Less me and more him. So I think the uh I asked Ted very last minute to change the description of the talk and uh I didn't make it. I don't blame him. It's he's uh transdimensional being so uh the talk is actually about how uh what the future of startups looks like in the world of open data. Not quite so much about initially it was about like you know the experience I had working on a product with uh lexicons that I didn't you know I didn't make a single original lexicon and I was happy about that.
That was a great thing. But um you know then it kind of expanded more, especially when I started talking to the community a lot more. And then there's like sort of a bigger issue here about you know this the computer kill mentality that's there in in in conventional tech startups in the tech world and what what a huge opportunity we have to kind of change that and disrupt that in the app proto world or the world of open data. So I want to talk about that a little bit. Uh so yeah, let's get started. Let's let's dive into like a little bit of the old world, like what the world look like, good old Microsoft, you know.
So Microsoft kind of kicked things off. I mean there's obviously like much many more stories of um how there's like this crazy competition outside of the tech world, but in the tech world, I think one of the biggest stories that got us kicked off back in the 90s, this was 96, was uh Microsoft with their kind of like cutthroat, we must dominate mentality. They kind of dominated the dominated the market for um uh operating systems in the first place, but on top of that, you know, when this new thing called the internet came out, and um they were like we gotta get in on that.
So Netscape at the time was uh was was dominating the space with the internet browser, um Netscape Navigator. I think Mike McHugh's somewhere in this uh sphere, so uh I'm glad he's not here because I'm I hope I get all the details right. But um yeah, Microsoft didn't quite like that, and they were like, you know, uh we gotta get ourselves in there fast. So what they did was uh they noticed that everyone was using open standards. And that's a way for them to kind of put themselves in there. Everyone's kind of like agreeing that you know we gotta use these standards to kind of like build on the internet.
So then they say, yeah, you're we're gonna come in, we're gonna embrace your standards. Uh we're gonna we're gonna you know make sure that uh uh we wanna we wanna give the users the best, you know, even when some of that is originated elsewhere, like from people contributing to the ecosystem. And then you know the next thing they do is they extend it, being like, oh we have to we're not we're not gonna hold back our users for waiting for these like slow-moving organizations and standards bodies, you know. We're gonna we're we're gonna have to move fast and do things uh do some of the things our own way.
And and and the the well-being of of those few people who aren't our users is understandable, but also not a high priority, you know. And then eventually that goes to extinguish, where uh they did this with uh ActiveX and Internet Explorer extensions to kind of like dominate the market share uh and kind of make sure that they are the only ones who kind of stay in there. Uh so the rationale for that is like why should we expand effort towards uh keeping competitors viable? Why shouldn't we actively help uh potential customers join us? You know, why why do we have to care anymore?
So suddenly the same you know standards that they were embracing, they have kind of weaponized that to kind of keep all the competitors out. And you know, of course they can also just uh tell all the PC uh manufacturers they're working with, if you if you work with Netscape, we're gonna stop supplying you. So you know that's another way to just like kill your competitors. You know, so it's kind of crazy how uh Netscape was literally 90% in 95 in 1995, and in the span of like seven years, like you know, it flipped completely to uh up to five percent, you know.
Uh and an Internet Explorer took over because uh because of these these sort of practices. And uh and you know, uh AOL acquires uh Netscape by the end of this, so they kind of get a nice cushy exit. Uh and okay, a bunch of people have had a chance to to uh to kind of dunk on the Zuck. It's my turn, okay? So this this is the thing. He he he spent years shouting domination at the end of Facebook. Like that's so weird. Like I mean, imagine doing that at the end of a meeting, being like, domination, what?
What a strange guy. And uh, you know, um this is another thing that the guy the Zuck is capable of, you know. Like he's uh he was working with Harvard to do the Facebook, but you know, he's just giving out the data for to other people. That's that's the kind of person that kind of comes up with this competition attitude, you know. That's like I mean, I'm I'm dunking on Zuck for sure, but like there's a sort of domination attitude, which is uh an abstraction that I'm trying to point towards here. Um and to ground it more in sort of like the same story as uh Microsoft from earlier.
So we're we're all familiar with Snap and we kind of live through this. I was actively using Snap as a as a teenager at that at that point. And uh, you know, uh what was going on behind the scenes at that point was uh in 2012 uh Facebook acquired Instagram and uh for one billion dollars, and they I think within a year they they wanted to acquire Snapchat because Snapchat was like this hot new thing, all the kids were using it. They wanted to you know grab those grab those little kids uh in a you know probably weird way.
