386: Thoughts on Cloudflare Q4, Adyen vs Stripe, x86 CPUs, Jupiter vs Saturn, Stability AI, and Master of Puppets

"Slowing down to think can be a superpower."

Don’t treat people as bad as they are. Treat them as good as you are. -Kevin Kelly

✨🔭 Astronomers estimate that there are between 100 and 400 BILLION stars in our galaxy, the Milky Way.

I suggest taking at least 10 seconds to think about that. One of humanity’s flaws is that we spend too little time thinking about things… Slowing down to think can be a superpower.

To be honest, I’m mostly giving advice to myself here, because I don’t think I spend enough time pondering that fact, among other things worth really thinking about.

It’s not just a number: these stars are out there right now all around us. Many of them have orbiting planets, and many of these planets have moons… There are so many large objects — each a whole world unto itself — in just *one* galaxy.

And then when you look at James Webb’s Deep Field photos showing just how many galaxies there are out there…. 🤯

🛀💭📊🌐 The human brain isn’t good at processing large numbers of people. It’s difficult to think about scale when things get larger than the number of people that could fit into the same venue…

Recently, I was thinking about how many of the biggest podcasts I listen to in business/investing/tech have around 50,000-100,000 regular listeners per episode.

This sounds like a lot when I compare it to my own podcast which gets between 2k and 6k downloads per episode these days. However, if I compare it to a random mid-sized city’s FM radio station, these podcasts aren’t that big, especially since they have global distribution vs only local/regional for FM.

If I start thinking of it like that, most of the online media I consume is pretty niche. Even Ben Thompson probably has readers/listeners in the high tens of thousands/low hundreds of thousands.

This steamboat, approaching 15,000 subs, is tiny. 🚢

There are so many people on this planet, and most of them are the dark matter of online media. They’re there and exert a huge gravitational pull, but they don’t show up in most places.

The flip side of the niche scale is that if you do it correctly, the intensity of the relationship is very different.

The media FM radio station may reach a lot of people, but will only elicit a lower affinity/intensity from most listeners *because* it has to appeal to a broader public. They can’t spend 2 hours talking in-depth about just that thing that really interests you.

If you’ve been listening to a good podcast for a while, you get to feel like you know these people and they’re a part of your life, they occupy more mental mindspace than almost any other media.

Video gets more scale, even in niches (ie. Youtube), but I don’t think the intensity quite reaches podcast levels 🤔 There’s a line in a podcast I heard recently — Spike Eskin on Making Media — that made a good point about audio vs video (I’m editing for clarity):

The big difference between TV and radio, or video and audio, is that when you watch TV and you're watching somebody, you're not feeling like you're spending time with that person. 

But when you are listening to audio, whether it's in your car or walking your dog and they're just talking to you, it's just you and them, the ability to want to spend time with them is different.

I think *some* video has that more personal quality, but I the point rings true generally.

📝 Obsidian has a new CEO, Stephan Ango aka Kepano.

In his first message as CEO, he writes:

Obsidian is, and will continue to be:

• Free for personal use

• Built on durable, open file formats without lock-in

• Private, offline-first, and E2E encrypted

• Endlessly customizable via API/plugins

Above all, Obsidian is 100% user-supported. There are no investors pushing us to compromise on these values.

It seems like a way to let the two co-founders spend even more time coding and building the product, but it’s interesting to note that the new CEO is also technical and contributed code and created one of the most popular Obsidian themes (Minimal).

Answering a question on Reddit, Kepano wrote:

Licat will continue his role as CTO leading the engineering efforts. Silver will continue her role as COO, leading the community and many of the strategic/product decisions. I will be focused on the business side, building the company structure that allows Obsidian to continue growing as a democratic tool that people around the world can adopt.

The company now has 7 employees, but not all of them are full-time.

I love this software, so I hope this only makes the company better and able to iterate even faster!

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🏦 💰 Liberty Capital 💳 💴

⛅️ Cloudflare Q4 2022 Highlights 🕵️‍♂️ 💵

Here are my thoughts and highlights on the most recent results: