Can capitalism be fun? As John Cleese famously highlighted, solving problems requires creativity, and creativity at its best is play. However, as far as I can tell, capitalism doesn’t incentivize play. It’s a machine that rewards things like convenience, efficiency, margins, arbitrage, and generating shareholder value. ROI or die baby!
Ironically, society’s biggest problems are not only outcomes of capitalism, but have proven uniquely difficult for it to solve – healthcare, homelessness, climate change, loneliness – these all feel objectively “outside” the free market frame we all rely on to allocate private resources and time. How well is capitalism really driving us towards providing what our society needs?
So doesn't it follow that I – as an able bodied individual with agency – should be throwing myself at these huge problems or against the gears of capitalism itself? Perhaps, but how do you balance your intrinsic motivations against what society needs or what it will pay you for?
I had a nice walk with Andrew Rose this week about what motivates me and how I’d like to spend time after the engineering accelerator. The net of the conversation was for me to spend more time building toys. Not products. Not businesses, but fun software toys that delight and have the kernel of an interesting idea. Treat software as an artistic medium and nothing else.
It was a refreshing reminder that some of the most transformative things in society often come from people hacking on the weekend just for fun. They come from someone saying “Wouldn’t it be cool if….” Paraphrasing Chris Dixon: tomorrow’s tech breakthroughs often start as someone’s weekend projects.
I’m excited to distance myself (for a few more months) from the seductive capitalist draw of New York City to earn more money and the internal pressure to “build something BIG.” Instead I’ll keep tinkering with software to improve my craft and perhaps create some joy. Behind that fun is likely an intrinsic idea that’s delightful or interesting or impactful. Maybe it’s something big or maybe it just gets a laugh. I’m actually pretty happy with both those outcomes. Will it solve capitalisms worst externalities? Who's to say :)
I’ll revisit how to make money or what business to start in a few months. Until then, it’s time to build some toys. It’s time to play.
A few working ideas (with WIP names):
- Whomst: An LLM chat experience that matches you with the other person you’re most similar to on the service.
- Daily Vision: A tool that generates a guided 10-min audio visualization at the beginning of your day based on your daily calendar and to-dos.
- Fair Weather Friends: An app that just tells you the weather of your friends.
- Strangers: An app that builds a social graph based on who you’ve spent time with.
- VidBox: An app that allows you to capture short video samples, then turn those samples into a beat pad.