This paper targets the idea that developers or dev-minded people in the space lack imagination where users are desperate for ‘innovation’.

I believe the developer-minded, zeros-and-one-minded, won’t agree with this opinion generally. Why it feels worth claiming, at least in this paper, is they are the ones who have the firmest grip on capital allocation and network effects in the industry.

If you inspect enough VC decks, pitches, Twitter threads, Twitter spaces, blog posts, etc., you realize that VCs are generally lagging indicators. You have your unicorns, who invest in unicorns, surely, but the majority are average, bordering on mediocre (like nearly every other profession). With a small 20% having a gradation of A to A+, and a fraction of that at 10x, and a fraction of that fraction at 100x.

This funding demographic is captured by the dev-minded, software-minded, app-minded person in crypto. Realistically it is a safer bet with metrics, and a fundamental agreement in a16z’s software is eating the world.

These cohorts largely hold unspoken disdain for design, management, abstract creativity, copy, marketing, and anything that is not automation-type technology you can plug into a computer and get standard wealth-effect-equations.

This claim has nothing to do with saying they have no place, or that they don't deserve the strength of their influence in the moment. Rather it’s an acknowledgment that they lack understanding on how the other parts that have shown up to the space, especially since '21, could compound what they are good at.

The person who oversees the construction of the car is not the person who designs the car, nor is it the person who sits around with the idea of the car, or the person who writes the code that automates the assembly of it.

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After making claims that sound accusatory it bears a disclosure that I bring a problem with no solution. My intuition is that the flow-order-of-thought needs to invert however.

The basis of this intuition is that quality of idea supersedes quantity of metrics attainable in my estimation. Another way of saying this is that an eccentric whose time-in-fortification has been spent polishing the art of thinking and idea generation, generally speaking, will be able to surface more unicorns. While a dev who has spent time polishing technical abilities likely have a limit on how abstract and imaginative their ideas can reach.

This is not a pejorative claim, rather a logical one. Playing off the graphic, a way to think about this is that a dev searches for a problem that they want to fix and then brings in creative counterparts to help polish the public-facing logic behind solving it. While a creative thinks of experiences, novelties, and ‘unrealistic’  ideas that a dev can help refine technically/functionally.

This creates something that brings new experiences in place of solving codified problems. Which in the ownership layer of the internet, seems to be the driving desire of the users. Community, peer to peer, trustless, enriching tech integration, etc.

If you think about how populace social media is; Twitter, TikTok, Snapchat, Facebook, Instagram, AirBnB, Uber, etc, these things are about experiences on or through the internet at very simple levels. Crypto allows for an ownership layer to form here; expanding the possibilities by multiple step-order functions.

There’s ample space for devs to lead with their ideas and solve problems as well. So this paper is not about removing freedoms from developers. Instead, the paper argues we now enter a paradigm shift where creatives with skilled-imagination can bring experiences to the internet, novel and unique, that with refinement by devs, can unlock ‘impossible or unrealistic’ innovations. (Think of Opepen or Nouns)

I believe this order, and combination, can/will create unrecognizable institutions of digital experiences. We just need to find a way to handle the eccentrics leading.