1 post published by Alex Danco during September 2021| Alex Danco's Newsletter
If I told you about a piece of consumer electronics technology that: A billion+ people own and use every dayHas changed those people and their world in some pretty radical and consequential waysGet…| Alex Danco's Newsletter
1 post published by Alex Danco during August 2025| Alex Danco's Newsletter
I’m heading to Andreessen Horowitz! After five years at Shopify, I’m moving onto my next adventure in life, and joining a16z. Shopify is an incredible place, and Tobi is one of the great foun…| Alex Danco's Newsletter
There’s a lot you can criticize about cars and individual car ownership. But one criticism you shouldn’t make blindly is “Think about how much of the car you don’t use.” It’s true that not ev…| Alex Danco's Newsletter
I am delighted that Windsurf has turned out well. It sounds like everyone is getting a good outcome of some kind, and the principal actors involved get to claim good faith. So that’s reassuring. Bu…| Alex Danco's Newsletter
3 posts published by Alex Danco during April 2019| Alex Danco's Newsletter
The more we understand about the world around us, the less it seems we understand about people and the way they are. This post is an introduction to one man, named René Girard, who bucked this tren…| Alex Danco's Newsletter
I mean, what stage of the S curve is this? It’s been a tough week for the AI haters; not only because of Ghibli Day (if you aren’t in the… Read more Scarcity and Abundance in 2025 →| Alex Danco's Newsletter
So, I guess there are four possible scenarios here? Scenario One: the Trump economic gambit is a good strategy, but they’re executing badlyScenario Two: it’s a bad strategy, and they’re executing b…| Alex Danco's Newsletter
There’s some counterintuitive but deep intuition that things can feel higher signal when they are 99% false but 1% true, versus it they are 99% true but 1% false. A… Read more Wine tasting with Claude Shannon →| Alex Danco's Newsletter
In December of 2019, which feels like quite a lifetime ago, I posted ten predictions about themes I thought would be important in the 2020s. In the immediate weeks after I wrote this post, it start…| Alex Danco's Newsletter
There’s a certain magical quality to creating new things together. Any time we bring something genuinely new to life, especially if it took a group effort, something special happened that… Read more Innovation takes magic, and that magic is gift culture →| Alex Danco's Newsletter
Creativity After AI The comic Chris Fleming has a great bit: “[The singer] Saint Vincent said something the other day… ‘I am so glad that I moved to New York… Read more Have you ever seen a goth downtown? →| Alex Danco's Newsletter
This dream is all amiss interpreted. It was a vision fair and fortunate. Your statue spouting blood in many pipes, In which so many smiling Romans bath’d, Signifies that from you …| Alex Danco's Newsletter
Ten predictions for the next ten years. #1: Enterprise software in the 2020s will replay Softbank’s Capital-as-a-Moat disaster of the late 2010s. Here’s a thesis I’ve been chewing on f…| Alex Danco's Newsletter
Posts about Uncategorized written by Alex Danco| Alex Danco's Newsletter
Michael Seibel of YC posted a short video the other day about a topic that’s near and dear to my heart: Why Fundraising is Different in Silicon Valley. This is an interesting and important questio…| Alex Danco's Newsletter
Six months ago I proposed The Michael Scott Theory of Social Class, which says: “The higher you ascend the ladder of the Educated Gentry class, the more you become Michael Scott.” The M…| Alex Danco's Newsletter
Maybe it was a subconscious thing or something, but when I wrote the essay on World Building a couple weeks ago, I had clearly already started thinking about the future of this newsletter – e…| Alex Danco's Newsletter
Each year, Shopify releases a report with Deloitte called our Economic Impact Report, in order to highlight and celebrate some bigger-picture impacts of Shopify merchants around the world. This pas…| Alex Danco's Newsletter
To the extent that we were taught any history at all, I suspect that many of us learned our world history in a fairly linear fashion: “First the Greeks, then the Romans, then the Dark Ages, t…| Welcome to Dancoland
I’m happy to finally share a thesis I’ve been chewing on for a little while. I call it The Michael Scott Theory of Social Class, which states: The higher you ascend the ladder of the Educated …| Alex Danco's Newsletter
You’ve probably heard a familiar piece of career advice: “Everyone works in sales, even if they don’t realize it.” This is good advice. I want to propose an updated version for today: “Everyo…| Alex Danco's Newsletter
Each day on Tech Twitter, we get up in the morning, open up the website, and then go see what it is we’re mad about. A few days ago, it was this: The concept of “pay to get a better place in l…| Alex Danco's Newsletter
Ten years from now, what seismic change will we reflect back on and think, “well that was pretty obvious, in retrospect”? Debt is going to finally come to the tech industry. We can hat…| Alex Danco's Newsletter
Today’s newsletter is a partnership special: I’m filling in for Mario Gabriele at The Generalist, who is off this week and kindly offered me the opportunity to write a guest issue. So today will be…| Alex Danco's Newsletter
One night, a young man who we’ll call Student went to sleep and fell into a strange dream. Student: Huh, where am I? I don’t recognize this place. In front of him was a large black box,…| Alex Danco's Newsletter
Hello everyone! This week in Dancoland, Jim O’Shaughnessy and I have a fresh podcast recording for your enjoyment. Alex Danco: Everyone’s job is World-Building | Infinite Loops You can …| Alex Danco's Newsletter
Nadia Eghbal’s new book, Working In Public: the Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software, may not have been on your short list of books to read this year. It’s admittedly a nerdy topic: …| Alex Danco's Newsletter