But um Snapchat declined the offer. And I think uh there was a subsequent offer from Google as well, which they also declined. And they continued to grow over those years. Like for a solid three or four years after that, Snapchat went up to 150 million users. Uh but then uh don't be too proud to copy. That was actually from a memo that was in Facebook. You know, they said uh we we shouldn't we should we we should just rip those off. We have Instagram, let's just put that put uh stories in there, you know, they launch stories.
Uh in one year, when they launched um uh Instagram, when Snapchat had 150 million users, within one year, Instagram had overtaken that, you know. Uh and and there was there was like I mean for the previous story, there was at least an anti-compete uh for that that scenario and uh anti-trust rather. And and Microsoft did actually face some repercussions. Uh there's there they not that it really stopped them in the grand scheme, but here's nothing happened. You know, it just uh the uh Snapchat exists as a husk of itself doing whatever people there do now. Um and and you know this this this attitude of like copying things has pervaded you know Facebook, but not just Facebook, you know.
You like within Facebook alone, you have stories that become Snapchat, you have reels from uh TikTok and threads, like they build threads in I think uh in in five months, which is you know pretty insane. And there's a point there that these guys at some point the biggest guys they become brokers of scale. The large companies become brokers of scale and they're able to stay dominant because they have the means and ability to deploy things that scale really fast. And uh they have the users, they have the distribution, they have the network effects, and if you're you're some kind of like upstart with a genuinely innovative product and idea, you become you become big enough to get to the point where they'll notice you and then they're kind of you know, they're they're gonna decide your fate at that point.
And and I want to look at this now from the the founder perspective. You know, if you if you're if you're if you're building a company, like you want to create something of value, and then you want to grow, and then like kind of the meta now. If you're if you're a startup uh you know, or like a founder, an entrepreneur, you want to like sell to the broker of scale. Like this is this is actually this isn't a failure, this is like the expected outcome. Like founders now in like all these startup universities, they're taught to do this stuff, you know.
Like this is kind of like we've we've accepted that this is how the life cycle of a product of a new innovative thing should be. And it's just like you know, it's it's uh first you build something that people love, you know. There's a whole user side of this. Users start relying on your on your product, they start you know integrating it into their lives, they start trusting it with their data, they start using it to find their community and build their community. Uh there was some conversations I had with community members here, and of course about meetup.com.
Maybe you guys uh have had some bad experiences yourself, you know, where you're paying a bunch of money and uh you know what's really happening there. Um there's people like I think uh I was talking to someone who said that meetup sent them a uh a notice being like, oh, you're our like uh I think you have brought like 10,000 people or reached 10,000 people to the network, and also by the way, can you pay us for the next year? It's like you should be paying them, man. But anyway, that's that's almost a separate point. But the point is here is that you you kind of grow something until you're visible, and then when you're when you when you sell uh as an entrepreneur, if you sell, the product is a sacrifice.
Like the users who have now spent all this time building a relationship with what you've what you've uh built, now it's uh they're kind of you know they become the uh uh uh they be they become the the sacrifice, like all of that is sacrificed. Um yeah, and and and the other note here is like scale doesn't matter. Like Instagram with its 30 million users was a one billion uh purchase, 400 million users for WhatsApp, uh Oculus well, that was more of like uh like a hardware remote. And be real, this is kind of a newer example.
I just found this out while researching this talk. It had 40 million users, and you know, like even now it's like it doesn't matter if you hit the scale. If you hit a scale that's kind of big enough, big tech just comes in and swoops in uh because they they just have to continue to dominate. It's just a mandate of domination. Um yeah, to go back to the earlier point is just you know, I'm gonna use some query doctoro stuff here. Uh the and shittification starts happening, you know. This is like the eventual decline and death of of products.
You know, people have like opinions about Dr. O and the word and shidification, but it is a true concept. It's something that happens to us, you know. Um I don't know if you guys have watched the movie Pentagon Wars. It's uh it's fantastic. It's about basically the uh Pentagon. Uh they have this uh Bradley fighting vehicle, which is like this uh a tank, but you know, people people aren't exactly sure what it is. Like people get promoted to be in charge of it, they slap on a new feature, then they get promoted to work on something else.
Uh and then this this goes on for like a while. And uh Kelsey Grammar, he's uh he's you know the guy in charge. But then at some point an airline guy comes into vet the product and he finds out that it's it doesn't work, it doesn't do anything, and people aren't even sure what it's supposed to do because it's supposed to be like submarine, it's supposed to be a land, it's supposed to be troop transport, it has a gun. So the point here, and the analogy here is that you know eventually the big tech when when they have their own products like Google or Spotify, they start slapping on these features, people get promoted to a higher position, and then they stop caring about it.
They move on to other things. And then ultimately you just have like this mess of like 50 different things going on. The user is like, I actually just wanted these three things that I always had before, you know. Um and if you're if you're a big company, this is what happens. If you're a startup, you sell your company, and then it becomes part of this machine where the same thing happens. You know, the user didn't choose the acquisition. The user doesn't get anything out of this. In fact, they just get you know they get squeezed more for putting their trust, placing their trust in this sort of uh ecosystem.
So that's like and and their information is stu is weaponized against them now. Uh and ultimately, you know, at some point they'll just throw it out. You know, Google Reader, there's like killed by Google has I think like something like 200 products that Google has killed, maybe even more, actually, I forget. But um, yeah, you know, at some point everything you've you've kind of like worked towards, built your sort of like uh interaction with the internet around your community around, is now just gone. You know. Um and and and founders aren't the bad guys. Like why should like we're not like we're not bad for innovating here, right?
The late-stage capitalism machine has forced us to serve the overlords, even if we break out of the system and forge our own paths. And and users kind of end up in the same same spot, even if they you know trust something that's new, even if they kind of like go with the the overlords. Um the system kind of frames this as like exits are success and and shittification is growth, you know, with all these metrics that come, like the dashboards that analysts are looking at and trying to squeeze users more, and lock-in is network effects, you know.
Uh okay, that was enough of the Doom and Gloom. Let's start talking about the good stuff. Open data. So I want to just talk about lexicons, just in case anyone's not familiar with them. Uh in app protocol, uh, they are the unit of information. So essentially everything you do in the app protocol, if you like something, it's a record, it's a lexicon that gets emitted and stored on a personal data server. And uh that's sort of like the information that's traveling around, that that's a lexicon. Uh apps don't need to declare their own types, they can grab existing ones.
It's cool that I've seen a lot of developers kind of come into the ecosystem being like, what, the same types are in different apps? That's awesome, you know. It's a very cool uh selling point for Ad Proto. And uh developers can publish their own types and contribute to what's already like a very rich ecosystem. Like there's well, Paul said there's like a thousand apps on atproto now, which is pretty awesome. Uh I just want to show a few lexicons just so it's clear what we're doing. Uh uh Lexicon Garden here. Yeah, so we have uh cool website lexicon.garden.
If you guys haven't seen it, please check it out. Uh so yeah, it's basically just uh a string that's attached to a DNS. So it's BSky.app is the the app for Bluesky. And uh you can kind of like specify it. This is called a namespace ID. And uh you can you can kind of add a bunch of metadata to it that kind of defines what it what it is to like something in this case, you know. So like uh what is the thing that's being liked? Uh I'm not sure what the via is, but yeah, when it's created uh and what's what's actually being liked.
That's kind of like what matters to us here. Um let's go back to full screen. Um yeah, and and now lexicons kind of open up a lot of things to us. Um in the old world, data is proprietary. Uh we can't interoperate apps. You have to you have to clone features. Like we saw like with stories, with reels, with threads, like how like you know, you have to build the whole thing by yourself in this sort of like necessarily antagonistic way. Now now we have this sort of new perspective, new world where uh like uh I'm about to demonstrate something I built uh later, but like I like a few features, and I think I could compose these specific features from these different apps and then kind of like do my own weird thing, you know.
Uh so it it's all about the quality of the interface than it is about like trying to capture users and drive growth. Um and from a user perspective, you can pick one app, you can accept all its compromises before. Like you know, you're kind of stuck in this the late-stage capitalism machine that I was talking about. But now you can just pick uh whatever app you want for your future. We already seen this in Bluesky, you have all these different uh front ends for Bluesky, like Deer.social or like a fully different app view like BlackSky.
You have all these different uh opportunities, and as we saw yesterday, you can you can just make your own experience, you know. Like users have infinite choice. You can see a couple I made already there. But um so that this is kind of like a big big game changer. And I want to kind of talk about like this is the part of the talk where I'm like, I'm not sure where we're going. But I have a lot of questions. I can at least throw those out there. So a few experiences I think I had. I don't know if any of you guys were in at science a few days ago in this exact room.
