ts so tuff 😭😭

LMFAOOOO the future is so bright

[ THE CASE FOR VIRALITY ] There’s been a lot of noise the last month on X about attention as a strategy and whether or not it works. As one of the frontrunners getting most talked about here, I think it’s about time for me to offer my thoughts. Fundamentally, I believe that it has never been easier to scale an idea quickly, and it has never been harder to break through the noise. Pretty much every attention-first company is less than, or around a year old. The relevance behind us is hyper inflated because, despite being months old, we’re seen much more than some of the biggest companies. Virality compresses time, and a few big moments make a months-old startup feel, in your head, like we’ve been around for five years. The truth is, there is no “proof” that attention-first strategies don’t work because the experiment has barely even started. Startups fail all the time, but most of them just fail quietly. The key difference is that attention-first companies are hard to forget, so people obsess over their trajectory in a way they never would for 99% of startups who sit behind a waitlist for 2 years. The macro suggests the same too. There have never been more eight-nine-figure ARR bootstrapped companies. Most of these would not be possible without social media. Distribution today scales orders of magnitude faster than in any previous era. A “disappointing” few months for one or two early startups don’t disprove the entire model. And at a cultural level, the actual winners of the attention-era who have built the biggest empires are ALWAYS the most polarizing figures. It’s Donald Trump, Kai Cenat, iShowSpeed, the Kardashians. This is fundamentally different from the world these older operators come from. Short-form only became the dominant cultural medium a few years ago, and there are already countless examples of impressive businesses formed out of it. Nobody is claiming that virality is the only way to build a company or even necessarily the best way. But it is intellectually unserious to claim that it’s not a viable way when the entire experiment has just started. This time 12 months ago, I was studying for my midterms back at Columbia. Companies are built by building something and selling it. If you can go viral, you can sell something good much more quickly than you could in the past. That is the case for virality.