General – Half-formed thoughts and musings

A culture of profit

(Currently writing from Tokyo so bear with my somewhat sleep-deprived cognitive functions) Dave Madden is one of my favourite people in the ad world for many reasons, one of which is the brutality of the post he wrote about the near future of the adtech world being mostly liquidations rather than consolidation.

Some thoughts on LEGO Fortnite

Okay so now I can finally stop giving a polite smile to the people asking me what Epic is actually doing with LEGO. Based on what seemed to be the former taking over most of the world’s media this weekend¹, I’m assuming you know what I’m talking about but in case you missed it, the LEGO Fortnite survival crafting game (and several other things) has been announced.

Why is the internet still (mostly) a dumpster fire for kids?

For those that watch the general kids-and-internet space, the last couple of weeks have been pretty busy. Ireland rolled out a framework to allow parents/teachers regulate phones in schools and the UK issued their Codes of Practice for companies to comply with the Online Safety Act. Meanwhile in the US, a Californian District Court ruled that Meta, Alphabet, ByteDance and Snap must face lawsuits alleging they designed their platforms to attract and be addictive to children, thereby harming their mental health. Over the years countless parents and teachers have cornered me with the question: why is the internet STILL such a dumpster fire for kids?

Fortnite and the Lindy Effect

Fortnite’s reactivation of its player base has been quite extraordinary and reminded everyone just how big the platform still is. It seems to be a good examples of the Lindy Effect which broadly states that the longer something has survived, the longer its remaining life expectancy. While this has all sorts of fairly obvious exceptions, as a probabilistic model it’s increasingly helpful to think about what the next ten years of consumer digital platforms might look like.

Thoughts from the MadTech Money conference

Earlier this week I was speaking at the MadTech Money conference, an excellently named event which is delightfully blunt about the business of both building and selling adtech and martech companies. I feel like we need more conferences like these.

Casual observations of founder thinking in 2023

There is a delightfully Gandalfian quality about being in non-building mode and intellectually rambling around different landscapes. At this point I’ve replaced a lot of previous meeting time allocation with reading (and writing) and am working pretty hard to broaden my queue from ‘interesting’ to ‘esoteric’ (current status: ‘weird’). Somewhat surprisingly, I’m seeing Substack’s inbox rapidly become one of my most used reading apps (relatedly, if anyone is working on a better Goodreads, please just tell me where to wire the money).

Why does everything feel like it’s changing all at once?

There are certain weeks when my newsfeed is filled with stories about platform transitions and tipping points. Whether it’s Disney/Charter, streaming/theatrical, TV/digital or retail/ecommerce it feels like a whole bunch of phase shifts are happening at the same time. It’s easy to point to Covid and interest rates but actually when you look at the data, it does really look like the last five years are an unusual concentration of behavioral change: