The Curious Engineer

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Alex Danco's Newsletter

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Essays / personalTech news / industry

’15’20’25
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183 from 3 Sep 2013 to 12 Aug 2025
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now and then
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2025 9

  1. I’m joining a16z
  2. A startup is a bundle, and Windsurf broke the bundle
  3. Scarcity and Abundance in 2025
  4. If you’re first out the door, it’s not called panicking
  5. Wine tasting with Claude Shannon
  6. 10 Predictions for the 2020s: Midterm report card
  7. Innovation takes magic, and that magic is gift culture
  8. Have you ever seen a goth downtown?
  9. Manifest Destiny returns

2021 19

  1. When Did Things Happen?
  2. Twist Biosciences: the DNA API
  3. Dancoland
  4. Michael, Dwight and Andy: the Three Aesthetics of the Creative Class
  5. World-Building and the Early Internet
  6. Civic LARPing
  7. Power, Proximity, and Standup Comedy
  8. Building the World of Alex Danco’s Newsletter
  9. What’s behind the Shopify Effect
  10. Worldbuilding and Antifragility
  11. World Building
  12. How Scenes Work, with Jim O’Shaughnessy
  13. Pipe It! Platforms, Funding, and the Future
  14. NFTs and CBGBs: How’s that for a clickbait title
  15. The next evolution of the Internet Newsletter: with Mario Gabriele of The Generalist
  16. The Pirate Problem
  17. r/WhiteHouseBets
  18. The Michael Scott Theory of Social Class
  19. Why the Canadian Tech Scene Doesn’t Work

2020 35

  1. Fixing Audit Won’t Fix Fraud: An Interview with Kris Bennatti of Bedrock AI
  2. Bfcm
  3. Election Day 2020: René Girard, Part 2
  4. Six Lessons from Six Months at Shopify
  5. Covid Kills Inertia: Homeownership Edition
  6. Making is Show Business now
  7. The Future of the CFA Institute: An Interview with Margaret Franklin, CFA
  8. Are Founders Allowed to Lie?
  9. The Kids are Alright: An Interview with Eugene Wei and Julie Young (Gift Culture, Part 4)
  10. Scarcity Status versus Abundance Status (Gift Culture, Part 3)
  11. The SE Suite: An Interview with Julie Young (Gift Culture Part 2)
  12. Homesteading the Twittersphere
  13. Rollin’ (ARR-paid vehicle)
  14. It’s Not Debt, It’s Better: an Interview with Harry Hurst of Pipe
  15. SPAC Man Begins
  16. The Freud Moment
  17. Craft is Culture
  18. The Most Famous Loop
  19. Never Hertz to Ask
  20. Let’s just get rid of peer review
  21. Debt: the First 5000 Years
  22. Download Cards, “eCommerce”, and Covid Commerce
  23. Shopify
  24. It’s going to get worse
  25. Life is Made of Unfair Coin Flips
  26. Positional Scarcity and the Virus
  27. Black Swan Events
  28. Antifragility
  29. Employee Stock Options: free money, kinda
  30. VCs should play bridge
  31. Progress, Postmodernism and the Tech Backlash
  32. Can Twitter Save Science?
  33. Debt is Coming
  34. Counterfeit Food
  35. Social Capital in Silicon Valley

2019 39

  1. Ten Predictions for the 2020s
  2. The top five “I, too”s of 2019
  3. Stone Soup, Diversification, and the Alchemy of Venture
  4. The Social Subsidy of Angel Investing
  5. The Car Bundle
  6. Internet Crowds and Personal Space
  7. An Interview with Jamie Catherwood
  8. The Trillion Dollar Lawsuit
  9. Everything is Amazing, But Nothing is Ours
  10. The Audio Revolution
  11. An Interview with Brent Beshore of adventur.es
  12. Five Writing Tips
  13. Disruption Theory is Real, but Wrong
  14. Netflix, Positional Scarcity and the Red Queen’s Race
  15. The Founding Murder and the Final Boss
  16. Why I don’t love Light Rail transit
  17. Positional Scarcity
  18. OuiWork? The quick case for WeWork as an actually disruptive business
  19. The players are the artists; the game is the venue
  20. An Interview with Casey Newton from The Verge
  21. An Interview with Zachary Sun of Tierra Biosciences
  22. A Midsummer Night’s Term Sheet
  23. An Interview with Jonathan Hsu from Tribe Capital
  24. Birthday Post
  25. All the other kids with their pumped up BTCs
  26. Facebook’s Crypto Strawman
  27. Would you accept cheaper rent in exchange for a monthly Amazon purchasing quota?
  28. I’m writing a book, and I want your help.
  29. Google Chrome, the perfect antitrust villain?
  30. What happens if building more housing doesn’t work?
  31. Crowds, Power and Bitcoin
  32. Cooking As A Service
  33. Billy Joel: American Kayfabe Master
  34. Secrets about People: A Short and Dangerous Introduction to René Girard
  35. Snippets 2.0 – it’s back, baby
  36. “I, too, am Contrarian”: moving on from Social Capital / final newsletter
  37. A technical introduction to Bitcoin for non-technical people
  38. Why is twitter dot com, the hell website, so funny?
  39. Starting this thing back up

2016 1

  1. Seeking the Indicorn

2015 30

  1. Taylor Swift, iOS, and the Access Economy: Why the Normal Distribution is Vanishing
  2. Social Capital
  3. Ways to think about water
  4. How to identify The Most Important Thing
  5. Predicting Walmart
  6. Software Eats Healthcare, For Dummies
  7. Notifications, part 2: Gradually, and then suddenly
  8. Emergence Podcast, Episode 4: Notifications
  9. Notifications run our lives now. Is there room for any more?
  10. Why fantasy football is so hellaciously pervasive right now
  11. Disrupting Visa will be really hard – but here’s how it could happen
  12. Dropbox: the first dead decacorn
  13. Emergence Podcast, Episode 3: The Uber Episode
  14. The Colour Wheel of Tech: Why Apple hates Google, Facebook is the new Microsoft, and more
  15. The startup logic puzzle
  16. Emergence Podcast, Episode 2: Secrets
  17. Secrets
  18. Hey there, buyable Pins
  19. Emergence Podcast, Episode 1: Zero Rating
  20. 2 Big Updates
  21. Type 1 versus Type 2 Proof
  22. How Apple Escapes Disruption
  23. Startups are not normally distributed
  24. IT’S WHITE AND GOLD NO IT’S BLUE AND BLACK
  25. Push, Pull, Purchasing and Pinterest
  26. Idle hockey observations: Age/Zone Start% team signatures
  27. The rise of the access economy
  28. Quick thought on the future of STEM jobs
  29. The big, bad wireless carriers: 6-month update on my 2 year hypothesis
  30. The Montreal Canadiens, hockey lineups and the Peter Principle

2014 37

  1. Haters gonna hate (hate, hate, hate, hate) on the Innovator’s Dilemma
  2. Backtrack announcement: part 2
  3. Update from Backtrack
  4. Interview with Rob Woodbridge from untether.tv
  5. Our Kickstarter campaign is live!
  6. Innovation / Not Innovation
  7. A quick thought on company culture.
  8. Bundling, unbundling, and the future of health care innovation
  9. Rehab economics
  10. Be the Twitter Guys: More gold from Sam Altman’s startup class
  11. Theatres of the absurd: how to get startup ideas
  12. A secret about wearables
  13. We’re doing a Kickstarter!
  14. Hey Alex Blumberg: coffee is for closers only
  15. Forget fitness. The real killer app for wearable health is rehab.
  16. Startup Wisdom from NPR’s Car Talk
  17. Mobile Net Neutrality will be the kingmaker of Apple versus Google.
  18. Should Samsung make a deal with the devil? (Yeah, probably)
  19. Smartwatches and the triage nurse problem
  20. Points vs. Shapes
  21. Interview with Alex Gramling, on the Starting Good Podcast
  22. Prediction: Android Health will look a lot like Google Now
  23. Backtrack: the movie
  24. Apple gets aggressive with HealthKit
  25. Office upgrade
  26. New faces at Backtrack
  27. Is Apple missing a big opportunity with Healthbook?
  28. Oh Canada
  29. Full Stack Rehab
  30. Term sheets: VCs versus record labels
  31. How long will wearables be their own product category?
  32. Quantified Self, meet the Rehabilitation community
  33. Touch screens in cars: a lesson for wearable tech
  34. On entrepreneurial situations
  35. From the TandemLaunch blog: CES, TandemLaunch, and Cool Toys
  36. Update from the Backtrack team
  37. 2014: Caffeine counting resumption!

2013 13

  1. Will you develop back problems? A simple test from Roz Warren
  2. Is grad school useful for young entrepreneurs? Guest post from TechEntrepreneurship
  3. Publications and Vanity Metrics: an update
  4. TandemLaunch Pitch Day
  5. BackTrack + TandemLaunch
  6. Publications and Vanity Metrics
  7. CareFWD 2013
  8. The back pain patient app: one direct comparable
  9. A killer app for back pain patients
  10. D Labs and P Labs
  11. The 2012-2013 coffee experiment
  12. How to hack life science research: part 1
  13. A problem with science: Disruptive vs. Sustaining Research