Atlas

Reality, in a very major sense, is up for grabs in many ways. And we’re now seeing more and more entities bootstrap their own reality. People call this community building. It’s actually people defecting their shared sense of mainstream reality that has existed for a long time and creating new ones.
You start out these communities with high-status optimizations, you get the right people, you get peers, you get people who want to be with each other.
The challenge, if you stop there, is that it reverses the network effects. Basically, the more people you get, the worse it becomes.
You have to use status to bootstrap utility. You have to add enough value beyond the signal, such that people are willing to give up a little bit of the signal so they can get more utility in the process.
That’s what I think YC has gone through, which has expanded class sizes from 20 people to 200 people.
One of the things I think they say to their Founders is, “Hey, you’re going to have this network of 2,000 other Founders that you’re going to be able to hire from, raise money from, and the network is going to be so much more valuable.”
I think that trade-off is something that communities should be very deliberate about. When to make that transition, how to optimize for it and not to make it too soon.
“Come for the tool, stay for the network,” - Chris Dixon.
you want to spark the fire, stoke the fire, and spread the fire.
Spark the fire is: How do you get something off the ground?
Spread the fire is: How do you create the rituals and infrastructure such that it can expand beyond you?
And spread the fire is: How do you scale? How do you empower people in the community to become leaders such that it scales way beyond you?
The biggest mistake people make when trying to spark the fire or trying to start the communities is just assuming it’ll happen.
They just assume they will build it and people will come. What people don’t realize is that a lot of great communities, Product Hunt included, were very manual at the beginning.
They’re simultaneously manual, but you also want it to seem as community-driven as possible. You don’t want to deceive people in any way, but you want to create precedents and templates that people can see, use, and imitate.
You want to get the people who, if you get them in the community, everyone else is going to want to come - I think in Atlas' case these people might be a quality audience than the creators themselves. Build a high quality user base, attract creators to serve a ready community.
Most of the products at the beginning were just us posting on other people’s behalf until other people saw that behavior and said, “Oh, I want to get credit for posting someone else’s product.”
We also gave all the early users numbers so they’d say, “Oh, I want to be user 70 on Product Hunt before it hits scale.” It was really about getting the status dynamics right, but also making it as easy as possible for the right people to contribute early on.
tribal network effects. One of the things that we pointed out there is that the network members within a tribe are taught to be intentional about building the value of the tribe.
They will do things like add value to other members and defend the tribe’s reputation. This is intentional value creation by the nodes of the network, which is really distinctive from other types of network effects where nodes largely contribute value and drive network effects unintentionally. E.g, - Harvard, Yale.
There’s this great Bedouin saying, “Me against my brother, me and my brother against my cousin, and then me and my brother and my cousin against the neighboring family.” One thing it’s meant to signify is that people often bond over common enemies. That’s just who we are.
What I’m interested in doing is expanding the circle of empathy, making the common enemy as abstract as possible. But we should also try to expand the circle, such that the enemy has some abstraction or instead, it’s some goal like economic growth or something that you are striving for because we need transcendence as people. We need a goal. We need something that we can commonly aspire to and you want to make that as positive as possible