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we're all here because we're hungry for a more nourishing a more insightful a more curated a more human internet we're here because we understand that the right idea or connecting the right
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combination of ideas can change the course of a life an organization or an entire civilization we're here because we've experienced the joy of discovering the right Insight at the right time and the power of sharing
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it with others but why then to our online social environments leave us Restless unfulfilled in a state of Envy anxiety and constant distraction it's sad isn't it that in the past 20
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years we were essentially handed free access to the entirety of human knowledge and it didn't trigger a golden age for human flourishing the reason I get so charged up about this is because I have been transformed
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by cultivating a habit of mindfully curating and connecting the things that resonate with me in 2019 I started with many people in this room called a second brain mine
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lived on air table essentially it was a repository of the best articles podcasts essays videos tweets highlights and their connections to topics and to each other this thing grew to have more than 5 000
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entries but more importantly it changed my relationship to the internet I was no longer mindlessly consuming the internet I was mindfully curating it and then a few things happened I wanted
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more people to have access to this resource and so I sent an email to my 10 000 sub stack subscribers and more than 400 people bought access to this thing my fascination with Knowledge Management
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and curation kept growing I read everything I could get my hands on on the history of the internet approaches to Knowledge Management networked curation ugc networks and I wrote I wrote about
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why we need less people laboring away in their solo note-taking tools more Squad energy I wrote about why search is declining in quality and why curators are the new Google
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and ultimately I landed on this Insight user curated knowledge is stuck in single player environments all while search engines are deteriorating in quality we need less second brains more
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collectively curated knowledge Networks six months ago we put these insights to work we turned my airtable database into a searchable interface and invited others to contribute to it
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the tldr is it worked we tapped into the Zeitgeist we onboard a 250 founding curators who collectively made over 29 000 curations 80 000 connections and in the process built a lovely audience of
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over 25 000 newsletter subscribers but what's next we have this Half Baked product that's janky it's buggy but people are contributing to it but to truly deliver on this vision of building a human curated Knowledge Graph
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we're going to have to build a lot more this shouldn't just be a graph you contribute to this should be a tool that is first and foremost for you but unlike other bookmarking and note-taking tools the superpower here is
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the collective graph imagine building your own personal Library except this time your ideas are open for anyone to see for anyone to add connections to for anyone to build on top of
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there's nothing like this on the internet here's how I look at the internet today on the top left hand quadrant you have single player productivity and Knowledge Management tools think notion airtable Rome
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these are great powerful tools that augment human intellect but fundamentally they are single player private semi-private and to live an entirely private life means to be deprived of the things that I believe
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are truly essential to a human life of the connections that help us be seen and heard by others when you share something on the Internet and someone Builds on top of you
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that's resonance that doesn't exist here in the bottom right hand corner you have the major social networks we use today I think Twitter Instagram tick tock tools are social they're networked
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they're alive there's discovery but they've compromised much of their usefulness for people in these spaces we're not building extensions of ourselves we're building ads for ourselves the organizing
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principles of these networks likes retweets is Vanity and to live a social life that only feels rewarding when other people are watching is a trap
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the wrong takeaway though is to leave social spaces we actually really need something like social networks the right question is why is there nothing in the top right
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my belief is that on the path to attention-based monetization these platforms have compromised much of their usefulness to people the business model of platforms which rely on clicks and engagement and
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advertising means we're trapped in a profitable state of anxiety envy and distraction our ambition is to build a social tool that is actually good for Humanity powered by a freemium model not an
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advertising one we know we can do this because we understand that this is about nailing a feeling not a checklist of features that feeling is a feeling of having a party for your brain where everyone's invited to the dance with you
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it's the feeling of being in a space that is deeply personal yet communal and connected it's combining the focus and utility of a productivity tool with a sense of aliveness and connectivity of a
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social network in a few years we will be what Rome could have been had they started multiplayer first with every curation and every connection we will weave a human curated graph of the best
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knowledge on the internet Google organized the world's information we have an opportunity to curate the world's best knowledge by putting humans at the center if the ideas I just shared resonate with
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you come talk to me together we can build a more Sublime internet and speaking of sublime this feels like a good time to share that we have a brand new interface coming in 2023 and a brand
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new name foreign [Applause]
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