I'm so excited to hit publish on the latest episode of the Slow Hunch Podcast, where I chat with author, thinker and creator Steven Johnson.

As anyone who's read this blog over the years knows, the idea for the concept "The Slow Hunch" comes from Steven's book Where Good Ideas Come From. I've always loved that book and have drawn so much inspiration from it over the years.

One of the key ideas in WGICF is the "Commonplace Book", which was essentially a scrapbook of ideas, notes, and thoughts, typically kept by some of history's great thinkers. Steven chronicles how thinkers like Darwin used a commonplace book not just to capture their own thoughts, but to paste notes from readings and others' ideas. And, most importantly, the key to making a commonplace book work was committing to re-reading the notes over time, on the chance that connections likely exist that you might not have realized previously. Thus, laying the groundwork for turning Slow Hunches into big breakthroughs.

Shortly after reading the book (nearly 15 years ago now), I wrote this post seeking a digital version of the Commonplace Book. A way of replicating this experience but using digital tools and stitching together notes, ideas and thoughts from across our digital lived experience.

It took a while, but now with the advent of LLMs, it's more possible than ever to build such tools. And in fact, and of course, Steven has actually been working on one -- for the past several years he's been working with the team at Google Labs to build NotebookLM, and AI-powered commonplace book.

In my conversation with Steven, we talk about his personal Slow Hunch on the path to "tools for networked thought" -- spanning his first explorations with Hypercard in the 1980s all the way to his work on NotebookLM today.

As always, the episode can be found on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, and anywhere else you might catch a pod. Enjoy!

In the last few weeks, I've found myself in the middle of several very complex negotiations. Getting something done in any negotiation requires leverage. But leverage is tricky. You need to have it to drive an outcome in your direction, but you want to be careful using it.

Brazenly using leverage can be effective, but it's somewhat distasteful, and can create bad blood / tarnish relationships. Leverage is also slippery and elusive. It may be that you have it, but sometimes it's not necessarily 100% clear, and things can change quickly.

Taking these two things together, I always find that it's wisest to try and understand what your leverage is, but also avoid wielding it too openly. Both because you may not actually have as much as you think, and if it turns out that you don't, you end up exposed as someone who's not afraid to use it.

But all that said: navigating real-time contentious situations is a good reminder that leverage is best built up over time, and planned ahead for as much as possible. That way, when it comes time you use it, you can a) be sure you actually have it and b) use what you have as modestly and comfortably as possible.

Image from Getty on Unsplash

Our life is increasingly dominated by screens. Giant screens in public spaces; TVs everywhere in bars and restaurants; everyone standing around and walking around with their faces in their phones; watches, glasses and goggles with screens built-in, etc. "Screen time" is a thing.

Screens are amazing: full of information and entertainment. But they are also exhausting and over-stimulating.

It feels to me that, one way or another, we're poised to experience some amount of cultural backlash against so many screens. I can already start to sense it, as I spend time with my teenage kids -- while they are certainly on screens quite a bit, I can tell that they realize that it's a lot, and they seem to actively seek out escapes from the screen (as much as they understand that the screen can be an attractive escape from the real world).

In particular, I'm curious about digital interfaces that manage to capture the value & utility of being connected, but strike a different tone in terms of experience.

For example, I've been experimenting with the Meta Ray-Ban glasses for a while now, and while they aren't perfect, the experience of taking a photo or video without sticking my face in my phone is refreshing. That said, smart glasses are also clearly a step towards a more immersive, rather than less immersive tech experience, which has other potential drawbacks.

In terms of more visually interactive devices, the Kindle is probably the most successful example of this kind of "low-fi" computing. While it's also not perfect, and I still personally prefer to read a paper book, it doesn't scream "I AM A COMPUTER" quite the way other tablets do, and there's just something about the posture of reading on a Kindle (compared to a phone, for sure) that just feels more healthy and nature.

I am curious to see whether such an approach could work for other kinds of products that come closer to the experience of phones and tablets. I was surprised to learn recently that the ReMarkable tablet has sold over 1mm units (that's a 2021 number, so it must be materially larger now). I tried an early version and didn't have a great experience, but I've always liked the idea. I've been following the development of the Techless phone which is a Kindle-like "dumb phone" targeted at teens, but haven't tried it yet, as well as the Daylight tablet, where I'm currently waiting on a pre-order. I'm somewhat more skeptical of the Techless approach which would seem to position the low-fi item as a "starter" phone, and am somewhat more drawn to the Daylight approach which positions low-fi as "premium".

I'm excited to see more experiments in low-fi computing, and am very curious to see which form factors and user experiences prove to be appealing to mass audiences.

Photo: Stanley Kubrick. Life and Love on the New York City Subway. Passengers reading in a subway car. 1946. Museum of the City of New York. X2011.4.10292.30D (link)

It's such a cliche to say that "less is more" but it's so often the case.

We often advise companies we're talking to to raise less money than they otherwise might. Raising less now typically means less dilution. It can also mean more focus. Often times, raising too much means spending too much, or growing the team faster than makes sense, ultimately slowing things down.

Often times doing less means accomplishing more. What I mean by this is: doing something "perfectly" or "bigly" or whatever, often adds pressure, which can often lead to accomplishing less. This is the "perfect as the enemy of good" version of more. I most often see this expressed in forms like, we are encouraging our analysts at USV to write blog posts or develop internal decks/memos more quickly with less pressure, to get them out in the world and get feedback. My partner Jared encapsulates this well in Shitty First Drafts. This is also the theory behind Minimum Viable Products (MVPs). Often times, waiting to do more results in accomplishing less (and feeling worse along the way).

More stuff also means more responsibility. More pressure, more weight, more cost, etc etc. I'm definitely not a Marie Kondo minimalist, but I do understand this point of view. While I love stuff, I also like to pack light.

I'm writing this now mostly as a reminder to myself about how much I value this overall approach.

I was sitting with an investor friend earlier this week, describing the kinds of things that USV likes to invest in. She asked if USV invested much in SaaS (Software as a Service), and I said no, not really. But yes, in certain cases, especially where there is a network to be had, and I mentioned that one kind of network we like to invest in is a system-of-record style network.

The canonical example is our portfolio company Carta, which is certainly SaaS, but really, it's system-of-record, grounded in ownership interests (starting with equity ownership in startups) as the foundation record that binds the system together. From there, many stakeholders can engage and collaborate, all based on the shared interest in the records at the heart of the system.

Since the beginning of USV, we have always asked the question: "is this a tool, or can it become a network?" In the early days of Carta (f/k/a eShares), you could look at it as a tool for managing cap tables, or you could look at it as a network of assets and stakeholders.

The system-of-record network effect is also at heart of why blockchains are interesting. They are, by definition, ledgers that track the relationship between digital assets (money, date, etc) and a wide variety of stakeholders.

With any system of record, the more data and records that the system holds, and the more stakeholder identities that interact with it, the more valuable it gets. It's no surprise that the enterprise ERP systems (eg., SAP, Oracle, Microsoft, Salesforce, etc) that form the systems-of-record for most large companies are extremely highly valued and long-term durable.

Perhaps all of this is obvious. But it has proven to be a helpful frame for us as we continue to consider software applications in a wider variety of contexts. For example, CarbonChain is building a system-of-record around carbon accounting, and Odyssey is building a system-of-record around financing and operations of distributed energy resources in emerging markets.

Becoming a system of record is not easy -- it requires placing oneself at the center of someone else's workflow and digital life. Open source solutions (e.g., blockchains) are well suited to it because bring a high level of transparency and trust. Digitizing an asset type that was previously analog and making it 100x more useful is another way to generate enough momentum to get there.

And with that, I will hit publish, and as I do so, this post will get recorded -- permanently -- in the arweave blockchain which provides the system-of-record datastore for this blog!

Cover Photo by blocks on Unsplash