We’ve been running Software Daily for 6 years.
When we started it back in 2015, the goal was to create a software engineering podcast that was 60% as good as Software Engineering Radio, but aired with 5x the frequency.
5 shows per week, 50 weeks per year, 5 ads per show, means 1,250 advertising spots. We are a two sided marketplace for podcast ads targeted at developers, and our business is successful. We have found our cash cow.
We didn’t think there was a cash cow in this business, but it turns out that podcasting plus software engineering is a peanut butter and chocolate-level pairing.
We are a two sided marketplace for podcast ads targeted at developers. There are limitless adjacencies to such a business. Pulling on business generality, we are a human-and-automation-driven sales and digital supply chain optimization company. Adjacency potential: probably limitless, but certainly gated by capital, and being a bootstrapped business it takes some imagination to think through why or how Software Daily should transform into an enterprise with well-defined incentive and equity structures.
So we are in the process of hiring a CEO for Software Daily. Our prospective CEO candidate has done a great job so far and we are hoping they join full-time. I’m the host of Software Daily, and I’m also working to start other businesses, raise capital, and grow our influence.
Why is influence so important? Consider the following problems we face as a society:
- most code is closed source
- we do not have transparent, verifiable checks and balances on the power structures of corporations and governments
- we do not have truly free speech anywhere in the world
- we are not providing fellow global citizens with a minimum set of human rights that they need to make life a deterministic enterprise (clean water, basic healthcare, decent political governance and taxation)
- creativity is as important to mind-body health as exercise, yet most people are not able to utilize their endowed talents
- fiat and crypto are as well-integrated as oil and water
- we are delegating our healthcare decisions to opaque advisory systems
These problems can all be fixed within the next decade through straightforward engineering. These problems are global problems.
Until these problems are alleviated, we will be rapidly starting companies, financial groups, and other organizational units to systematically break down and attack each problem.
We have five projects with significant potential:
- Software Daily is being driven by a new CEO who is routinizing existing business lines and evaluating the highest margin opportunities based on characteristics such as risk, team, free cash flow, consistency of vision, digital leverage, and relation to companion organizations. We recently started a YouTube channel and have a Slack channel with 4398 users if you want to join and hang out with us.
- Supercompute is pursuing a redefined computing paradigm with the proposition that the frontier of technology is expanding at a pace that creates more opportunity than humanity can capture. Under such a regime, there is no point in competing, because there will always be unbounded, uncaptured opportunity for all market participants. The supply side of this two dimensional economics 101 diagram is the cloud, and the demand side is the smartphone. Unbounded demand increase meets unbounded supply-side efficiencies leads to unbounded exponential economic expansion. Our first product is a digital collectible card game. Our CEO is a grizzled Sheryl Sandberg-like revenue-driven operator and our CTO is a young, imaginative wizard tinkerer. We are putting together a team of the best software engineers and applied game theoreticians to define the field of crypto-driven incentive science.
- Rectangle is an open source (and open operations) financial services system with Yad Konrad as CEO starting with a dual product development strategy of 1) rapid customer success and product engineering 2) first principles approach to engineering ie what are the “Zapier Zaps for open source fintech” ie how do you have a Twilio-like experience for converting Visa swipes to Bitcoin in merchant account? There are a lot of these kinda Zap things. Rectangle hopes to co-found with Square a CNCF-like pie-growing-media-conference-business with unicorn-tier growth properties called Quadrangle Consortium, a division of the Shapes Consortium. We have nascent ideas for the Hexagon and Septagon business units. Rectangle hopes to partner with Stripe on the Rhombus Initiative, with ordinance towards rapid parallelogram development. Rectangle hopes to partner with PayPal on the Friendly Payments Movement, a watchdog organization promoting high quality user experience and a predictable, steady decrease in transaction costs across all crypto and fiat global asset classes. Rectangle hopes to partner with Amazon on the Open Antifraud Collaboration (OAC), an open source, open data, open operations consortium built on a semi-decentralized corporate and crypto consortium mirrored blockchain system based on federated queueing among Google PubSub, Confluent Kafka, PubNub, Ethereum, Solana, Kinesis, etc with FaaS-driven eventual consistency among these queues
- Some new approaches to venture capital — ie can you do automated fund of funds across emerging managers? If so how do you do dynamic allocation? Can you justify a coin, and do it without legal risk? Is this an internally or externally facing technology platform? How much money does AngelList make? Is Carta better than LTSE? More abstractly–Software Daily was founded with a minimum vision of copying Andreessen Horowitz, but monetizing through media first to add an additional business line and to develop a trusted media source biased more transparently through its sponsorship agreements rather than private investments. We are recruiting GPs for this role so please send me an email if interested and I can forward your resume to our founding partners.
