9. On failure, pivot, experimentation

Dear Co-creator;

This will be a short one. In our second newsletter, we stated a goal of having 5 investment memorandums to vote on by August 1, 2023. Well yesterday was that day and we have neither the memos nor the voters 😀.

Failure: Addshortcut as a “mass participatory masterclass” is currently failing in the participation department. That’s fine for me, really. As long as the educational content is to your liking – I don’t mind documenting my journey. I know 65% of you open the email (thank you 👏🏻) so take a second to give me feedback right here in the newsletter by clicking on one of the responses below:

Decision: Unfortunately, but only for the time being, there will no longer be an opportunity to participate in surveys, voting, etc. at scale as non-participation at large has hindered our progress by diverting my own limited resources. You see, I have to let some of you go, my dear “board of directors” after a month and a half. I didn’t follow the first half of the old adage “hire slow, fire fast” - everyone was most welcome to participate meaningfully and get paid. Our incentives are not aligned at the moment, but we will try again and experiment in the future especially if we have a larger community. No more decision surveys for you to participate in.

Mitigation: For now, anybody who wants to participate in the actual making of our startup, get in touch with me directly just as my other co-conspirators have done - an inner circle is forming. Don’t be shy:

Progress: I am looking at a bunch of different ideas at the moment, some you already know, and some being shared with me by the members of the community (some lending instruments, an AI superstore for the community, etc). We discussed a bunch of Greg Isenberg ideas at our Slack. They all sound exciting at first blush. At some point I will write the investment memoranda and share with you. Vote or not, non impedire progressus, and the journey continues.

Updates:

• Two of my classmates have started the Carbon Company. For now it will be a credit card that funds carbon reduction investments in lieu of giving the customer the 2% (or whatever) cashback. Simple idea and if you want to help, join the waitlist for the Carbon Card just as I did. In exchange, Marlon would help us quite a bit in the future with any of our carbon reduction ideas I am sure.

• There weren’t enough responses to go forward with our conjoint analysis. Back to the non-validated storyboard.

Image by Bing “Yin and Yang”

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