Govind Mohan 92:43 All right, everybody, welcome back. 92:45 Did you have a good lunch? 92:47 Good lunch, yes. 92:47 Good food, eh? 92:50 Canadian, you know. 92:51 Thank you very much for coming in this afternoon. 92:54 So this afternoon track has a bunch of sort of different things going on, as I think you've seen. 93:01 But we're going to let Gov kick off for us. 93:05 And yeah, I guess I probably— so I'm Jackaholic. 93:08 If I haven't met you before, I've met most of you, I think, before from Protocol to Publisher. 93:13 And yeah, less me and more him, so I'll let you go. 93:16 All righty. Speaker B 93:16 Take it away. 93:18 So I think the— I asked Ted very last minute to change the description of the talk, and I didn't make it. 93:25 I don't blame him. 93:26 He's a trans-dimensional being, so. 93:29 The talk is actually about what the future of startups looks like in the world of open data. 93:34 Not quite so much about— initially it was about the experience I had working on a product with lexicons that I didn't make a single original lexicon, and I was happy about that. 93:44 That was a great thing. 93:45 But then it kind of expanded more, especially when I started talking to the community a lot more. 93:52 And then there's sort of a bigger issue here about the computer kill mentality that's there in conventional tech startups in the tech world. 93:59 And 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. 94:06 So I want to talk about that a little bit. 94:08 So yeah, let's get started. 94:11 Let's dive into a little bit of the old world, like what the world looked like, good old Microsoft. 94:17 So Microsoft kind of kicked things off. 94:18 I mean, there's obviously many more stories of how there's this crazy competition outside of the tech world. 94:25 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 Microsoft with their kind of cutthroat, we must dominate mentality. 94:35 They kind of dominated the market for operating systems in the first place, but on top of that, this new thing called the internet came out. 94:43 And they were like, we got to get in on that. 94:46 So Netscape at the time was dominating the space with the internet browser Netscape Navigator. 94:54 I think Mike McHugh is somewhere in this sphere, so I'm glad he's not here because I hope I get all the details right. 95:02 But yeah, Microsoft didn't quite like that. 95:05 And they were like, we got to get ourselves in there fast. 95:09 So what they did was they noticed that everyone was using open standards. 95:13 And that's a way for them to kind of put themselves in there. 95:15 Everyone's kind of agreeing that we got to use these standards to build on the internet. 95:20 So then they say, yeah, we're going to come in. 95:21 We're going to embrace your standards. 95:23 We're going to make sure that we want to give the users the best. 95:29 Even when some of that is originated elsewhere, like from people contributing to the ecosystem. 95:34 And then the next thing they do is they extend it, being like, oh, we're not going to hold back our users for waiting for these slow-moving organizations and standards bodies. 95:42 We're going to have to move fast and do some of the things our own way. 95:47 And the well-being of those few people who aren't our users is understandable, but also not a high priority. 95:54 And then eventually that goes to extinguish, where They did this with ActiveX and Internet Explorer extensions to kind of dominate the market share and kind of make sure that they are the only ones who kind of stay in there. 96:08 So the rationale for that is like, why should we expend effort towards keeping competitors viable? 96:13 Why shouldn't we actively help potential customers join us? 96:15 Why do we have to care anymore? 96:17 So suddenly the same standards that they were embracing, they have kind of weaponized that to kind of keep all the competitors out. 96:24 And, you know, of course they can also just tell all the PC manufacturers they're working with, if you work with Netscape, we're going to stop supplying you. 96:32 So that's another way to just kill your competitors. 96:35 So it's kind of crazy how Netscape was literally 90% in '95, in 1995, and in the span of 7 years, it flipped completely to 5%, you know? 96:46 And Internet Explorer took over because of these sort of practices. 96:52 AOL acquires Netscape by the end of this, so they kind of get a nice cushy exit. 96:58 Okay, a bunch of people have had a chance to kind of dunk on the Zuck. 97:03 It's my turn, okay? 97:04 So this is the thing. 97:06 He spent years shouting domination at the end of Facebook. 97:09 That's so weird. 97:10 Imagine doing that at the end of a meeting, being like, domination! 97:12 What? 97:13 What a strange guy. 97:17 This is another thing that the guy, the Zuck, is capable of. 97:22 He was working with Harvard to do the Facebook, but he's just giving out the data to other people. 97:27 That's the kind of person that kind of comes up with this competition attitude. 97:31 I'm dunking on Zuck for sure, but there's a sort of domination attitude, which is an abstraction that I'm trying to point towards here. 97:38 And to ground it more in sort of the same story as Microsoft from earlier. 97:42 So we're all familiar with Snap and we kind of lived through this. 97:45 I was actively using Snap as a teenager at that point. 97:49 And what was going on behind the scenes at that point was in 2012 Facebook acquired Instagram for $1 billion. 97:59 And I think within a year they wanted to acquire Snapchat because Snapchat was like this hot new thing. 98:05 All the kids were using it. 98:06 They wanted to grab those little kids. 98:10 In a probably weird way. 98:12 But Snapchat declined the offer. 98:14 I think there was a subsequent offer from Google as well, which they also declined. 98:19 And they continued to grow over those years. 98:21 For a solid 3 or 4 years after that, Snapchat went up to 150 million users. 98:27 But then, don't be too proud to copy. 98:30 That was actually from a memo that was in Facebook. 98:32 They said we should just rip those off, we have Instagram, let's just put stories in there. 98:39 They launched stories. 98:41 In one year when they launched Instagram, when Snapchat had 150 million users, within one year Instagram had overtaken that. 98:51 And there was, I mean, for the previous story there was at least an antitrust for that scenario, and Microsoft did actually face some repercussions. 99:03 Not that it really stopped them in the grand scheme, but here nothing happened. 99:06 Snapchat exists as a husk of itself doing whatever people there do now. 99:13 And this attitude of copying things has pervaded Facebook, but not just Facebook. 99:21 Within Facebook alone you have stories that become Snapchat, you have Reels from TikTok, and threads, they built threads in I think, in 5 months, which is pretty insane. 99:31 And there's a point there that these guys, at some point, the biggest guys, they become brokers of scale. 99:36 The large companies become brokers of scale. 99:38 And they're able to stay dominant because they have the means and ability to deploy things at scale really fast. 99:43 And they have the users, they have the distribution, they have the network effects. 99:48 And if you're some kind of upstart with a genuinely innovative product and idea, you become big enough to get to the point where They'll notice you and then they're going to decide your fate at that point. 100:02 And I want to look at this now from the founder perspective. 100:06 If you're building a company, you want to create something of value and then you want to grow. 100:11 And then kind of the meta now, if you're a startup or a founder, an entrepreneur, you want to sell to the broker of scale. 100:19 This isn't failure. 100:21 This is the expected outcome. 100:23 Founders now in all these startup universities, they're taught to do this stuff. 100:27 This is kind of like we've accepted that this is how the lifecycle of a product, of a new innovative thing should be. 100:34 And it's just like, first you build something that people love. 100:39 There's a whole user side of this. 100:41 Users start relying on your product. 100:42 They start integrating it into their lives. 100:44 They start trusting it with their data. 100:45 They start using it to find their community and build their community. 100:49 There were some conversations I had with community members here, and of course about Meetup.com. 100:53 Maybe you guys have had some bad experiences yourself, you know, where you're paying a bunch of money and, you know, what's really happening there. 101:00 There's people like— I think I was talking to someone who said that Meetup sent them a notice being like, oh, you're our, like, I think you've 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? 101:15 It's like, you should be paying them, man. 101:17 But anyway, that's almost a separate point. 101:19 But the point is here is that you kind of grow something until you're visible. 101:23 And then when you sell, as an entrepreneur, if you sell, the product is a sacrifice. 101:28 The users who have now spent all this time building a relationship with what you've built, now they become the sacrifice. 101:40 All of that is sacrificed. 101:43 Yeah, and the other note here is scale doesn't matter. 101:46 Instagram with its 30 million users was a $1 billion purchase, 400 million users for WhatsApp. 101:53 Oculus, well, that was more of a hardware remote. 101:57 And BeReal, this is kind of a newer example. 101:58 I just found this out while researching this talk. 102:01 It had 40 million users, and even now it doesn't matter if you hit the scale. 102:05 If you hit a scale that's kind of big enough, big tech just comes in and swoops in. 102:09 Because they just have to continue to dominate. 102:12 It's just a mandate of domination. 102:15 And yeah, to go back to the earlier point, it's just I'm going to use some Cory Doctorow stuff here. 102:22 The enshittification starts happening. 102:23 This is the eventual decline and death of products. 102:27 People have opinions about Doctorow and the word enshittification, but it is a true concept. 102:31 It's something that happens to us. 102:35 I don't know if you guys have watched the movie Pentagon Wars. 102:37 It's fantastic. 102:38 It's about basically the Pentagon. 102:41 They have this Bradley fighting vehicle, which is like this tank. 102:47 But people aren't exactly sure what it is. 102:49 People get promoted to be in charge of it. 102:51 They slap on a new feature, then they get promoted to work on something else. 102:55 And then this goes on for a while. 102:57 And Kelsey Grammer, he's the guy in charge. 103:01 But then at some point, an airline guy comes in to vet the product, and he finds out that it doesn't work. 103:06 It doesn't do anything. 103:07 And people aren't even sure what it's supposed to do, because it's supposed to be submarine. 103:11 It's supposed to be land. 103:12 It's supposed to be troop transport. 103:13 It has a gun. 103:14 So the point here and the analogy here is that eventually the big tech, when they have their own products like Google or Spotify, they start slapping on these features. 103:23 People get promoted to a higher position, and then they stop caring about it. 103:27 They move on to other things. 103:28 And then ultimately you just have this mess of 50 different things going on. 103:31 The user is like, I actually just wanted these 3 things that I always had before. 103:37 And if you're a big company, this is what happens. 103:40 If you're a startup, you sell your company and then it becomes part of this machine where the same thing happens. 103:45 The user didn't choose the acquisition. 103:47 The user doesn't get anything out of this. 103:48 In fact, they get squeezed more for putting their trust, placing their trust in this ecosystem. 103:54 So that's like— and their information is weaponized against them now. 104:00 And ultimately at some point they'll just throw it out. 104:03 Google Reader, there's like— Killed by Google has I think something like 200 products that Google has killed, maybe even more actually, I forget. 104:10 But yeah, at some point everything you've kind of worked towards, built your sort of interaction with the internet around, your community around, is now just gone. 104:23 Yeah, and founders aren't the bad guys. 104:27 We're not bad for innovating here, right? 104:32 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. 104:37 And users kind of end up in the same spot, even if they trust something that's new, even if they kind of go with the overlords. 104:49 And the system kind of frames this as exits are success and enshittification is growth with all these metrics that come, like the dashboards that analysts are looking at and trying to squeeze users more. 105:00 And lock-in is network effects. 105:01 OK, that was enough of the doom and gloom. 105:04 Let's start talking about the good stuff. 105:07 Open data. 105:07 So I want to just talk about lexicons just in case anyone's not familiar with them. 105:14 In app protocol. 105:15 They are the unit of information. 105:17 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. 105:25 And that's sort of like the information that's traveling around, that's a lexicon. 105:31 Apps don't need to declare their own types, they can grab existing ones. 105:34 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? 105:40 That's awesome. 105:41 It's a very cool selling point for App Proto. 105:44 And developers can publish their own types and contribute to what's already a very rich ecosystem. 105:50 Paul said there's like 1,000 apps on App Proto now, which is pretty awesome. 105:55 I just want to show a few lexicons just so it's clear what we're doing. 106:03 I have lexicon garden here. 106:06 Yeah, so we have a cool website, lexicon.garden. 106:09 If you guys haven't seen it, please check it out. 106:13 So yeah, it's basically just a string that's attached to a DNS. 106:19 So it's bsky.app is the app for Bluesky. 106:22 And you can specify it. 106:24 This is called a namespace ID. 106:26 And you can add a bunch of metadata to it that defines what it is to like something in this case. 106:34 So what is the thing that's being liked? 106:37 I'm not sure what the via is, but yeah, when it's created and what's actually being liked. 106:43 That's kind of what matters to us here. 106:47 Let's go back to full screen. 106:53 Yeah, and now lexicons kind of open up a lot of things to us. 106:58 In the old world, data is proprietary. 107:00 We can't interoperate apps. 107:01 You have to clone features. 107:03 We saw with stories, with reels, with threads, You have to build the whole thing by yourself in this sort of necessarily antagonistic way. 107:12 Now we have this sort of new perspective, new world where I'm about to demonstrate something I built later, but I like a few features and I think I could compose these specific features from these different apps and then kind of do my own weird thing. 107:29 It's all about the quality of the interface than it is about trying to capture users and drive growth. 107:35 And from a user perspective, you can pick one app. 107:38 You can accept all its compromises before. 107:40 You're kind of stuck in the late-stage capitalism machine that I was talking about. 107:44 But now you can just pick whatever app you want for your future. 107:47 We've already seen this in Bluesky. 107:48 You have all these different front ends for Bluesky, like dear.social or a fully different app view like Blacksky. 107:55 You have all these different opportunities. 107:57 And as we saw yesterday, you can just make your own experience. 108:02 Users have infinite choice. 108:04 You can see a couple I made already there. 108:08 This is kind of like a big, big game changer, and I want to kind of talk about— 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. 108:18 I can at least throw those out there. 