☝️ Interesting Things #2 - January 15, 2021

Jan 15, 2021

Welcome to ☝️ Interesting Things Issue #2. If you enjoy this, consider sharing or subscribing. Enjoy.

Toby is a chrome extension to clean up and organize your browser tabs. 🎩 David McDonough.
Commonstock. Speaking of David…he is the founder of Commonstock, an investing-focused social network. Commonstock connects to your brokerages and surfaces powerful and interesting ideas around engagement linked to portfolio performance.
Gather.town lets you create 2d virtual spaces to audio/video chat with friends. This space is exploding at the moment. There are a lot of cool ideas here, and gather.town is decidedly non-professional, which is refreshing in a sea of Workplace Tools™. In the best possible way, it feels like a toy.
Spline is a Figma-esque tool for 3d design. People are making tremendously rad shit with it. 🎩 @jmj
Astra.finance is an API for moving money. Like a higher-level more targeted Plaid.
Alto is an alternative IRA that lets you invest in startups, private companies, real estate, crypto assets, and more. Here’s hoping they can make a dent in the $29 trillion dollar retirement asset cartel. 🎩 @danielpearson

Howard Marks dropped a new 18-page heater “Something of Value”
Moderna is developing an mRNA-based HIV vaccine. Absolutely incredible.
What's 🔥 in Enterprise IT/VC #219 is packed with useful knowledge.
Bill Gates is America’s top farmland owner 👀 🎩 @mcarney
Ticketmaster willingly hacked and consequently killed it’s former rival Songkick and were fined a paltry $10 million. Hardly a disincentive.
Bumble files their S-1. IPO season continues 📈

Two great episodes of the All-In podcast this week, with discussion revolving around last week’s capital attacks, free speech issues and big tech, and much more.

The music video for Duck Sauce’s Mesmerize is mind-bending, hilarious and brilliant. It might also break your brain. How I even came to know about this is internet magic.

Creator Equity Platform (Kickstarter + Angellist for creators).
Make it dead simple for creators to let their followers invest in them. Automate entity creation through Stripe Atlas, allowing followers to buy shares in creators. The creator entity could be scoped to specific activities (e.g. merch, podcast revenues, but not certain types of royalties). It could allow automated dividend payouts based on some criteria, automate bank account creation so the platform can track money in and money out, and what’s owed to investors. There are lots of complex .
I want a better podcast player. So does @adayeoyh. Especially because Breaker is shutting down today.
I want roam templates. Don’t make me think how I should take reading notes.
There’s a a privacy revolution quietly taking place in B2B SaaS, which means on prem is back baby!