Means of Creation

In another special hangout episode, Li, Nathan and MOC producer Adam Keesling talk through the week's passion economy news and take live questions from the MOC community.

In this episode, we talk about:
- The intersection between Nathan and Li's recent writing on why content is king and building a creator middle class
- Why Li built Side Hustle Stack, and its surprise appeal to Gen Z
- How to mitigate risk in the Passion Economy
- Sahil Lavingia's new essay "No Meetings, No Deadlines, No Full-Time Employees," and whether we've been brainwashed by capitalism

Brought to you by the Means of Creation newsletter: meansofcreation.substack.com.

Lenny Rachitsky is a writer, creator, angel investor, and who recently spent 7 years at Airbnb, where he led supply growth. He now writes a popular business/tech newsletter, covering product, growth, people management, and other business/tech topics. In this video, he discusses when creators should monetize.

Means of Creation is a weekly conversation hosted by Li Jin and Nathan Baschez to unpack the passion economy. Li is the founder of Atelier, a new venture fund investing in the passion economy; Nathan is a writer, strategy researcher and a founder Everything, a business-writing bundle that includes his newsletter Divinations.

Means of Creation is hosted live on Zoom every Friday at 11 PST. The first 30 minutes of the show is a fireside chat, and the latter half is Q&A with the audience. You can listen to the full conversation on Apple Podcasts and Spotify or at https://meansofcreation.substack.com/

Show theme music: Compassion by Stefan Kartenberg

Adam Davidson and Li Jin are two thought leaders in the Passion Economy: a new economy where people are able to leverage their passions and creativity in order to make a living.

Adam Davidson is the creator of NPR's Planet Money podcast and New Yorker staff writer who wrote "The Passion Economy," a book that explores stories of people who followed their dreams to craft a livelihood. He also writes a newsletter here: https://passion.substack.com/.

Li Jin is a VC investor who wrote the seminal blog post "The Passion Economy and the Future of Work," who is actively investing in new platforms in the space. She previously worked on the consumer investing team at Andreessen Horowitz for 4 years before recently launching her own firm. She also regularly publishes a newsletter about consumer tech and the passion economy: https://li.substack.com/

Moderated by Nathan Baschez of the Everything newsletter bundle, they will answer live audience Q&A regarding all things passion economy.

Related links:
https://www.amazon.com/Passion-Economy-Thriving-Twenty-First-Century/dp/0385353529
https://a16z.com/2019/10/08/passion-economy/
https://meansofcreation.substack.com/

Show theme music: Compassion by Stefan Kartenberg

Indie Hackers is an online community that focuses on entrepreneurs who build profitable internet businesses. They describe themselves as individuals seeking financial independence, creative freedom, and the ability to work on their own schedule. Entrepreneurs in the community have built B2B SaaS applications, paid newsletters, and everything in between.

Courtland started Indie Hackers in 2016 and it was acquired by Stripe 10 months later. He now works for Stripe operating Indie Hackers and hosting their podcast. As of February 2020, the site was seeing about 1.5 million page views per month and the community had grown to 80,000 members.

Before creating Indie Hackers, Courtland spent several years working on software startups and graduated with a degree in computer science from MIT.

In this interview, we talked to Courtland about:
-The origin story of Indie Hackers
-The best products and services that niche online communities can use to monetize
-The types of businesses that have become more (or less!) popular to start during Covid-19
-The traits of successful Indie Hackers
-What the mainstream technology community misunderstands about Indie Hackers
-The biggest issues Indie Hackers face
-The most popular tools for Indie Hackers

Brought to you by the Means of Creation newsletter: meansofcreation.substack.com

For the next few episodes of Means of Creation, we are piloting a series of web3 explainers—unpacking some of the fundamental concepts of web3, from first principles. The goal is to explore various topics, trends, and projects that people want to learn more about but find confusing! Essentially, to ask the questions we’ve been too afraid to ask in public.

If you want your questions answered, or have topics and/or guests you want to recommend, feel free to do so by tagging @Means of Creation on Twitter.

We hope you find these conversations valuable!

In this first episode, we explain DeFi, or Decentralized Finance.

Cryptocurrencies have taken a major hit over the last few days—Bitcoin and Ethereum have fallen by almost fifty percent from their all-time highs. However, the proponents of DeFi still believe in its long-term potential to be the future of finance.

If we zoom out a little, this belief seems to be well-founded: as of this writing, the value locked in various DeFi projects is $196B. As recently as 2019, that number was merely $600M.

DeFi proponents also go on to claim that we’re just getting started—the advantages of an open and decentralized financial system have the potential to capture trillions of dollars of value.

In this episode, we're joined by Nat Eliason, who helps us unpack this claim. Nat is a writer, crypto engineer, and educator who’s been at the forefront of DeFi long before it became became a trend.

He brings with him a wealth of experience in this space—he teaches a very popular course called DeFi Orientation which enables people to get started in DeFi and earn money from their crypto assets. He helps crypto companies with their tokenomics and smart contract development. He also writes Almanack, a newsletter about DeFi, tokenomics, yield farming, and other related topics.

Nat's experience as an educator and operator lets him simplify complex theories but also demonstrate how to apply them in practice. He was the perfect guest to bring on to explain the rapidly changing world of DeFi.