There was a beautiful moment, one of my favorite uh moments of the conference so far, which was uh Som is uh he goes by the handle HYL.st, uh super cool person. And um uh he built an extension called Seams, which is for annotating the uh Atmosphere or like annotating websites on the Atmosphere or just on the web on the internet. Uh but he I think after Margin came out, he kind of like lost his joy. I think he felt a little bit like drained from it. He gave me permission to talk about this, so I'm just you know that's uh so like he kind of like shared his experience actually right here, exactly here, about how he's kind of like hospicing his his extension, which is you know an interesting perspective.
So I I I think what what he said was what stuck with me was like you gotta build with joy, you know. And he he kind of like lost the joy that he was building for. So if we're building something, we definitely have to build for joy. And we want to build stuff for the community, like you know, I think Blaine's talk yesterday was really big part of this. Um like you you you can just uh like you know it's we're all cheese, you know. You gotta just show up and make sure that the um the microbiome is looking good and we're doing it for the right reasons and for the right people.
Um and we have to break the old patterns, you know. We have to we have to you know make sure that um we're not we're not contributing back to the old ecosystem. We have this new opportunity, we have a necessarily different way of approaching um uh of approach of approaching competition. Uh we we can all build stuff that is similar. Uh even Tori the other day from Skylight, uh she was saying in her talk about how you know there's like all these other there's uh in the Fediverse, there's Divine, which is another video platform, and she's like that's awesome.
That's it's great. We are all kind of growing all ships rise together. Um but at the same time uh we have we gotta get paid, you know. Uh I this is a post from Rudy a few days ago. Uh like we this is a part of the Atmosphere that's that's like very heavily unsolved, which is uh what are we gonna do about uh payments? Uh I considered talking a little bit more about this, but I think it kind of like expands the scope too much. Uh but you know we have we don't really have protocols that are on payment yet.
Uh uh sorry, uh payments on protocol yet. Uh we we we don't really know how value creation happens. We don't really know how apps can make money, we don't know what's a convincing sell to investors here, you know. So we have good intentions, we have sort of like a post you know cutthroat competition world, potentially. Uh so what can we do with that in a way that actually is you know value creation here. Um, I mean, in if you look back in economic theory, and I'm flexing my economics minor here, it's gonna work a little too hard for a second.
Uh Oscar Morgenstein and John von Neumann made uh the book The Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, which is about which kind of brought game theory as a mathematical field into what was the social science before of economics. And that kind of started this movement of economics that eventually led to uh the market's creation uh and and sort of like the the you know uh zero sum games was exactly what they built, and how you know if I get money it's at the expense of someone else. Since that time, economic theory has moved to positive sum.
There's like all kinds of like goofy things they're doing, and this is where my economics minor stops. But what I do know is that the theory is completely moved on, but the world is stuck with the same zero-sum stuff that we don't need to be stuck in anymore. So uh and there's a few examples of this in the wild already. Like we have Patreon, that's something that's come in the last decade where like uh donations are actually something that's that's um that's that's people's regular source of income, you know, on a monthly basis. And and you have all these other uh like sort of mutual aid and all these things uh that are coming up that that all on the internet.
We this is the sort of model we need to move towards. And this is where it would be cool for us to use this framing uh that I'm presenting to to come up with a way that we can monetize apps in the future. Convince investors to get in and then and then get people to be able to be paid to work on this stuff full time because you know man's gotta eat. So for the last uh maybe five minutes or so, I'm gonna uh show the extension I made, which is rabbit hole. Yeah, it's it occupies your new tab.
And essentially it stores uh you can you can kind of grab all the uh you can track your rabbit holes online. That's kind of the idea here. Uh these are a bunch of the different rabbit holes I made. The part where it relates to competition is because I don't I didn't make any original lexicons here. These are all uh these are trails uh where which which were made on side trail, an app made by Dan Avramot, who's uh coincidentally giving a talk in another room right now. Um let me find a little trail. There was a good one.
Oh there you go. Brandon's one for leaflet. So this extension allows you to actually you know just walk a trail uh and check out stuff. Like you there's information on each you know stop that you're making on the trail that lets you uh kind of like understand what you need to do, and after that, hopefully you come out of it with um with with some sort of knowledge or skill. I'll go through the whole thing. So if you guys haven't used Leaflet, beautiful editor, you know, it's uh give it a try for sure. And it's fully feature complete.
