Power to the Person 人的权利

Status

Creators’ Crazy Month

创作者的疯狂之月

It’s been quite a year for the Passion Economy. Back in October 2019, pre-COVID, Li Jin wrote The Passion Economy and the Future of Work. In it, Li highlights that “Users can now build audiences at scale and turn their passions into livelihoods, whether that’s playing video games or producing video content.”

对于 “激情经济” 来说，这是相当不错的一年。早在 2019 年 10 月，在 covid 之前，李金写了《激情经济与工作的未来》。在这篇文章中，李强调，“用户现在可以大规模地扩大受众群体，将他们的热情转化为生计，无论是玩电子游戏还是制作视频内容。”

Note: We’ll use Passion Economy and Creator Economy interchangeably, but Creator Economy is technically a subset of the Passion Economy that’s more focused on media and entertainment.

注意: 我们将交替使用 “激情经济” 和“创造者经济”，但从技术上讲，“创造者经济”是 “激情经济” 的一个子集，更侧重于媒体和娱乐。

The piece was one of those magical self-fulfilling ones that both names a trend and supercharges it. By naming it, Li gave people license to go out and build, both as individual creators and as companies formed to build the tools to grow the movement. COVID helped, too, with more people stuck at home and facing uncertain job prospects. This newsletter is part of the Passion Economy, and it probably wouldn’t exist without COVID.

这篇文章是那些神奇的自我实现的文章之一，既提到了一种趋势，又给它加了油。通过给它命名，李给了人们走出去建设的许可证，无论是作为个人创造者，还是作为公司成立来建设发展运动的工具。考维德也提供了帮助，因为更多的人被困在家里，面临着不确定的就业前景。这份时事通讯是激情经济的一部分，如果没有 COVID，它可能不会存在。

The Passion Economy just keeps picking up momentum, and it’s reaching a fever pitch. While TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram keep exploding, new entrants are joining the party with breathtaking speed. In the past month alone:

激情经济一直保持着增长的势头，并且达到了一个狂热的高度。当 TikTok、 YouTube 和 Instagram 保持爆炸式增长的时候，新的参与者以惊人的速度加入了这个派对。仅在过去一个月:

Clubhouse raised its Series B at a $1 billion valuation and announced plans to let creators monetize directly from the audience through tips, tickets, or subscriptions. 俱乐部以 10 亿美元的估值提高了其第二轮融资，并宣布计划让创作者通过小费、门票或订阅直接从观众那里赚钱。

Creator finance platform Stir raised its Series A at $100 million (a16z led both Clubhouse and Stir). 创造者财政平台 Stir 提高了其系列 a 在 1 亿美元 (a16z 领导俱乐部和 Stir)。

Substack announced that there are over 500,000 paid subscriptions on the platform, and that the top ten writers collectively make over $15 million. 宣布平台上有超过 50 万的付费订阅，排名前十的作家合计收入超过 1500 万美元。

Twitter acquired newsletter platform Revue. 收购了时事通讯平台 Revue。

YouTuber David Dobrik launched his photo app, Dispo, and it went so viral so quickly that it’s in talks to raise at its own $100 million valuation. (Read Divinations on Dispo). Youtube 用户大卫 · 多布里克推出了他的照片应用程序 Dispo，这款应用程序迅速走红，目前正在洽谈以 1 亿美元的估值进行融资。(阅读关于 Dispo 的预言)。

LinkedIn (LinkedIn!!) is building a service called Marketplaces to compete with Fiverr and Upwork to connect freelancers and hirers. LinkedIn (LinkedIn! !) 正在建立一个名为 Marketplaces 的服务，与 Fiverr 和 Upwork 竞争，将自由职业者和雇员联系起来。

Li unveiled her own $13 million early stage venture fund, Atelier Ventures, to invest in the Passion Economy (and instead of announcing in a major publication, she dropped the news in an interview in Lenny’s Newsletter).

李推出了她自己的 1300 万美元的早期风险投资基金，Atelier Ventures，用于投资 Passion Economy (她没有在一家大型出版物上宣布，而是在 Lenny’s Newsletter 的一次采访中透露了这个消息)。

That’s just the past month, and the list goes on. Given my intersection as both a creator and an investor, I probably get a pitch for a new Passion Economy company at least once a day. In a little over a year, the Passion Economy has gone from an unnamed je ne sais quoi to one of the hottest early stage investment categories.

这还只是过去的一个月，还有很多。鉴于我既是创作者又是投资者的交集，我可能每天至少会有一次为一家新的 Passion Economy 公司推销产品。在一年多一点的时间里，激情经济已经从一个不知名的难以名状的投资领域变成了最热门的早期投资领域之一。

Beneath the flashy headlines, regular people are starting to make great livings as part of the Creator Economy, both those who choose to go solo and those who decide to let the market set the price for their talents. The globalization of the talent marketplace means that more people are making more money doing what they do best.

在华丽的头条新闻之下，作为创造者经济的一部分，普通人正开始创造伟大的生活 —- 无论是那些选择单干的人，还是那些决定让市场为他们的才能定价的人。人才市场的全球化意味着越来越多的人在做他们最擅长的事情，赚更多的钱。

My sister told me that because of global demand from companies that have accepted that remote is here to stay, the salary for top Nigerian engineers has increased by 2-3x in the past month. My friend Dror Poleg would suggest that that’s just the beginning – he writes about the 10x Class, “a whole new layer of professionals that earn incomes that are a level below the biggest earners in their field, but still much higher than what the average employee could earn in the pre-internet era” because of demand for their niche skill in the global marketplace. He thinks of it as gig workers in reverse – where the clients are commoditized and the individuals are the secret sauce. Power to the person.

我姐姐告诉我，由于全球需求的公司已经接受了远程是在这里停留，尼日利亚顶级工程师的薪水在过去一个月增加了 2-3 倍。我的朋友德罗 • 波莱格 (Dror Poleg) 认为，这仅仅是个开始——他在谈到 “10 倍阶层”(10 x Class) 时写道，“这是一个全新的专业人士阶层，他们的收入水平低于所在领域收入最高的人群，但仍远高于前互联网时代普通员工的收入水平”，因为全球市场对他们的利基技能有需求。他把它看作是反向的零工——客户被商品化，而个人则是秘密武器。人的权力。

And all of that is just in the mainstream, Web 2.0 Passion Economy. If you expand the definition to include Web3, things get even more insane. On Thursday, digital artist Mad Dog Jones broke an NFT record by selling $4 million worth of tokenized animations of his Tokyo artwork in 9 minutes on Nifty Gateway. Thousand-person companies would kill for sales like that.

所有这些都是主流的，Web 2.0 激情经济。如果你把定义扩展到 Web3，事情会变得更疯狂。星期四，数码艺术家 Mad Dog jones 打破了 NFT 的记录，他在 9 分钟内在 Nifty Gateway 上卖出了价值 400 万美元的他东京艺术作品的标记动画。千人公司会为这样的销售而疯狂。

Mad Dog Jones Crash + Burn Collection 疯狗 Jones Crash + Burn 系列

More broadly, the NFT and crypto space has been on an absolute heater. Dapper Labs, the company behind NBA TopShot, which I wrote about in The Value Chain of the Open Metaverse, is rumored to be raising $250 million at a valuation north of $2 billion. Bitcoin broke $50k for the first time on Wednesday, and there are now over 100k addresses that hold over $1 million worth of Bitcoin.

更广泛地说，NFT 和加密空间一直处于绝对的加热状态。我在《开放元宇宙的价值链》中提到过的 NBA TopShot 背后的 Dapper Labs 公司，据传将以超过 20 亿美元的估值融资 2.5 亿美元。周三，比特币首次突破 5 万美元，现在有超过 10 万个地址存有价值超过 100 万美元的比特币。

Source: BitInfoCharts 来源: BitInfoCharts

Bitcoin isn’t traditionally grouped with the Passion Economy, but a combination of ownership and fandom has rewarded hundreds of thousands of people with net worths higher than the US median of $121k, and given them career leverage they likely wouldn’t have otherwise had. Power to the person.

传统上，比特币并不被归类为激情经济，但是所有权和粉丝的结合使得成千上万的人获得了高于美国 12.1 万美元中位数的净利润，并且给予了他们职业杠杆，否则他们很可能不会有这样的机会。人的权力。

It seems crazy out there, bubbly, like 2000 or at least 2017 (the last crypto craze) all over again, and we haven’t even talked about Unisocks yet. These are actual, limited edition socks, backed by the $SOCKS token. The current price is $72,242.77. Or this Non-Fungible Pepe that sold on OpenSea for 110.58 ETH ($216k USD). Or the Logan Paul NFT drop that has generated over $3.4 million in one day.

这看起来很疯狂，像 2000 年或者至少是 2017 年 (最后的加密狂潮) 一样，我们甚至还没有谈论过 unislocks。这些是实际的，限量版袜子，由 $SOCKS 令牌支持。现在的价格是 72242.77 美元。或者这个不可替换的 Pepe 在 OpenSea 上以 110.58 ETH (216k 美元)的价格出售。还有洛根 · 保罗的股价下跌，一天之内就创造了 340 万美元的收入。

There are so many more examples. Every time I opened up Twitter this weekend, I saw a new NFT making over $1 million in like an hour. NFTs have gone mainstream, and creators are making bank.

还有很多这样的例子。这个周末每次我开通 Twitter，我都会看到一个新的 NFT 在一个小时内赚了 100 多万美元。已经成为主流，创造者们正在赚钱。

We have YouTube stars launching $100 million photo apps and $3.4 million NFT sales, $2 billion NFT companies, $72k socks, and the world’s largest companies starting to get involved. It’s almost impossible to tell what is real and what is going to blow up. But something is clearly happening.

我们有 YouTube 明星推出的 1 亿美元的照片应用程序和 340 万美元的 NFT 销售，20 亿美元的 NFT 公司，72k 美元的袜子，以及世界上最大的公司开始参与进来。几乎不可能分辨出什么是真实的，什么会爆炸。但是很明显，有些事情正在发生。

We are in the early stages of the Creator Economy and NFTs. They look like toys. Currently, the main beneficiaries of the Passion Economy and NFTs are traditional Creators - artists, writers, entertainers. It’s easy to dismiss the confluence of these threads as a COVID-and-Bitocin-induced bubble waiting to pop. But a much bigger shift is underfoot.

我们正处于造物主经济和非技术型企业的早期阶段。它们看起来像玩具。目前，激情经济和非营利组织的主要受益者是传统的创作者——艺术家、作家、演艺人员。人们很容易把这些线程的合流看作 covid- 和 - bitocin 诱发的等待破裂的泡沫。但一个更大的转变正在脚下。

The Creator Toolkit

创造者工具箱

Today, NFTs almost exclusively back digital art and fashion, and the most popular creator tools are focused on media, art, education, and entertainment. Even the ones that go beyond that are too prescriptive to build trillion-plus dollar solo public companies with. But away from the splashy headline numbers, new tools mean new opportunities for millions of people.

今天，nft 几乎完全支持数字艺术和时尚，最受欢迎的创作工具集中在媒体、艺术、教育和娱乐。即使是那些超过这个标准的公司也太过规范，无法凭借一己之力建立价值超过万亿美元的上市公司。但是，除了那些引人注目的标题数字，新的工具意味着数百万人的新机会。

Many of the Creator Economy companies that have received the most funding and attention are purpose-built for a specific medium, the Creator Economy equivalent of Vertical SaaS.

许多获得最多资金和关注的 “创造者经济” 公司都是为某种特定的媒介——创造者经济相当于垂直 SaaS ——而专门建立的。

TikTok is for short-form mobile video. TikTok 是用于短格式的移动视频。

YouTube is for longer-form video. YouTube 是一个较长的视频网站。

Twitch is for streaming (mainly) video games. Twitch 主要用于流媒体视频游戏。

Instagram is for photos. 是用来拍照的。

Substack and Revue are for newsletters. Substack 和 Revue 是用于新闻通讯的。

OnlyFans is for (mainly) adult content. 只有 fans (主要) 是针对成人内容的。

Teachable and Wes and Gagan’s Startup are for online courses. 和 Wes 以及 Gagan’s Startup 都是在线课程。

Clubhouse is for audio conversations.

俱乐部会所是用来进行音频对话的。

There are also more horizontal companies that support creation or monetization:

还有更多的横向公司支持创造或货币化:

Descript is for audio and video editing. 描述是为音频和视频编辑。

Patreonand Buy Me a Coffee are for subscriptions and tipping. 和请我喝杯咖啡是为了订阅和给小费。

Stripe is for payments. 条纹是用来支付的。

Stir lets creators manage their finances and collaborations. 让创作者管理他们的财务和合作。

Linktreeand Beacons give creators one central home for all of their channels.

Linktreeand Beacons 为创造者的所有频道提供了一个中心家园。

Together, these companies focus on helping creators create, grow, manage, and monetize their audiences. That’s incredibly important. As we’ll discuss, solo builders’ main weapon is their ability to build relationships at scale and distribute their products.

这些公司共同致力于帮助创作者创造、成长、管理和赚钱。这是非常重要的。正如我们将要讨论的，独立制造商的主要武器是他们在规模上建立关系和分销产品的能力。

But it’s also just the beginning. Ben Thompson has said that media companies are the first to adapt to a new paradigm shift because of the relative simplicity of their products. They require very little coordination among parties, just the ability to capture and distribute one person’s thoughts, images, or dance moves.

但这也仅仅是个开始。本 · 汤普森曾经说过，媒体公司是第一个适应新模式转变的，因为他们的产品相对简单。他们需要很少的协调各方，只是能够捕捉和传播一个人的想法，图像，或舞蹈动作。

Take Not Boring, for example. Starting this business meant signing up for Substack, writing in Google Docs, making (beautiful) graphics in Figma, incorporating with Stripe Atlas, setting up a bank account with Mercury, recording and editing podcasts on Descript, releasing them on Anchor, and being loud on Twitter. That’s it.

以《不无聊》为例。开始这项业务意味着注册 Substack，在谷歌文档中写作，在 Figma 制作 (美丽的) 图形，与 Stripe Atlas 合并，在 Mercury 建立一个银行账户，在 Descript 上录制和编辑播客，在 Anchor 上发布播客，在 Twitter 上大声宣传。就是这样。

It’s a ton of work, but it’s not complex. The same can be said for Addison Rae’s TikTok following or Harry Stebbings’ podcast empire. Obviously, from there, it can get more complex. Addison and Harry both monetize in all sorts of interesting ways. But the basics are simple.

这是一大堆工作，但并不复杂。这同样适用于 Addison Rae 的 TikTok 或 Harry Stebbings 的播客帝国。显然，从那里开始，它可以变得更加复杂。艾迪生和哈里都以各种有趣的方式赚钱。但是基本原理很简单。

Other Passion Economy companies, which Nikhil Basu Trivedi (NBT) calls Business-in-a-Box (“BiaB”) companies, let people build small businesses beyond media and entertainment. These include some of the media businesses mentioned above, but expand into the physical world with daycare, grocery shopping, and even trucking.

其他的 Passion Economy 公司，Nikhil Basu Trivedi (NBT) 称为 Business-in-a-Box (“ BiaB”) 公司，让人们在媒体和娱乐之外建立小型企业。这些包括上面提到的一些媒体业务，但是扩展到日托、杂货购物甚至货运等实体世界。

The idea behind these companies is that people don’t need to be gig workers for someone else; they can build their own businesses within a category. Why work for Instacart when you can be your own boss with dumpling?

这些公司背后的想法是，人们不需要成为别人的零工，他们可以在一个类别内建立自己的企业。既然你可以用饺子做自己的老板，为什么还要为 Instacart 工作呢？

These businesses offer incredible freedom, ownership, and flexibility to a new class of digital-first small business owners, and many people have used them to create financial independence or even generational wealth for themselves and their families. Teachable founder Ankur Nagpal tweeted that the top 10 creators on Teachable have collectively made over $100 million!

这些企业为数字优先的新型小企业主提供了难以置信的自由、所有权和灵活性，许多人利用它们为自己和家人创造财务独立甚至代际财富。教学创始人 Ankur Nagpal 在推特上说，《教学》上排名前十的创作者们总共赚了 1 亿美元！

That’s real money, orders of magnitude more than teachers typically make. Individuals are opting out of the traditional path and building something of their own. But for every creator making millions, the platforms on which they operate make billions. That’s fair, that’s how the economy works.

这才是真正的收入，比老师通常挣的数量级还要多。个人选择离开传统的道路，建立自己的东西。但是对于每一个创造者来说，他们运作的平台可以赚取数十亿美元。这很公平，这就是经济运行的方式。

What we’re after in this thought exercise, though, aren’t full-fledged businesses-in-a-box solutions, but a new set of primitives that individuals can mix and match and build on top of to create new products and massive businesses.

然而，我们在这个思考练习中所追求的，并不是一个成熟的盒子里的企业解决方案，而是一套新的原语，个人可以混合、匹配并在此基础上创建新产品和大规模业务。

We want to see individuals compete with the platforms themselves, create entirely new innovations, and fundamentally alter the nature of the firm.

我们希望看到个人与平台本身竞争，创造全新的创新，并从根本上改变企业的性质。

Coase and the Nature of the Firm

科斯与企业的本质

In 1937, economist Ronald Coase wrote a relatively short paper that would ultimately win him the Nobel Prize: The Nature of the Firm. That paper remains fundamental to the way we think about why firms, or companies, exist, when they should or should not, and how big they should be.

1937 年，经济学家罗纳德 · 科斯写了一篇相对较短的论文，最终为他赢得了诺贝尔奖: 《企业的本质》。这篇论文仍然是我们思考为什么企业或公司存在的基础，它们应该存在还是不应该存在，以及它们应该有多大。

In the paper, Coase wrestled with the apparent contradiction between the idea that free markets, or economic systems, should be able to direct resources to the right places without central planning, by using the price mechanism alone. Supply and demand curves and all that. The prevailing economic theory pre-Coase said that because markets are efficient, it should always be cheaper to contract out work than to build a firm. But that was very clearly not happening in practice.

在论文中，科斯解决了一个明显的矛盾，即自由市场或经济体系应该能够在没有中央计划的情况下，仅仅通过使用价格机制，将资源引导到正确的地方。供给和需求曲线等等。科斯之前流行的经济学理论认为，由于市场是有效率的，外包工作总是比建立一家公司要便宜。但很明显，这种情况在实践中并没有发生。

Why then, Coase wondered, do firms exist instead of a multitude of self-employed people who contract with each other on an as-needed basis? What causes an entrepreneur to start hiring people instead of contracting?

那么，科斯想知道，为什么企业会存在，而不是大量的个体经营者，他们根据需要彼此签订合同？是什么原因促使企业家开始雇佣员工而不是签订合同？

Coase uncovered two competing forces: transaction costs lead to the creation of the firm, and overhead and bureaucracy costs limit the firm’s size.

科斯揭示了两种相互竞争的力量: 交易成本导致了公司的创立，管理成本和官僚成本限制了公司的规模。

Transaction costs like search and information costs, bargaining costs, and keeping and enforcing trade secrets meant that the cost of obtaining a good or service is higher than just the price. That’s why entrepreneurs hire people: employing a trusted CMO, for example, meant that the entrepreneur didn’t need to start each marketing campaign with a recruiting process, information dumps, and goal-setting, and didn’t need to worry that the marketer would bring all of her company’s information and goals to a competitor at the end of the campaign.

像搜索和信息成本、讨价还价成本、保守和执行商业秘密等交易成本意味着获得商品或服务的成本要高于价格。这就是为什么企业家会雇人: 例如，雇佣一个值得信赖的 CMO，意味着企业家不需要在每个营销活动中都开始一个招聘过程、信息转储和目标设定，也不需要担心营销人员会在活动结束时把公司的所有信息和目标带给竞争对手。

Overhead and bureaucracy costs include wasted organizational time – think of all of recurring meetings you have on your calendar – and the propensity for an overwhelmed manager to make mistakes in resource allocation.

管理费用和官僚成本包括浪费的组织时间 —- 想想你日历上所有重复出现的会议 —- 以及不知所措的经理在资源分配上犯错的倾向。

Those two sets of costs are in a constant, dynamic tension and determine the ideal size for a firm at a given time. So if we’re thinking through how to get a firm size back down to one, and to let the free market do it’s thing, what we’re looking for is a dramatic decrease in transaction costs, a dramatic increase in overhead and bureaucracy costs, or both combined.

这两组成本是在一个恒定的，动态的张力和确定的理想规模为一个公司在一定的时间。因此，如果我们正在考虑如何让一个公司的规模缩小到一个，并让自由市场做它的事情，我们要寻找的是大幅减少交易成本，大幅增加管理费用和官僚成本，或两者兼而有之。

The New Nature of the Firm

企业的新性质

The limit to the size of the firm is set where its costs of organizing a transaction become equal to the cost of carrying it out through the market.当组织交易的成本与通过市场进行交易的成本相等时，就设定了公司规模的限制。– Ronald Coase文 / Ronald Coase

Thanks to new tools and technologies, we are nearing the point at which the costs of carrying out a transaction through the market are getting so low that firms are less necessary.

由于有了新的工具和技术，我们正在接近这样一个临界点: 通过市场进行交易的成本变得如此之低，企业不再那么必要。

Recall that Coase highlights three main types of transaction costs: search and information costs, bargaining costs, and keeping and enforcing trade secrets. We are on the verge of driving those costs low enough to let market mechanics rule the day in practice and not just in economics textbooks. There are three main drivers:

回忆一下，科斯强调了三种主要的交易成本: 搜索和信息成本、谈判成本以及保守和执行商业秘密。我们即将把这些成本压低到足以让市场机制在实践中 (而不仅仅是在经济学教科书中) 占据主导地位。有三个主要驱动因素:

Better Software Primitives 更好的软件原语

Cryptographic Stigmergy (lol, I’ll explain) and DeFi 加密 stingmergy (lol，我将解释) 和 DeFi

NFTs 加密艺术品

Those three categories are the building blocks of the expanding Solo Corporation Toolkit.

这三个类别是扩展的 Solo 公司工具包的基石。

Better Software Primitives

更好的软件原语

The promise of modern business software is that it allows companies to do more, better, with fewer people than was previously possible. Take API-first businesses, for example. In APIs All the Way Down, I wrote:

现代商业软件的前景是，它允许公司用比以前更少的人做更多、更好的事情。以 api 优先业务为例。在 api All the Way Down 中，我写道:

When a company chooses to plug in a third-party API, it’s essentially deciding to hire that entire company to handle a whole function within its business. Imagine copying in some code and getting the Collison brothers to run your Finance team.当一家公司选择插入第三方 API 时，实际上是决定雇佣整个公司来处理其业务中的整个功能。想象一下，在一些代码中进行复制，并让 Collison 兄弟来运行您的金融团队。

An increasing number of the things that firms hired whole teams of people to do are now achievable with a few lines of code. This table from Canvas Ventures’ Grace Isford (to which I’ve added a few new ones) captures the breadth of functions now possible via APIs.

越来越多的公司雇佣整个团队去做的事情现在只需要几行代码就可以实现。这个表格来自 Canvas Ventures 的 Grace Isford (我在其中添加了一些新的) ，它捕捉到了现在可以通过 api 实现的函数的广度。

APIs dramatically reduce transaction costs. Assuming you have a clear understanding of what you need from an API, that you go with their standard pricing, and that you trust them to keep your data secure, plugging in APIs eliminate each of the categories of transaction costs that Coase highlights.

Api 极大地降低了交易成本。假设你清楚地知道你需要从一个 API 中得到什么，你会按照他们的标准定价，并且你相信他们会保证你的数据安全，插入 API 消除了科斯强调的每一类交易成本。

In addition to APIs, well-funded startups and public companies are building increasingly sophisticated tools with increasingly simple interfaces, making it possible for one person to do in minutes what previously would have taken teams of people months to do. As a stark example, think about the rooms full of typists replaced by a combination of Google Docs or Descript. Copy AI can even write professional quality marketing copy using rough human input.

