Founders

Purely digital consumer products are emotion machines.  You feed it with your attention or money, you get an emotional return.  The technology that's innovating on this aspect is improving on these axes:

1. Asymmetric returns in emotional potency.  Small(er) investment needed than ever before for outsized results.

Builder behind /ethxy and /sexy!  https://ethxy.com.  MIT 6-3.  a16z CSS ’23. YC alum.

The four fundamental building blocks that make the new paradigm possible are:

1. Crypto.  You can now wield financial incentives with previously impossible payout structures designed to enhance the three axes above.  There is no limit to the degree of complexity for each transaction.

2. AI.  It is now possible for extraordinarily small teams to leverage a vast amount creative output as ingredients in servicing novel emotions for its users.

3. Mobile.  This was the earliest key breakthrough that we regard today as "old news", but the fact that we all have a personal, always online, interface that can provide push notifications is in the bedrock of this paradigm.

4. Cloud.  As @naval referenced, these are infinitely scalable robots able to do anyone's bidding that are stored in Amazon datacenters for energy efficiency.  It is here where consumer digital products gain their asymmetric upside where a $100 a month server can service tens of thousands of users.

My expectations are we'll see an explosion of small teams (<10) that are incredibly highly levered, producing apps that produce novel emotion that transact previously unimaginable scale of volume thought to only belong to AAA gaming studios employing hundreds to thousands of people.

Our efforts at @ethxy is a culmination of these trends coming together into a magical product that delights, providing an enormous amount of novel joy to the world.

2. Novelty of feeling.  Applications that can engender different parts of the human condition that previously were not digitally reproducible.

3. Consistency.  This feels contradictory to #2, but applications that can consistently deliver fresh, pleasurable emotions is king.

This sort of asymmetry has the effect of shortening the user’s attention span. This phenomenon has knock-on effects which are not yet clear. Founders should also consider whether their product has “stickiness” and conditions its users to be loyal, or whether conditions them to be frenetic and disloyal