I don't use Notion anymore, which is awesome. Um let's just get to the end. Yeah, and uh the other thing that you can organize your rabbit holes into are burrows or these are literally just uh uh sample collections. Um that's that's like that's something, you know, these are these are all lexicons that already uh exist and I don't I don't see the need for us to like you know if if you want to build new stuff you can build new stuff if you want to take features you can take features. All you gotta do is have ideas and compose them.
So that's kind of it in terms of what I plan to talk about. So we can if you guys got questions, we can start talking about those. Excellent, thank you. I love that idea of like, oh he just kind of drops. He's like, these are all just symbol collections. You know, just composing all these different parts. And they're not even like uh protocol-based parts, they're like the the next level up. Yeah, you know, that's the composable bit, and then you can keep composing, keep composing. Excellent. Thank you very much. All right, uh, let's give a round of applause.
Thank you guys. Thank you, thank you. All right. Anyone have any questions or comments? Let me get you the mic, let me get the mic for the extreme so the stream can hear you. I was just saying, was that a Chrome extension? Yeah, it's uh Chromium only for now. Very soon I'll do Firefox as well. Uh there'll be an extension, sorry, there'll be an announcement for that coming, like probably today at some point. So yeah, look out for that. What's it called? Uh what's it called? Uh rabbit hole. Rabbit hole. The rabbit hole extension. Yeah. Oh, right there.
Um on the expo panel, they talked about how it allowed them to ship quickly. Like there was this uh implicit competitive advantage thing. Um yeah, I was just thinking about that. Uh so there still seems to be this drive to get something out fast, be the first one, um potential first mover. Do you have any thoughts on that? Yeah, I mean that I think that's that's a good thing. You know, if you have an idea and you're burning with passion to like get it out there, that's that's such a good feeling. I've experienced that feeling a lot.
And uh I think there's nothing wrong with that. In fact, I'm I'm more happy than ever that the same joy I experienced as a programmer when I first built something and I saw it worked. Uh seeing that other people can have access to this without knowing how to program is is is is awesome. I think that's just a really good thing. So I think I think if you make something first, that's that's cool. It's like even this like rabbit hole, like I think I saw margin come out. I'm like, oh this is this looks like they're doing like similar stuff to me.
I'm like, I just like building this. I've been building this for myself, and you can you can see how many I have. You know. I have like a whole bunch. So that's that's kind of uh yeah, that's my take on that. But that's an interesting point, and that's something that I think is is changing as well. Like one, like over the last say 15 or 20 years of startups, we've often had to remind beginners that come into the space that you know once they have this passionate idea and then they make it and then they see, oh, this person already made it.
Oh, it's like no, there can be more than one of those things in the world. That's okay, and you can spin your own your own version. But now uh, you know, especially with like uh Claude and stuff, you're gonna see a lot more like slightly tweaked different versions as people as uh you know Jay said yesterday she was calling it liquid. You know, UIs are liquid and we talk about malleable software and those types of content uh concepts. So I think uh first to market doesn't necessarily might lose meaning in the future, maybe. I don't know.
Uh Dawn, here you go. Yeah, great talk, great conversation so far. Wondering if you could build on what's just been said into that um thing you your slide where you talk about like figuring out ways to get paid. And do you have ideas or like dreams or like what that could look like for you in a non-zero sum ecosystem? Yeah, I I definitely I think uh as a lot of things in the protocol, Black Sky's been stewarding uh or taking the lead on this with BlackSky Cash. I'm eager to see how that pans out. I do think I I haven't talked to Jay about this yesterday about like what did they think about you know payments on protocol.
Uh and that's not something that you know I I understand there's a sequencing for things that need to happen. Like private data right now is probably more important. Uh what I think would be cool is at least we start with mutual aid, we start with donations at on protocol. Uh we got it's it's actually kind of uh cruel irony for me, someone who came from the crypto world. Uh we I was working on a bunch of cool projects, a bunch of people were working on cool projects, which the least cool part was the fact that there's a cryptocurrency and people like are expected to work with it.
Now it's like we come to this space where we got all the cool stuff, but we don't actually have any payments on protocol. It's it's just a funny irony that, yeah. Any other questions from the crowd? Okay, great. Well, thank you very much for the presentation. Thank you everybody very much. This afternoon. Cheers.