除了 api 之外，资金充足的初创公司和上市公司正在开发越来越复杂的工具，其界面也越来越简单，这使得一个人在几分钟内就能完成以前需要几个月才能完成的工作成为可能。作为一个鲜明的例子，想想那些满是打字员的房间被谷歌文档或描述文档的组合所取代。复制 AI 甚至可以写专业质量的营销副本使用粗略的人工输入。

For less technical people, no-code tools, like Webflow, Zapier, Bubble, Airtable, and countless new entrants enable drag-and-drop building of increasingly complex products. Even large companies with full teams of engineers are beginning to use no-or-low-code tools for certain tasks.

对于技术水平较低的人来说，无代码工具，如 Webflow、 Zapier、 Bubble、 Airtable 和无数新进入者，使得拖放式构建日益复杂的产品成为可能。甚至拥有完整工程师团队的大公司也开始在某些任务中使用无代码或低代码的工具。

I am dramatically oversimplifying how easy it is to use, let alone combine, all of these tools. It’s taken me weeks to build a website on Webflow, and I still don’t know how to do simple addition in Airtable. We’re not there yet. I’m also skipping huge categories.

我戏剧性地过分简化了所有这些工具的使用，更不用说组合。我花了几个星期的时间才在 Webflow 上建立了一个网站，但是我仍然不知道如何在 Airtable 做简单的加法。我们还没到那一步。我还跳过了很多类别。

My broader point, though, is that while innovation over the past decade has felt stagnant, a lot of work has been done on the building blocks that will allow fewer (and eventually just one) people to build more complex products and businesses with powerful software and machine learning. These primitives will continue to improve, too, and new products will be built that makes it easier to combine and manage all of them, decreasing the overhead and bureaucracy costs of building a company with software.

不过，我更广泛的观点是，尽管过去 10 年的创新感觉停滞不前，但许多工作已经完成，这些工作将使更少 (最终只有一个) 的人能够利用强大的软件和机器学习构建更复杂的产品和业务。这些原语也将继续改进，新的产品将更容易地组合和管理所有这些原语，减少使用软件建立公司的开销和官僚主义成本。

Instead of AI replacing humans, I’m a big believer that it will give individuals superpowers that let them compete with large companies. As this software becomes more frictionless, the overhead and bureaucracy costs of meetings and management will become more obvious and unnecessary.

我坚信人工智能不会取代人类，而是会赋予个人超能力，让他们能够与大公司竞争。随着这个软件变得越来越没有摩擦，会议和管理的开销和官僚成本将变得越来越明显和不必要。

At the same time, the blockchain is opening up new possibilities for lowering transaction costs when humans do interact with each other to build something outside the traditional structure of a firm.

与此同时，区块链开辟了新的可能性，降低交易成本时，人类互动，以建立一些传统的结构以外的公司。

Cryptographic Stigmergy and DeFi

密码学的 Stigmergy 和 DeFi

In the eighty years since Coase wrote his paper, price and planning have stood as the two ways to organize economic activity. In his paper The Return of ‘The Nature of he Firm’: The Role of the Blockchain, independent scholar Prateek Gohra argues for a third, decidedly less catchy entrant: cryptographic stigmergy. What does that mean?

在科斯写这篇论文的八十年里，价格和计划一直是组织经济活动的两种方式。独立学者 Prateek Gohra 在他的论文《企业本质的回归: 区块链的作用》中提出了第三个明显不那么吸引人的参与者: 密码技术。这是什么意思？

Stigmergy is the idea that a large group of individuals can interact through identifiable changes in their environment; when that environment is reliably reified in a blockchain, we have cryptographic stigmergy.是一个想法，一大群人可以通过可识别的变化，在他们的环境; 当环境是可靠的具体化在一个区块链，我们有密码 stinggy。

Clearer now? No? OK. Gohra is saying that the blockchain offers a third option for organizing economic activity, somewhere between a pure price mechanism and a centrally-planned firm. I summarized further, and then I deleted it, because it’s really dry.

现在清楚了吗？不是吗？好的。Gohra 说区块链提供了组织经济活动的第三种选择，介于纯粹的价格机制和中央计划的公司之间。我进一步总结，然后删除它，因为它真的很干。

Instead, let’s turn to _DeFi + Creators = 🚀_by Tal Shachar and Jonathan Glick, which gets at the same idea in a less “economics paper” way. The two argue that:

相反，让我们看看 DeFi + Creators = Tal Shachar 和 Jonathan Glick 的作品，它们以一种不那么 “经济学论文” 的方式获得了同样的想法。两人辩称:

By reducing transaction costs, improving information asymmetries and better aligning incentives, decentralized finance (DeFi) will unlock the creator economy. In turn, popular creators and social influencers will push crypto deeper into the mainstream. The effects of this combination will be far-reaching and unpredictable.通过降低交易成本、改善信息不对称和更好地调整激励机制，分散金融 (DeFi) 将解锁创造者经济。反过来，受欢迎的创造者和社会影响者将把加密技术推向主流。这种结合的影响将是深远和不可预测的。

The essay focuses on the idea that any product launch that doesn’t include influencers is likely to fail, but that cash and equity don’t properly align the incentives between influencers and companies. Introducing DeFi, they argue, will properly reward creators and influencers for the value that they provide to a project. That’s an interesting idea, but it relies on the limited definition of Creator that we use today. Where it gets really compelling is when they say:

这篇文章的重点在于，任何不包括影响者的产品发布都有可能失败，但是现金和股权不能恰当地调整影响者和公司之间的激励机制。他们认为，引入 DeFi 将适当地奖励那些为项目提供价值的创造者和有影响力的人。这是一个有趣的想法，但它依赖于我们今天使用的创造者的有限定义。真正引人注目的是他们说:

As the market for creators grows, many workers might become more like project nomads than full-time employees. Swarms of talent, community and capital already flock from project to project, and this has been true about open source for decades. Perhaps over time, as these projects become better funded and proven successful, the corporate world itself will be ‘eaten’ or at least transformed by this capital-charged collab culture. Companies and projects might become more like clouds, larger than ever before but with vaguer outlines, eroding the boundaries between employees, consultants, customers and investors.随着创作者市场的增长，许多工人可能会变得更像项目游牧民，而不是全职员工。大量的人才、社区和资本已经从一个项目涌向另一个项目，这在开源领域已经存在了几十年。也许随着时间的推移，随着这些项目获得更好的资金支持并被证明是成功的，企业界本身将会被这种充满资本的共同实验室文化 “吃掉”，或者至少会发生转变。公司和项目可能变得更像云，比以往任何时候都大，但轮廓更模糊，侵蚀了雇员、咨询顾问、客户和投资者之间的界限。

DeFi, through cryptographic stigmergy, allows talent and contributors to flow as easily from project-to-project as money does today. This is part of the idea behind Fairmint, which Sari Azout and I wrote about in November. Better align financial incentives, and you can attract the right people to your project at the right time. This reduces transaction costs and lets project leaders and workers get market price, and is an important step on the path towards the Solo Corporation, one with just one full-time employee orbited by a constellation of people and tools that float in and out as needed.

DeFi 通过加密技术，允许人才和贡献者像今天的金钱一样轻松地从一个项目流向另一个项目。这是我和 Sari Azout 在 11 月写的 Fairmint 背后的部分想法。更好地调整财政激励，你就能在合适的时间吸引合适的人加入你的项目。这降低了交易成本，让项目负责人和工人获得了市场价格，是通往 Solo Corporation 的重要一步。 Solo Corporation 只有一名全职员工，由一群人和工具组成，根据需要进进出出。

If DeFi and cryptographic stigmergy are the forces that allow Creators to snap people and capital into place when needed, lowering search, information, and bargaining costs, then NFTs are the ones that handle trade secrets, and allow Creators to share and remix IP seamlessly.

如果 DeFi 和加密技术是让创作者在需要的时候把人和资本投入到合适的地方的力量，降低搜索、信息和讨价还价的成本，那么 nft 就是那些处理商业秘密的，并且允许创作者无缝地分享和混合 IP。

NFTs

NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, are cryptographic tokens that prove authenticity, ownership, and scarcity of digital assets.

Nft，或者说不可替换的令牌，是用来证明数字资产的真实性、所有权和稀缺性的加密令牌。

If you want to go deeper down the rabbit hole, you should check out The Value Chain of the Open Metaverse, which I wrote in January, or Jesse Walden’s NFTs Make the Internet Ownable.

如果你想更深入地了解这个兔子洞，你应该看看我在一月份写的《开放元宇宙的价值链》，或者杰西 · 沃尔顿的《让互联网可以拥有》。

They are the ultimate manifestation of “the next big thing will start out looking like a toy.” The NFT projects attracting the most attention currently really do look like digital toys. NBA TopShot lets people own highlights of NBA games. Logan Paul is giving away Pokemon cards. @optimist is taking over my twitter feed with what can best be described as a gif of cabbage. Beeple’s multi-million dollar digital art collection features a disturbing number of illustrations of a naked Donald Trump.

它们是 “下一个大事件将开始看起来像一个玩具” 的终极体现目前吸引最多关注的 NFT 项目看起来确实像数字玩具。让人们拥有 NBA 比赛的精彩部分。Logan Paul 正在分发口袋妖怪卡片。@ 乐观主义者正在用一种可以用 “卷心菜” 来形容的东西，接管我的推特 feed。毕普价值数百万美元的数字艺术收藏品中有大量唐纳德 · 特朗普裸体的插图，令人不安。

While provable ownership of digital art and fashion is a total game changer in its own right, and should have huge implications for the Metaverse, this first application masks a ton of powerful applications beyond the worlds of art and entertainment. NFTs and smart contracts have the potential to change the way that we manage Intellectual Property (“IP”).

虽然数字艺术和时尚的可证明所有权本身就是一个彻底的游戏规则改变者，并且应该对 Metaverse 有巨大的影响，这第一个应用程序掩盖了大量超越艺术和娱乐领域的强大应用程序。Nft 和智能合同有可能改变我们管理知识产权的方式。

In The Value Chain of the Open Metaverse, I wrote about a digital fashion company called DIGITALAX that “is based on a parent-child structure, in which the Parent NFT - the final piece - is composed of child NFTs representing all of the materials, patterns, and colors that go into the construction of the garment.” The NFTs that are all over your Twitter feed today are based on the ERC721 asset standard – one token for one final item – but DIGITALAX also uses the ERC1155 standard, used for semi-fungible tokens that represent a category of things without concern for exactly which one is used. In DIGITALAX’s case, a final digital dress might be backed by an ERC721 token, but different color patterns or materials would be backed by ERC1155 tokens, which would reward their creators every time the pattern or material is used.

在《开放元宇宙的价值链》一书中，我写到了一家名为 DIGITALAX 的数字时尚公司，它 “基于父子结构，其中父母 NFT ——最后一块——是由代表所有材料、图案和颜色的子 NFT 组成的，这些材料、图案和颜色构成了服装的结构。” 如今，你的 Twitter feed 上到处都是基于 ERC721 资产标准的 nft ——最后一个项目的一个标记——但是 DIGITALAX 也使用 ERC1155 标准，用于半可替换的标记，这些标记代表一类事物，不需要考虑到底使用哪一个标记。在 DIGITALAX 的案例中，最终的数码礼服可能由 ERC721 标记支持，但不同的颜色模式或材料将由 ERC1155 标记支持，这将奖励它们的创造者每次使用模式或材料。

This same concept could be applied to all sorts of things for which we rely on the blunt instrument of intellectual property law today, giving digital assets’ original creators financial upside whenever their work is used instead of the right to sue, and giving new creators the ability to use a wider range of off-the-shelf inputs in their products.

同样的概念也适用于我们今天依赖于知识产权法这一生硬工具的所有事情，只要数字资产的原创者的作品被使用，而不是有权起诉，他们就能获得金钱上的好处，并且让新的创造者能够在他们的产品中使用更广泛的现成投入。

Here are a few concrete examples:

以下是一些具体的例子:

Music. ERC721-backed songs made up of ERC1155-backed choruses, verses, beats, and hooks, which can be used to make literal remixes that reward the original creators automatically. 音乐。Erc721 支持的歌曲由 erc1155 支持的合唱、诗歌、节拍和钩子组成，可以用来进行文字重组，自动地奖励原创者。

Research. Today, the success of a research paper is measured by the number and quality of citations. What if, instead, the research paper was backed by an NFT that made it free to use for other academic research, but that paid the researcher out any time it was used for commercial purposes. 研究。今天，一篇研究论文的成功是通过引用的数量和质量来衡量的。如果研究论文得到了 NFT 的支持，可以免费用于其他学术研究，但研究人员只要将论文用于商业目的，就可以获得报酬，那该怎么办。

Code. Instead of pure open source code, what if code blocks were backed by NFTs that allowed remixing and improvement, but paid out the code’s original author whenever it was used in new, commercial code. 代码。代替纯粹的开源代码，如果代码块由可以进行重新混合和改进的 nft 支持，但是只要在新的商业代码中使用代码，就支付代码原作者的费用，会怎么样。

Stock Images. Photos or illustrations used in website design or marketing materials could pay the original creator.

在网站设计或营销材料中使用的照片或插图可以支付原创者的费用。

The possibilities are endless, but making IP more flexible and remixable unleashes benefits far beyond owning a clip of your favorite NBA star’s best dunk. NFTs can help build the Creator Economy’s Middle Class by rewarding original creators every time their work is used, freeing their earning power from labor, and can lower transaction costs for Solo Corporations who want to freely use the best inputs available to build trillion-plus dollar public companies.

可能性是无穷无尽的，但使 IP 更加灵活和可重组释放的好处远远超过拥有一个剪辑你最喜欢的 NBA 球星的最好的扣篮。NFTs 可以帮助建立创造者经济的中产阶级，方法是每次使用原创者的作品时奖励他们，使他们从劳动力中解放出赚钱的能力，并且可以降低那些想要自由使用最好的投入来建立超过一万亿美元的上市公司的独立公司的交易成本。

Taken together, better software primitives, cryptographic stigmergy and DeFi, and NFTs have the ability to completely redefine and expand what being a Creator means. But no matter which definition you’re using – from YouTube star to newsletter writer to Creator Jeff Bezos – the one thing that remains crucially important is the influence of the individual.

总的来说，更好的软件原语、密码学的 stigmergy 和 DeFi 以及 nft 有能力完全重新定义和扩展作为一个 Creator 意味着什么。但是无论你用的是哪种定义 —- 从 YouTube 明星到新闻稿作者再到创作者杰夫 · 贝索斯 —- 唯一至关重要的是个人的影响力。

The Age of Individual Influence

个人影响力的时代

The reason that the Creator Economy is a thing in the first place is simple: people like people. Over the weekend, I had one of my most viral tweets ever:

造物主经济之所以是一个东西，原因很简单: 人们喜欢人。这个周末，我收到了一条有史以来最火爆的推文:

It sounds like a high kid thing to say, but it gets at a larger point, which Rodrigo Sanchez-Rios pointed out in the replies: “People follow people, not companies.”

这听起来像一个高年级的孩子说的事情，但它得到了一个更大的点，这是罗德里戈桑切斯 - 里奥斯指出的答复: “人们跟随人，而不是公司。”

At the same price and quality, we would much rather buy a loaf of bread from the baker next door than from the multinational conglomerate. We’d (I hope!) rather get business analysis from our favorite Substack writer than from an article by a faceless person in Harvard Business Review. We support companies whose CEOs we know, trust, and are inspired by more than those led by faceless and generic professional CEOs.

同样的价格和质量，我们宁愿从隔壁面包店买一块面包，也不愿从跨国集团那里买。我们会 (我希望!) 而不是从我们最喜欢的 Substack 作家那里获得商业分析，而不是从《哈佛商业评论》上一个不知名的人的文章中获得。我们支持那些我们认识、信任并受到比那些不知名的普通职业 ceo 更多的激励的公司。

In Business is the New Sports, all the way back in June, I wrote, “CEOs’ direct connections with fans humanize them and their businesses in a way that wasn’t possible before. It makes us more likely to root for them.” Since then, Elon Musk has memed himself into the richest person in the world by building a ravenously loyal base of Elon Musk, and by extension, Tesla, supporters.

在《商业就是新体育》一书中，我写道，早在六月份，“ceo 们与粉丝的直接联系使他们和他们的业务人性化，这在以前是不可能的。这让我们更有可能支持他们。” 从那时起，埃隆 · 马斯克通过建立一个贪婪忠诚的 Elon Musk 基地，以及特斯拉的支持者，把自己塑造成了世界上最富有的人。

The only thing better than rooting for companies whose CEOs we admire is rooting for individuals who are themselves the company. In DeFi + Creators = 🚀, Shachar and Glick put it well:

唯一比支持那些我们钦佩的首席执行官的公司更好的事情是支持那些本身就是公司的个人。在 DeFi + Creators = 中，沙查尔和格里克说得很好:

Like creator fandom today, every ‘company’ or project will become more like a tribe, driven and defined by the stories and symbols linking its members together, led by those who best weave its narrative.就像今天的创作狂一样，每一个公司或项目都会变得更像一个部落，由那些将其成员联系在一起的故事和符号驱动和定义，由那些最好地编织其叙事的人领导。

In a world of abundance, we want to follow the people we trust. The Creator Economy to date has unleashed a wave of people who are world-class storytellers, authentic, and relatable. The next step is for us to not just turn to these people for entertainment and education, but for an ever-larger number of things that we want to accomplish and achieve.

在一个富足的世界里，我们希望追随我们信任的人。到目前为止，创造者经济已经释放了一波世界级的故事讲述者，真实的，和相关的人。下一步，我们不仅要求助于这些人来获得娱乐和教育，还要求助于越来越多我们想要完成和实现的事情。

As the costs to launch full-scale businesses come down, supported by new software and crypto tools, individuals with influence will amass increasing power.

由于新软件和加密工具的支持，开展全面业务的成本下降，有影响力的个人将积累越来越大的权力。

Today, this is happening across Substack, TikTok, YouTube, podcasts, Twitter, Teachable, Twitch, Clubhouse, and a growing number of Creator Economy platforms. It’s already beginning to happen in finance, too.