108:21 A few experiences I think I had. 108:22 I don't know if any of you guys were in @Science a few days ago. 108:26 In this exact room, there was a beautiful moment, one of my favorite moments of the conference so far. 108:31 Which was Som. 108:33 He goes by the handle hyl.st. 108:36 Super cool person. 108:38 And he built an extension called SEAMS, which is for annotating the atmosphere, or annotating websites on the atmosphere, or just on the internet. 108:49 But I think after Margin came out, he kind of lost his joy. 108:53 I think he felt a little bit drained from it. 108:55 He gave me permission to talk about this. 108:59 So he kind of shared his experience actually right here, exactly here, about how he's kind of hospicing his extension, which is an interesting perspective. 109:08 So I think what he said that stuck with me was you've got to build with joy. 109:13 And he kind of lost the joy that he was building for. 109:15 So if we're building something, we definitely have to build for joy. 109:18 And we want to build stuff for the community. 109:21 I think Blaine's talk yesterday was really a big part of this. 109:25 Like you can just, like, you know, we're all cheese, you know, you gotta just show up and make sure that the microbiome is looking good and you're doing it for the right reasons and for the right people. 109:40 And we have to break the old patterns, you know, we have to make sure that we're not contributing back to the old ecosystem. 109:48 We have this new opportunity. 109:50 We have a necessarily different way of approaching competition. 109:57 We can all build stuff that is similar. 110:00 Even Tori the other day from Skylight, she was saying in her talk about how there's all these other— in the Fediverse, there's Devine, which is another video platform. 110:10 And she's like, that's awesome. 110:11 That's great. 110:12 We are all growing. 110:13 All ships rise together. 110:16 But at the same time, we got to get paid. 110:19 This is a post from Rudy a few days ago. 110:25 This is a part of the atmosphere that's very heavily unsolved, which is what are we going to do about payments? 110:34 I considered talking a little bit more about this, but I think it kind of expands the scope too much. 110:42 But we don't really have protocols that are on payment yet. 110:48 Sorry, payments on protocol yet. 110:51 We don't really know how value creation happens. 110:55 We don't really know how apps can make money. 110:58 We don't know what's a convincing sell to investors here. 111:01 So we have good intentions. 111:03 We have sort of like a post-cutthroat competition world. 111:07 Potentially. 111:09 So what can we do with that in a way that actually is value creation here? 111:15 I mean, if you look back in economic theory, I'm flexing my economics minor here, it's going to work a little too hard for a second. 111:24 Oskar Morgenstein and John von Neumann made the book, The Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, which kind of brought game theory as a mathematical field into what was a social science before, of economics. 111:36 And that kind of started this movement of economics that eventually led to the market's creation. 111:43 And sort of like the zero-sum games was exactly what they built. 111:48 And how if I get money, it's at the expense of someone else. 111:52 Since that time, economic theory has moved to positive sum. 111:55 There's all kinds of goofy things they're doing. 111:58 And this is where my economics minor stops. 112:00 But what I do know is that the theory has completely moved on, but the world is stuck with the same zero-sum stuff that we don't need to be stuck in anymore. 112:08 So, and there's a few examples of this in the wild already. 112:11 Like we have Patreon, that's something that's come in the last decade where donations are actually something that's people's regular source of income on a monthly basis. 112:22 And you have all these other sort of mutual aid and all these things that are coming up that all on the internet. 112:30 This is the sort of model we need to move towards. 112:33 This is where it would be cool for us to use this framing that I'm presenting to come up with a way that we can monetize apps in the future, convince investors to get in, and then get people to be able to be paid to work on this stuff full-time, because man's got to eat. 112:55 So for the last maybe 5 minutes or so, I'm going to show The extension I made, which is Rabbit Hole. 113:06 Yeah, it occupies your new tab. 113:09 And essentially it stores— you can kind of grab all the— you can track your rabbit holes online. 113:14 That's kind of the idea here. 113:16 These are a bunch of the different rabbit holes I made. 113:19 The part where it relates to competition is because I didn't make any original lexicons here. 113:25 These are trails. 113:28 Which were made on Sight Trail, an app made by Dana Rumal, who's coincidentally giving a talk in another room right now. 113:35 Let me find a little trail. 113:38 There was a good one. 113:41 There you go. 113:41 Brandon's one for a leaflet. 113:43 So this extension allows you to actually just walk a trail and check out stuff. 113:51 There's information on each— stop that you're making on the trail that lets you kind of understand what you need to do. 114:01 And after that, hopefully, you come out of it with some sort of knowledge or skill. 114:08 I'll go through the whole thing. 114:11 So if you guys haven't used Leaflet, beautiful editor. 114:14 Give it a try for sure. 114:16 And it's fully feature complete. 114:17 I don't use Notion anymore, which is awesome. 114:23 Yeah, and let's just get to the end. 114:30 Yeah, and the other thing that you can organize your rabbit holes into are burrows, or these are literally just assemble collections. 114:41 So that's something, you know, these are all lexicons that already exist, and I don't see the need for us to— if you want to build new stuff, you can build new stuff. 114:55 If you want to take features, you can take features. 114:58 All you got to do is have ideas and compose them. 115:00 So that's kind of it in terms of what I planned to talk about. 115:05 So if you guys got questions, we can start talking about those. Govind Mohan 115:09 Excellent. 115:09 Thank you. 115:10 I love that idea of like, oh, He just kind of drops. 115:13 He's like, these are all just symbol collections, you know, just composing all these different parts. 115:18 And they're not even like protocol-based parts. 115:20 They're like the next level up, you know, that's the composable bit. 115:24 And then you can keep composing, keep composing. 115:26 Excellent. 115:27 Thank you very much. 115:27 All right, let's give a round of applause. Speaker B 115:30 Thank you, guys. Govind Mohan 115:31 Thank you. 115:32 Thank you. 115:33 All right. 115:34 Anybody have any questions or comments? 115:37 Let me get you the mic. 115:38 Let me get the mic. 115:39 For the stream so the stream can hear you. 115:40 I was just saying, was that a Chrome extension? Speaker B 115:42 Yeah, it's Chromium only for now. 115:44 Very soon I'll do Firefox as well. 115:46 There'll be an extension— sorry, there'll be an announcement for that coming probably today at some point. 115:50 So yeah, look out for that. 115:51 What's it called? Govind Mohan 115:52 What was it called? Speaker B 115:53 Rabbit Hole. Govind Mohan 115:55 Rabbit Hole. Speaker B 115:56 The Rabbit Hole extension. Govind Mohan 115:57 Oh, right there. 115:59 On the Expo panel, they talked about how it allowed them to ship quickly. 116:04 Like there was this implicit competitive advantage thing. 116:11 Yeah, I was just thinking about that. 116:13 So there still seems to be this drive to get something out fast, be the first one, potential first mover. 116:20 Do you have any thoughts on that? Speaker B 116:22 Yeah, I mean, I think that's, that's a good thing. 116:24 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. 116:28 I've experienced that feeling a lot and I think there's nothing wrong with that. 116:32 In fact, 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, seeing that other people can have access to this without knowing how to program is awesome. 116:44 I think that's just a really good thing. 116:46 So I think if you make something first, that's cool. 116:51 It's like even this rabbit hole, I think I saw Margin come out. 116:54 I'm like, oh, this looks like they're doing similar stuff to me. 116:57 I'm like, I just like building this. 116:58 I've been building this for myself, and you can see how many I have, you know, like a whole bunch. 117:03 So that's, that's kind of, uh, yeah, that's my take on that. Govind Mohan 117:05 But that's an interesting point, and that's something that I think is, is changing as well. 117:08 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, they're more than one of those things in the world. 117:25 That's okay, and you can spin your own, your own version. 117:28 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. 117:39 You know, UIs are liquid, and we talk about malleable software and those types of content concepts. 117:44 So I think, uh, first to market doesn't necessarily— might lose meaning in the future, maybe. 117:49 I don't know. 117:50 Dawn, here you go. 117:52 Yeah, great talk, great conversation so far. 117:55 Wondering if you could build on what's just been said into that thing, your slide where you talk about like figuring out ways to get paid. 118:03 And do you have ideas or like dreams or like what that could look like for you in a non-zero-sum ecosystem? Speaker B 118:10 Yeah, I definitely, I think as a lot of things in the protocol, Black Sky has been stewarding or taking the lead on this with BlackSky Cash. 118:19 I'm eager to see how that pans out. 118:21 I do think— I even talked to Jay about this yesterday about what do they think about payments on protocol. 118:28 And that's not something that— I understand there's a sequencing for things that need to happen. 118:32 Private data right now is probably more important. 118:35 What I think would be cool is at least we start with mutual aid. 118:38 We start with donations on protocol. 118:41 It's actually kind of— cruel irony for me, someone who came from the crypto world. 118:47 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 are expected to work with it. 118:56 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. 119:00 It's just a funny irony that, yeah. Govind Mohan 119:05 Any other questions from the crowd? 119:09 OK, great. 119:10 Well, thank you very much for the presentation. 119:11 Thank you, everybody, for coming out this afternoon. 119:13 Cheers.