- “pop culture development” which today is mostly just me writing music and producing music videos, but more importantly it feels like pop culture has become a battleground that abides by deterministic probability density functions which can be approached with an attrition-driven strategy. Check out the single I’m working on now.
By the way, if you have a perspective on which of the two choruses from the above songs is better, please tweet at me: twitter.com/the_prion
Each of the above systems is undergoing flywheel installation. As they become self-propagative, we are considering our next enterprise from the following prospectives:
- Quantified self for the post-COVID vaccine decision matrix (personal Palantir for vaccine expected value functions)
- KanyeCloud: the ultimate creator economy talent marketplace and experience platform
- Boot camp + headcount as a service: this was explored in the Move Fast book
- Vertically integrated hospital system—like Forward but applied to hospitals
- Open source crypto vol-arb tools: vol arb tech feels very stale and fragmented, why is there no Kubernetes type community here?
- Music video social network
- Adforprize reboot (get aggressive with sales, raise money this time around)
- FindCollabs reboot (get product development and community management right this time around, it should work; also double down on FindCollabs as hackathon platform)
- Podsheets reboot with a focus on secret confidential product strategy
- Open source open operations YouTube
- Open source open operations Spotify
- Open source closed operations Instacart
- Open operations open source Instagram
- Social network low code building blocks ie how do you build your own Instagram if you are in 3rd grade?
- Github for open operations
- Metaverse casinos for children in maximally exploitative form (to prove a point and drive sensible regulation)
- BitClout with different design paradigm
- General Internet of Money picks and shovels ideas
- New approach to recording studios—franchise model? Digital + physical vertically integrated experience? Beachhead into new kind of interactive DAW ie why is there no Figma DAW? Operational transform log for FL Studio much longer and denser time series data than Figma (though at a fundamental level it is the same problem)
- Bluetooth-like protocol that allows you to write music with Bluetooth headphones (can’t do today because round trip between laptop and bluetooth headset too long…but seems like that just leads to latency that should be bufferable? But then does that mean you are buffering at the Bluetooth headset, or on the output from the DAW? I guess FL Studio doesn’t include such a DAW buffer, and I can’t see the average bluetooth headset having such a buffer, so maybe you just make a bluetooth headset with a buffer, and also design a DAW VST with such a buffer and then you can actually sell bluetooth headsets as a standalone business line? So you don’t actually need to make a Bluetooth protocol. You just make a new kind of headphone business catering to music producers. How big is that market? Seems like it’s every music producer. This is pure software play so you can offer at the price of Amazon’s Choice $25 bluetooth headset, can also do $50 and $100 models with legit improvements in quality so you have triple price point hardware platform that is arguably as compelling as AirPods. And the Airpods business line is the new darling of Apple so that seems like a compelling place to start, plus you have this interesting buffering technology which is actually a platform? Maybe this buffer idea doesn’t actually work. Why doesn’t such a buffering system already exist? Do we call it BlueBuffer?
I think that my best role here is to stay as a podcast/YouTube host and try to situate capital, ideas, and people in productive ways.
I enjoy connecting with people on podcasts and Zoom calls and YouTube has been an interesting new dimension as well.
I’m interested in music—if there’s one zero sum competition I want to win it is to be the top of the Spotify charts, but not clear if that is something I am genetically endowed to do. Maybe team-based approach to digital audio workstation management systems can lead to deterministic outcome in the music production category. More generally speaking—when someone says that you are in a “hits-driven business” it is a useful flag to stop paying attention to them for the next 120 seconds.
I would also like to try to become a top 5 no limit holdem heads up player. After that I’ll try the other poker games. Side note, looking for a coach and someone to stake me in tournaments/cash games. If you are interested please message me.
Last week was my 33rd birthday, and I’m feeling grateful to be alive. I got to spend my first day as a 33-year-old in a recording studio in LA, working with an engineer and a talented female vocalist, which was a dream I first had when I was 13 years old, working in FL Studio on my stepmom’s old Dell laptop.
Software Daily has given me so much. It has only been possible because listeners pay attention to the content, and take us seriously. Listeners buy products using our promo codes and custom URLs. We have pretty good attribution and we think that both sides of our marketplace are helping people.
I really hope that my work has helped you in some meaningful way, and if it hasn’t then I hope it does in the future. I hate having any enemies and if you have ever been offended or disgruntled by something we said as a media organization, I hope you can ping me on Slack and I can apologize.
I feel loved by my family and friends, and I think we live in a special time. Everyone who feels creatively motivated should consider modern technology as a tool to help them realize that creativity. For me, it’s been spiritually helpful and fun.
I’m starting to get too much email to respond regularly, but if you are going through a tough time in your career, and you send me a brief email, I’ll make my best effort to respond when I can. But I do read almost everything I receive.
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