talk about Dave’s background, his journey into startups, how he approaches common questions from founders, why he is fascinated with teaching founders about revenue models, information asymmetry in the venture capital industry, and where Dave is heading next.

Check it out: Ideation to Product-Market Fit, choosing revenue models, and general advice for founders :: with Dave Parker

Social media, in a healthy way?

A few friends/colleagues have chimed in recently on my meta-conversation about social media and its perils in the Web 2.0 era. I was able to participate in an internal discussion recently with this tee up:

“….we'll be having a discussion about social media and Web 3.0, the advent of Clubhouse/TwitterSpaces, value exchange and identities on social media platforms, etc... For those able to make it, come prepared to chat about how/where you use social media (or not) and what a future could look like with personal data ownership, tuned permissions, and decentralized/scaled trust.”

It was a great discussion. One colleague has found a way to simply observe on social media to find awesome people and make connections. Another has found a way to build community on Twitter by focusing on positivity and thoughtful engagement.

One friend/colleague in particular, Marty, gave me permission to share his notes from the course The Science of Well-Being from Yale on Coursera:

• “Reduce social media usage & unfollow people who post situations better than yours
• Gratitude helps stop our social comparison & helps us realize the good things in our own life
• If you do continue to use social media, try to use it to savor experiences, express gratitude, and foster social connection rather than comparison to others or to flex. Use it to enhance rather than interrupt your experiences & mindfulness
• Also try to only follow people who are positive and you won’t compare yourself to.
• You can benefit others by making your content more realistic & honest as well. “

In the end, he admitted that “their conclusion was basically there is no real way to use social media ‘healthily’ ”.

Wow.

In startup land, we call this a “problem” that merits solving. :) While there are no lack of Web 3 projects out there trying to provide solutions from various angles, I’m still paying special attention in the Web 2.0 world to Clubhouse/TwitterSpaces (for how they do audio) and the new social network Librex (for how they do anonymity / no usernames).

In fact, this recent podcast with the Librex founder (Ryan Schiller) is incredibly interesting and I’d highly recommend listening to it if you are curious about where social media experiences may be heading next.  

Overall, it seems like if people want to play “the game” of social media (Web 2.0) they can. But, the general consensus out there from what I can see is that traditional social media has jumped the shark. The deep question every human needs to ask themselves is “why?”.  Why use social media? What value exchange is really happening here?

Where I’m personally at is in agreement that it’s almost impossible to use it in a healthy way, and there needs to be a Web 3 future where smaller communities can engage thoughtfully and “permission in” the right/appropriate people to a conversation. Perhaps the robots can help us with this? I certainly hope so.

Have a great rest of your week!

~Will