How marketers learned to dream of optimization and speak in the idiom of management science well before the widespread use of the Internet.Algorithms, data
The Oxymoron of “Data-Driven Innovation”
Once upon a time, in the dawn of the internet era, web products came from college dudes. The dudes were almost always wealthy and well-connected, but they weren’t usually market-savvy. These …
Steve Blank How to Find a Market? Use Jobs-To-Be-Done as the Front End of Customer Discovery
Modern entrepreneurship began at the turn of the 21st century with the observation that startups aren’t smaller versions of large companies – large companies at their core execute known business mo…
Search, Discovery, Pills, and Portals
Solving the distribution crisis in marketing
Design choices: Mechanism design and platform capitalism
Mechanism design is a form of optimization developed in economic theory. It casts economists as institutional engineers, choosing an outcome and then arranging a set of market rules and conditions to achieve it. The toolkit from mechanism design is widely used in economics, policymaking, and now in building and managing online environments. Mechanism design has become one of the most pervasive yet inconspicuous influences on the digital mediation of social life. Its optimizing schemes structure online advertising markets and other multi-sided platform businesses. Whatever normative rationales mechanism design might draw on in its economic origins, as its influence has grown and its applications have become more computational, we suggest those justifications for using mechanism design to orchestrate and optimize human interaction are losing traction. In this article, we ask what ideological work mechanism design is doing in economics, computer science, and its applications to the governance of digital platforms. Observing mechanism design in action in algorithmic environments, we argue it has become a tool for producing information domination, distributing social costs in ways that benefit designers, and controlling and coordinating participants in multi-sided platforms.
AI may fatally wound web’s ad model, warns Tim Berners-Lee
Web inventor warns reliance on AI agents threatens multibillion-dollar revenues for Google and Meta
The Techno-Optimist Manifesto | Andreessen Horowitz
We are told that technology is on the brink of ruining everything. But we are being lied to, and the truth is so much better. Marc Andreessen presents his techno-optimist vision for the future.
The continued search for Spime Script
The rants and raves of Simon Wardley on Evolution, Technology, Economics and Business
Debunking the science of advertising
We delve into the world of advertising, worth hundreds of billions of dollars annually, to find out if it's really even that effective. A collection with 3 stories from The Correspondent.
I’m Building an Algorithm That Doesn’t Rot Your Brain
AI's Affordability Crisis
A year ago in The Back Of The AI Envelope I pointed out that the AI platforms were running the drug-dealer's algorithm, "the first one's fr...
About Us
Around the world, building the internet’s operating system—and a better way to work. In a world of tech companies fighting for growth at any cost, imagine one that gives away its most successful pr…
computational product market fit
‘computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes.’ — edsger dijkstra
Mark Zuckerberg just declared war on the entire advertising industry
The “infinite creative” AI ad world is almost here.
Algorithmic Monocultures in Hiring - Stanford Digital Economy Lab
Many employers screen job applicants with algorithms built by the same few algorithm vendors. We hypothesize that algorithmic monoculture leads to the same individuals and members of the same racial groups facing rejection. We acquire and analyze a novel dataset of 3 million applicants submitting 4 million applications where all the applications are screened by algorithms built by the same vendor.
In search of Spime Script ...
The rants and raves of Simon Wardley on Evolution, Technology, Economics and Business
Presentations — Benedict Evans
Every year, I produce a big presentation exploring macro and strategic trends in the tech industry. New in May 2025, ‘AI eats the world’.
