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Ben’s List for Entrepreneurs W1 – Selected

Finally. It’s 2021 and we’re ready to build outstanding communities and resilient businesses… or are we REALLY ready for this?

I’m genuinely thrilled about this week’s reading list. It will cheer you up and push you towards building communities, raising funds and exiting your business. Maybe? Let’s hack communities, get the right SaaS tools and the financials to become a unicorn. Ok, you’re phoney.

Or maybe not… There will be trillions of individuals after us. The AI stack that powers self-driving vehicles is already stronger than our collective brain. And if you were wondering… YES, it’s more profitable to build a startup out of Silicon Valley. Fuck Miami dude.

I’m gonna get a nice shot of some vegan-friendly drink and then jump over 7 meters like Fosbury. My Google & Arts music will be a home run and I’ll nail it.

What will your 2021 look like?

Book

Biggest takeaway: belonging matters!

Hacking communities is about belonging anywhere and this pursuit of finding that home is the inner journey to your truest self.

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Hacking Communities
Guiding principles and practical insights to anyone willing to start or grow a community. Bring life to any business, cause or physical space. The book includes experience-based frameworks to community building.
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(Speaking of) Community

1. Mapping the Ecosystem of Community Tools

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2. Building Membership-Based Communities with Greg Isenberg and Justin Murphy

Re: Social Capital >> “We’re living through a period of extraordinary cognitive chaos…an utter collapse of centralized, aggregated sense-making abilities.. that’s the real underlying factor that makes these new movements into more private membership communities more profound” – Justin Murphy

3. Community Takes All: The Power of Social+

A social+ company combines the community and network of a social product with a specific category, form factor, or experience.

  • Link: a16z.com/2020/12/07/social-strikes-back-social-plus/
  • Author: D’Arcy Coolican

Startups

It’s all about thinking big, understanding that status comes from impact, and drinking the Kool-Aid.

One newer model of success we are starting to see is what has been called “The Mullet:” a small presence upfront (in SF or other hubs), and a large remote workforce elsewhere.

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SaaS

This should go without saying but David Sacks is here to remind us that “Team products are stickier than Individual products” with one of the main reasons being that “collaboration provides constant opportunities for reactivation.”

In those cases where it makes sense to build the Individual plan first, try to find the use cases for sharing and collaboration as soon as you can. Teams are the ultimate destination.

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Mobility

Hard to tell if this secret AR view was accidentally misfiled in the code or whether Elon Musk wanted his beta-testers to find it and tell the rest of us? Either way it definitely caught my attention as a heads-up of what’s to come from Tesla and/or other self-driving car makers!

Tesla full self-driving code contains secret “augmented reality view”
While digging through the code of their Tesla’s Full Self-Driving feature, this hacker found an augmented reality view of everything the vehicle sees.
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Psychology

According to Richard Fisher “around 100 billion people have lived and died in the past 50,000 years. But they, together with the 7.7 billion people currently alive, are far outweighed by the estimated 6.75 trillion people who will be born over the next 50,000 years, if this century’s birth rate is maintained.”

If we hope to be good ancestors, we need to develop a transcendent ‘legacy mindset’, where we aim to be remembered well by the generations we will never know, by the universal strangers of the future.

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Sports

The Fosbury Flop – or why breaking the norms is the gateway to success!

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cheezburger.com/958890752

Before he springs from the pad like some great rocket lifting off, Dick Fosbury meditates, worries, psyches himself.


Music

Still looking for that perfect present? Why not gift a festive song? Blob Opera is a new machine learning experiment by artist David Li that lets you create your own festive song inspired by Opera on Google Arts & Culture.

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Food in 2021

Cheers to kicking off those adaptogenic, upcycled New Year’s Resolutions of yours in style!

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  • Link: snaxshot.com/2021

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