今天，这种情况正在 Substack、 TikTok、 YouTube、 podcasts、 Twitter、 teakable、 Twitch、 Clubhouse 以及越来越多的 Creator Economy 平台上发生。金融业也已经开始出现这种情况。

NBT wrote about this idea in The Rise of the Solo Capitalists in July. Instead of working for large VC funds, individuals like Lachy Groom, Josh Buckley, Elad Gil, Shana Fisher, and now Li Jin, are raising their own funds, backed by their own identities, and beating out established funds to win some of the most competitive deals in venture. Everyone read Elad Gil’s High Growth Handbook or Li’s pieces on the Passion Economy, and they want to have those people, not some company with a faceless blog, on their cap table. The Not Boring Syndicate is a (very small) testament to the fact that companies want to work with people who can help tell their stories.

NBT 在 7 月份的《单独资本家的崛起》中写到了这个想法。与其为大型风投基金工作，像拉奇格鲁姆，乔什巴克利，伊拉德吉尔，沙娜费舍尔，现在李金这样的个人，正在筹集他们自己的资金，由他们自己的身份支持，并击败成熟的基金赢得一些最具竞争力的交易。每个人都读过埃拉德 · 吉尔的《高增长手册》或者李的关于激情经济的文章，他们希望这些人，而不是那些没有个性的博客的公司，出现在他们的帽子桌上。不无聊的辛迪加是一个 (非常小的) 证明了这样一个事实，即公司希望与能够帮助讲述他们故事的人合作。

The same transformation is happening to public markets investing, as well. SPACs are a manifestation of the idea that individual sponsors hold as much sway as investment banks. Public and CommonStock allow people to follow other people whose investing acumen they trust, and Composer (NB portfolio company) is going to take that a step further, by making it easy to subscribe to your favorite individual investors’ strategies.

公开市场投资也在发生同样的转变。个人赞助商和投资银行一样有影响力，spcs 就是这种想法的体现。上市公司和 CommonStock 允许人们关注那些他们信任的投资者，而且 Composer (NB 投资组合公司) 将会更进一步，通过订阅你最喜欢的个人投资者的策略。

Across media, entertainment, education, ecommerce, and now finance, the power is shifting to individuals. One person, backed by improving tools and their own personal influence, can genuinely compete with established institutions for eyeballs and dollars. Converting individual influence and existing social channels into sales gives Solo Corporations a huge advantage in customer acquisition, particularly when trusted creators form collectives and experiment with new ways of sharing upside with each other and with supporters.

在媒体、娱乐、教育、电子商务，以及现在的金融领域，权力正在向个人转移。一个人，在改进工具和个人影响力的支持下，可以真正与现有机构竞争眼球和金钱。将个人影响力和现有的社交渠道转化为销售渠道，让 Solo Corporations 在获取客户方面拥有巨大的优势，尤其是当可信赖的创造者形成集体，并尝试新的方式与彼此和支持者分享优势时。

While the idea of a trillion-dollar public Solo Corporation seems crazy from where we sit today, it’s inevitable. Genies don’t go back in bottles. And although the Creator Economy and NFTs seem innocuous and unthreatening to established companies today, they portend the next big thing. It may happen in the next decade, it may take until 2071, but it’s the way the world is heading.

尽管从我们今天所处的位置来看，上万亿美元上市的 Solo 公司的想法似乎有些疯狂，但这是不可避免的。精灵不会回到瓶子里。尽管创造者经济和非技术型企业今天看起来似乎无伤大雅，对老牌企业没有威胁，但它们预示着下一个大事件。这可能发生在下一个十年，可能要到 2071 年，但这是世界正在走的路。

All of that said, just because it will be possible doesn’t mean that everybody is going to go start Solo Corporations.

所有这些都表明，仅仅因为它是可能的，并不意味着每个人都会去创建独立公司。

For one, it’s really hard. In The Innovators, Walter Isaacson is adamant about the fact that throughout history, many people have tried to innovate alone and failed. I’m personally a huge believer in Scenius, the idea that the right groups in the right places at the right times are the ones that create world-changing innovation. Certainly, stigmergy and community can solve some of this; the crypto community is strong, and many within it are like teammates, even if none of them are employed by a company or co-founders.

首先，这真的很难。在《创新者》一书中，沃尔特 · 艾萨克森坚持认为，纵观历史，许多人尝试过独自创新，但都失败了。我个人是 Scenius 的忠实拥护者，认为正确的团体在正确的时间出现在正确的地点，才能创造出改变世界的创新。当然，stigmergy 和社区可以解决其中的一些问题; 加密社区很强大，其中许多人就像队友，即使他们没有一个受雇于公司或联合创始人。

Plus, working with the right team, when everything is humming, is incredibly fun, and co-founders that complement each others’ skillsets are a powerful force. There’s a reason that Y Combinator strongly prefers companies with co-founders.

另外，在一切都井井有条的情况下，与合适的团队一起工作是非常有趣的，而且共同创始人之间相互补充各自的技能是一种强大的力量。Y Combinator 强烈偏爱有联合创始人的公司是有原因的。

Most likely, we’ll see a trillion-plus dollar public company with two-or-three full time partners before we see the public Solo Corporation. A team comprised of a technical genius, a brilliant designer, and a master storyteller would be a hard thing to beat. Maybe that’s the magic of Dispo.

最有可能的情况是，在我们看到 Solo 公司上市之前，我们将看到一家超过万亿美元的上市公司拥有两到三个全职合作伙伴。一个由一个技术天才、一个杰出的设计师和一个讲故事的大师组成的团队是很难被击败的。也许这就是 Dispo 的魔力。

But whether very small teams with enormous impacts, or genuine Solo Corporations, the important thing is that the choice will be ours.

但是，无论是具有巨大影响力的小团队，还是真正的独立企业，重要的是，选择权在我们手中。

Power to the person.

人的权力。

Thanks to Dror, Ben, and Dan for editing!

感谢 Dror，Ben 和 Dan 的编辑！

Thanks for reading, and see you on Thursday,

感谢阅读周四见,

Packy https://www.notboring.co/p/power-to-the-person