The Fall of Roam and the Future of YC
Here's everything we published this week.
Knowledge Partner: McKinsey & Company
What’s up with the labor market? Nearly 70 million people left their jobs in 2021, and nearly two-thirds of staff who left the workforce have departed in the last six months. As more jobs remain available than people to perform them, employers face labor mismatches, and there’s urgency to go beyond a traditional fix for an unconventional problem. Dive deeper on the issues, and how to address them, with several articles from McKinsey Themes.
Happy Sunday!
You might notice a bit of a theme in the pieces this week. Maybe it’s the Winter Olympics, recent world events, or maybe we’re just feeling a little restless and competitive—regardless, we’re looking at the possible decline of some big empires: Roam and Y Combinator.
Let’s get right to it, shall we?
The Fall of Roam
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Dan Shipper / Superorganizers
The note-taking app that swept the nation—or at least the productivity scene—has lost its edge. What happened here? Why didn’t bi-directional links and double-bracketed keywords change the note-taking game like we thought it would? Some blame Roam’s slow product velocity, the bad mobile experience, or even the well-documented community issues for the collapse of the Roam-an Empire (get it?). But for Dan, it all comes back to that pesky question of organization: “Where am I going to put this [note]?”
Is YC the Monopoly It Thinks It Is?
After a fiery tweet thread from the now-former CEO of Bolt (and the subsequent onslaught of memes), Evan decided to do a deep dive of his own into the Y Combinator “mob” with one question: is YC truly indomitable, or is the company’s downfall on the horizon? For his research, he talked to multiple YC competitors and seed stage investors (none of whom were willing to go on the record out of fear of YC) and analyzed the market structure and competitive dynamics to reach his stance.
Reading Recs:
The Factorio Mindset
Byrne Hobart / The Diff
Are video games one of the biggest wastes of human potential? Or is there something beneficial to be gained from playing online? Friend of Every Byrne Hobart meditates on this question in this thoughtful post. So much economic activity is devoted to gaming, but there may be a greater lesson learned than simply the strategies necessary for the high score.
The man who got fired by his DAO
Casey Newton / Platformer
In a typical process of cancellation, some sketchy behavior will come into the collective public conscious (usually via Twitter). From there, a mob will assemble, decry the sin of the individual in question, and call for justice. If you are on the internet, you have seen this happen probably hundreds of times. In Web3 things are a little different: not only can the mob quote-tweet things into existence, they can vote on your fate using governance tokens. This is something entirely new. In this piece Casey Newton asks a question that few have thought to voice: Does the voting actually make anything different?
The Defiant
The Defiant curates, digests, and analyzes all the major developments in decentralized finance, so that you can stay informed and smart about the most cutting-edge and fastest-changing corner of crypto and finance.
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Dan wrote a Twitter thread on shame: what it is and what to do about it. You should check it out.
Knowledge Partner: McKinsey & Company
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