DALL·E 2, Panic Attacks, Divvy, and Netflix

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Happy Sunday!

We're obsessed with two things over here at Every: studying businesses, and studying humans. And we did a lot of both this week.

What we learned about businesses this week:

The second order consequences of DALL·E 2
Why Microsoft should buy Netflix
How to launch a crypto token
How one of proptech's hottest companies, Divvy, works

What we learned about humans this week:

The science of panic attacks and how to tame them
How to open and close your awareness

Pretty good right? Our mission is to feed the minds and hearts of the people who build the internet—and this week is a good example of exactly what that means.

Excited? Let's dive in.

Rent, Own, or Divvy

Tyler Okland / Every

Historically, if you wanted a place to live you had two options: buy the home outright, or rent it from someone else. But sometimes getting a mortgage isn't possible for the house of your dreams—and spending money on rent feels like a waste.

That's what proptech company Divvy is built to fix. Divvy buys houses for its customers, rents the house back to them, and allows them to build equity over time with each rent payment. They're now one of the top-five acquirers of single family homes in America. But how big can this business get? Guest-writer Tyler Okland examines.

Read.

DALL·E 2 and The Origin of Vibe Shifts

Nathan Baschez / Divinations

Some time around 2015 there was a mysterious vibe shift in web design. Before the vibe shift, all the cool websites used flashy photography as a core part of their aesthetic. Afterward, everyone started using hand-drawn illustrations. What happened? Unsplash, the photography website, made photography cheap to use in web design—so more expensive, hand-drawn graphics became cool.

Nathan believes that a similar vibe shift is on the horizon: DALL·E 2 promises to make all visual graphics cheap to make, by anyone. What are the implications? He examines in this week's essay.

Read.

How I Tamed Panic

Dan Shipper / Superorganizers

In 2014, Dan sold his first company. He'd achieved a personal dream, and had money for the first time in his life. What could possibly go wrong? It was just around that time, of course, that he had his first panic attack.

In this sometimes funny, sometimes sad, sometimes scary personal essay he breaks down his own journey with panic, and the science behind panic attacks. Then he explores in detail all of the experiments he tried to try to tame them—and shares what finally worked.

Read.

You can only respond to what you notice

Michael Ashcroft / Superorganizers

In our everyday life we often get tunnel vision: the experience of being so focused on a goal or way of doing things that we get stuck. This is a collapse of your awareness.

If your awareness is collapsed—you'll often miss things that are important because you're blind to them. But you can learn to control your awareness: to open and close it, and to move it around consciously.

Want to learn how? Check out Michael Ashcroft's essay from this week.

Read.

Microsoft should buy Netflix

Evan Armstrong / Napkin Math

Hear that? It's the sound of Netflix's stock crashing this week. The streaming giant announced their first ever loss of subscribers, and investors aren't happy.

In this week's Napkin Math, Evan examines Netflix's plan to get rolling again—finds it wanting—and proposes a plan of his own. Namely, that Netflix should "run to Daddy Gates" and let the synergies pump.

Read.

Tokenomics 104: How to Launch a Token (Tactics, Questions, Wen, etc)

Nat Eliason / Almanack

Nat's back at it again with his series of tokenomics explainers. This week he gets into one of the most difficult, and valuable parts of designing a token: figuring out how to actually get it into the hands of users.

He breaks down everything would-be token creators need to consider when planning a launch, covers important launch tactics, and then provides examples of launches and how well they did.

Read.

Sunday Superlatives

Most Viral Two Weeks: Nathan's had a banner 14 days on the Bird App. First, his Twitter take blew up and got mentioned in WaPo, and then his DALL·E 2 thread took the algorithm by storm.

Biggest Splash: DK and Mishti's Product Boneyard piece ended up getting linked absolutely everywhere, including a rare and coveted inclusion in Benedict Evans's newsletter.

Mensch Award: Packy posted a lovely tweet about watching Nathan's journey these last few months. He is an incredible human, and it warmed our hearts this week. We love you Packy 🥰

Spicy Take: Evan got some love from the algorithm explaining why VCs may be underestimating how hard it is to spin up a media arm that makes content that actually slaps.

A Course You Might Like

Learn to get out of your own way with Alexander Technique

If you liked the Michael Ashcroft article from this week, You can only respond to what you notice, you might want to consider checking out his course on the Alexander Technique. It's an awareness-based skill that helps people notice, expand and play within the space between stimulus and response.

You'll learn to develop conscious control of your awareness, and from there bring more agency and aliveness to all aspects of your life.

Click for more details. (Every gets a small cut if you use this.)

Or this one. (Every doesn't get a cut if you use this.)

That's all for this Sunday folks! We're stoked about the energy around here. We have an Every core team retreat this week in LA (w00t!) so it might be a little quieter on the article front—but rest assured, we have lots of great stuff coming your way soon.

Have a good one!