Yancey Strickler
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Intro for founders

If you’re someone who builds and starts projects, you might be interested in:

  • New mental models for products and platforms
  • Better ways to align culture and capital
  • Signals about where creative infrastructure is going

Here’s a path through my work with that lens.

1. The underlying frameworks

  • “Dark Forest Theory of the Internet” – Why the public internet is fragmenting into private, semi-secret spaces, and what that means for society online and off.
  • “The Post-Individual” – On the shift from individual-centric to group-centric identities and what that implies for what it means to be a person.
  • Bentoism – A decision-making framework (Now Me / Future Me / Now Us / Future Us) for seeing beyond short-term optimization.

2. Products and business models

Posts that share actual mechanics of business models built around group-level units rather than just individuals.

  • "Why we started Kickstarter" – Blog published the day after Kickstarter launched in 2009, explaining our motivations for the project.
  • "Resist and thrive" — Why long-term, pro-social growth is the only thing worth fighting for.
  • Metalabel – A platform for group releases: how groups share ownership of cultural work and present it together.
  • Dark Forest Operating System (DFOS) – A private internet for groups, combining chat, membership, and treasury tools.
  • Artist Corporations – Posts exploring the work to create a new law and business structure for creative people.

3. Strategies and mechanics

Moving from the why to the how.

  • "How to build a newthing" — On the metaphysical qualities and experience of building an organization that becomes much bigger and more powerful than you.
  • "Defining groupcore" — A post detailing a theory of the modern, fluid way of working defined by the online world.
  • "Metablogging" — A practice we use within Metalabel to build a shared collective brain.

4. Deep dives

If you want to go a level deeper: