The Cost of Information is Going to $0
What I believe comes next
This post is a part of the Iowa Startup Collective. If you haven't already, check out the other writers at IowaStartupCollective.Substack.com.
Throughout this month, I’ve shared my entrepreneurial journey with a half dozen classrooms. Whether it was with high schoolers or college students, every Q&A ended up circling the same truth; the cost of information is going to $0. Therefore, it’s never been easier to start something.
Raise your hand if your family bought an entire encyclopedia set back in the 1990s.✋
Now that information is close to $0, what does that mean for entrepreneurship?
First up, it’s never been cheaper to start a startup.
It’s never been cheaper or faster to build a prototype and reach customer #1.
Mikayla and I set out to prove it this month, by hosting a 1 month MooneyGrants competition in a DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization) we belong to.
With the help of ChatGPT and bots, we spun up the following competition.
The goal? encourage others to go from idea to prototype to revenue in < 1 month.
The majority of the competitors have little to no coding experience. But no one is afraid to play with Canva, ChatGPT, or Replit—to name a few tools we should all be using. At 18 days into the month, there’s 7 people competing, with 107 points between them. They’ve already built landing pages, demoed their apps, and found paying customers. The ideas so far revolve around prediction markets, brokering AI compute power, a gamified fitness tracker, drop shipping CPGs, and gaming leaderboards among friends on the social platform, Farcaster.
One of the fun apps I’ve appreciated so far is a Clayton Farms life extension calculator, built in about 1 hour, via Replit.
What we’re experimenting with in the competition above is what I believe comes next for builders in an age where information costs $0. I think it’s a heckuva combo to have a community who values contributions and experiments (the right DAOs do this well), and understands that perpetual hackathons are how to compound everyone’s momentum and potential.
Reach out to me if you’d like to join and contribute to a community like the one above.
If this is an example of how the cost of information going to $0 looks internally, or within an exclusive tech community, what does it look like externally or elsewhere?
I don’t believe my future children will learn how to drive, go to K-12, or go to a 4 year college.
Right now, the value of a college is not a degree. It’s that college’s network.
But as 4 year colleges turn to 2 year colleges, or they offer more and more 1 year certificate programs (to try and keep up with the cost of information going to $0), I believe the future of external networks are already afoot.
Where? At the intersection of web 3 and AI. It’s all playing out in real time on “Crypto Twitter/CT/X.”
First you saw this crypto cycle start off strong with AI agents launching their own coins to billion+ market caps to steal attention from memecoins. Now we’re looking toward the part of the cycle where NFTs gain popularity. But if you look at the infrastructure being built around all of the hot topics and trending mindshare, you’ll see that that the real winner is the filter that comes as a result of information costing $0.
That’s social scoring. And it’s going to be the filter that sits on top of every one of your social profiles.
The best example I can currently show of social scoring is Ethos Network. It’s a new platform in closed beta, where each profile on X has a social score, assigned from people voting on that person or entity’s credibility.
i.e. take a look at Michael Saylor’s profile on X, with the Ethos Network overlay.
130 reviews, currently 99% positive. His 1805 rating puts him in the Reputable category. You can see the categories below, from my chart.
Social scoring helps communities to identify credibility and fraud. It helps people to better connect with reputable peers. It helps in hiring. It helps in collaborating. It helps cut through the noise when anyone anywhere can start with information for $0.
While there’s no way social scoring will be perfect, both the flywheel and network effects from platforms like Ethos hitting scale is big. When information costs $0 and social scoring is growing, building a following, an audience, a customer base, a community, or a brand will drastically be reduced in cost and time, via flywheel effects.
Look at 3 of my recent interactions on X. Social scores are drastically different.
That’s powerful information for knowing who to trust, when reading each of these profiles’ replies and thoughts—all without losing focus or leaving the platform. Great flywheel effect, since this loop is self reinforcing.
What about a network effect, where everything becomes more valuable as more people use it?
While we don’t yet have enough people using Ethos Network, there are other platforms complimenting it through their network effects right now.
One example is Kaito.AI. They’ve built an incredible business on top of visualizing mindshare for various topics, based on people contributing thoughtful content and discussion toward those topics. When a topic’s mindshare expands, leaderboards are created. Check out the VC mindshare on X over the past 7 days.
Kaito then rewards contributions with points (called Yaps). The points turn to $ via airdrops—from both Kaito and new companies building on top of Kaito. The more users and companies using Kaito, the more clarity everyone has, and the faster someone understands what topics are actually gaining momentum (another example of the cost of information going to $0 in real time).
PS, Kaito now has an Ethos overlay, right within their leaderboards. See that nice ring and score around Jesse Pollak’s profile pic?
What happens when social scoring and mindshare visualizations expand beyond Crypto Twitter?
Accounting, Education, Law, Medicine (to name a few) will be forever changed. Instead of only companies being forced to “innovate or die,” so will professions.
Now that the cost of information is $0, what comes next for you?