The 3 Stages of Real Value Creation

All right, I'm waking up here. It's like, well, I woke up at like 1:30. It's now 4:10 AM. And, uh, I just had to get this off my chest. So where is value actually created in this business commercial landscape that we're all dealing with here? And I'm reminded of a continuum, especially in technology, especially in emerging technology. From left to right on this continuum, the lowest value is research. It's a white paper, it's something uploaded to a website, it's a blog post, it's a case study, it's content. There's billions of pieces of content. That's great. For Bitcoin, it was a white paper. It's cool, it's an idea, that's neat, but is there any inherent value in it outside of just that idea? Not really. AI, OpenAI wasn't worth that much when they were just doing research and doing math. You can come out of school with a math degree. I had one. No one cares. Like, no one cares. Okay, so then let's go up a bit. Now let's move into a product or a piece of code, right? So that's where the moment Bitcoin turned into A piece of software, and that software ran, and other people used the software, and a transaction occurred. So that's cool. It's a piece of software and something happened. Same thing with OpenAI. They launched GPT-3.5, GPT-4, whatever. And it was the first time that somebody who didn't know anything about this stuff could actually use it and experience it. And they put a little interface on it. So they essentially productized it, right? So that's cool. But the third leg of this from idea to productization is commercialization. This is why big tech is big and the rest of the world is fighting over scraps. Commercialization of emerging tech is very difficult. So what did Bitcoin do? Well, they had to establish a network. So a lot of people needed to Run the Bitcoin mining software. They needed to do transactions. They needed to send money back and forth. They needed to convert from fiat. They needed to run electricity nodes, right? So that's cool. ChatGPT, they kept launching improvements to the core algorithm and then improved the interface, which was based off SMS, which 6 billion people use. And how do you get there? Well, you get there by not constraining your thinking, right? This is like the number one thing that they beat over your head in big tech is like, why are you artificially and arbitrarily going to put a ceiling on your growth before you ever even stop? You're going to put yourself in a box and tell yourself, no, I'm not going to make more money. I'm not going to impact more people's lives. No, I just only want to do this for 2 people. Like, what? You're running a business. Like, it doesn't make any sense. So I guess I'm just wondering why people are celebrating white papers, why people are celebrating blog posts, why people are celebrating Like the first amount of code written. That's not where the value is created. The value is created when you have a number of people or a number of machines using the thing. So yeah, and it's just really funny to me. I think people like lose sight of where value is created and they get into these weird arguments. And most of social media is on the far left end of that continuum, which is why There's so much competition and so little money for the creators because it's just a bunch of like white noise and ideas. So anyways, as you think about that at 4:14 AM here on a Thursday morning, are you operating in research idea phase? Are you operating in like just wrote some code phase or vibe coded phase? Are you operating in commercialization phase? I spend all my time in commercialization. Yeah, you got to do that other stuff first, but that's really where we carve out value. So anyways, disagree with me, beat me up, vilify me. Um, yeah, it's a hill that I've climbed, and I died on the other hills, so I don't think I'm gonna die on this one.