The Red Thread This Week:
"I don't make songs for free, I make 'em for freedom." — Chance the Rapper
Last Friday, I spent the day in Bentonville with people starting over.
Slackers, the podcast I co-host, set up shop inside a Tandem Studio event with founders across Northwest Arkansas. Some had run hotels and restaurant groups. Some had spent years inside the biggest companies in town.
From the outside looking in, they’d already made it. Most people with careers like theirs would be riding off into the sunset.
Instead, they’ve decided to build new things, mostly because they can.
A theme all day was how much of that new work they plan to give away. Software they'd built. Playbooks they'd spent years refining the hard way.
I've seen this happen before.
In the music business, I watched the cost of recording and releasing music fall year after year. Studio time that used to cost five or six figures ended up fitting on a laptop in a dorm room.
The artists who understood what that meant were quick to start giving their music away. They wanted it to travel.
Chance the Rapper released the Coloring Book mixtape as an independent artist, free and streaming-only, and walked out of the 2017 Grammys with three trophies.
The music itself was the marketing. It gave the communities he wanted to serve a reason to talk. All that talk built the fans who later bought the tickets, the merch, and the records that followed.
AI is doing to software and media (and almost every kind of work) what affordable, powerful music tech did to the record business.
One founder at our table built software to run her own restaurants. Now other operators want it. Her plan is to find one great restaurant group in each city and build it out with them.
Building it cost her a fraction of the money and time it would have cost her five years ago, and partnering costs her even less. Every operator she brings in teaches her how to make it better, and every one of them can vouch for her going forward.
She's making a mixtape. Most of the people in the room were too.
What are you holding back that would cost you almost nothing to give away? That you pay to the community?
That you do to enrich the conversation, and get people to see and understand you?
~ Jaime
Co-host, Slackers podcast
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P.S. What do you think? Hit reply, let me know.
And thanks for being on the other end, I’m glad you’re here.
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B-Sides
The Radio Dept. — Pulling Our Weight
It’s starting to feel a bit more like fall here, which means this track is on repeat for me.
If AI does the beginner work, how do beginners become experts? [Carney]
I’ve always thought of it this way: education is done to you, and learning is done with you. If you’re the experienced one in the room, that second part is your job now.
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