Welcome to the first edition of the Roundtable weekly newsletter!
First off, we’d like to thank you all for signing up for our waitlist.
We’re currently heads down building what we hope will be a central part of your daily routine and we’re so excited to show you what we’ve been working on.
In the meantime, every Sunday we’ll be curating the most interesting short read, long read, podcast, and video we came across the past week. These recommendations will cover a wide range of topics, will be a mixture of both old and new, and will hopefully expose you to something you wouldn’t have come across otherwise.
With that said, here’s what we found interesting this past week:
📙 The vaccine insurrection
Noah Smith (@Noahpinion) —April 28 | 8 min
This is an interesting look at the dynamics behind COVID vaccine hesitancy, and how it’s very different than traditional opposition to vaccines. Noah Smith has had great writing on the pandemic throughout, in addition to covering a wide range of other topics—highly recommend adding him to your list.
— Mike
📚 A Technical Explanation of Bitcoin for Everyone
Billy Bitcoin | 37 min
If you’re interested in crypto and want to understand how underlying blockchain technology works, then this article is for you. It’s extremely approachable for complicated topics that include cryptographic hash functions and mining, while being sufficiently comprehensive. Fair warning, it’s long. But if you invest the time, it’s a great foundation and you’ll truly understand the magic of blockchains.
— Thomas
🎧 Mark Zuckerberg + Spotify & Shopify's CEOs discuss the Creator Economy on PressClub
PressClub with Josh Constine (@JoshConstine)—March 19 | 1 hr 22 min
Listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts
For all the naysaying on Clubhouse of late, the ability to bring together three mega names like this for a casual hour long discussion is pretty unique. My two biggest takeaways from the discussion:
Hammering their value to small businesses is Facebook’s clear PR priority (and, in my opinion, their best move). It doubles as a distancing mechanism from the pitchforks currently aimed at Apple’s policies. Minutes 33-39 are peak Zuckerberg, he nails the small business-oriented criticism of Apple.
Speaking of which, the open frustration with Apple, which has only increased in the ~5 weeks since this aired, feels like it’s reaching a boiling point. Almost nothing can unite Democrats, Republicans, and the biggest CEOs in tech, but the drive to regulate Apple is increasingly coming from all three. Minutes 46-49 with Eric Migicovsky from Pebble (former smartwatch co) cover a helpful example of how this goes far beyond just the App Store.
— Mike
📺 Jeff Bezos: The electricity metaphor
TED—Feb 2003 | 19 min
This is an old one but a classic. Back in 2003, a less jacked (and surprisingly funny) Jeff Bezos made a compelling bull case for the internet, arguing that the right analogy for the boom-bust cycle around the dot-com bubble was not the oft-cited gold rush, but the early days of electricity. This feels especially relevant today in that we’re very much in the early innings of Web3 and it’s only getting started.
— Thomas
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See you next Sunday.