Multiplying Attention: The Secret Art of Doing More

Attention is scarce, and that's why it's valuable, right? Anything people can do to get in front of you, they will.

That's why I've been so outspoken about advertising and why I've never been able to bring myself to build any ad supported products. I value my attention, so I assume you value yours as well. And I really appreciate when someone spends that valuable attention on something I've created.

That's one of the coolest feelings on earth.

But over the last few months, I've shifted that take a bit.

First, there was DefenderOfBasic's Substack post on advertising, and I shifted my stance a bit on it. I'll say it doesn't all have to be bad. But we still get bombarded with way too much of it. (Random theory about a possible connection that I want to explore more: the increased rate of advertising and the increase in diagnosed cases of ADHD. I think there could be something there about having to constantly try to guard our attention so that things don't capture them.)

But then I also asked myself, "What if attention weren't a scarce resource?"

If you measure a single point in time, it is a scarce resource. There are a finite number of humans on earth, and they can only pay attention to one thing in a moment (the moment apparently being the unit of time it takes to pay attention to something).

If you add all that attention up over time, you still get a finite amount, right? So it has to be a scarce resource.

Changes To Systems Thinking

That's true in a scarce system, because it measures everything in linear time. Scarce systems only have information about their internal state, not the state of the world.

Abundant systems, on the other hand, can adapt to changing external conditions. (For more on abundant systems, I wrote about them here).

Let's say you have two people who are using a system.

You own the system, so you can observe the internal state of the system, e.g. you can open up the database and view the user's records. You don't know anything about them that your system didn't capture.

So we'll say you capture their name, their address, their phone number, and their email.

We can call that 4 moments of attention for each user. A total of 8 moments.

That is how much attention it takes for 2 users to use our system. So how can we optimize? We can't unless we know something else about who's on the other end.

An abundant system can always get more context about the environment in order to save the user of the system time and energy. So let's say the first person added an item that said that the second user had the same address and phone number.

That means that person A spent 5 moments so that person B only had to spend 2. A total of only 7.

This shows up in the real world all the time, in the realm of open source. Someone solves a problem once, spending however long it took to figure out the solution, and then puts the solution online for others to use, because it takes less time to install a package than it does to fully understand a problem in order to solve it. That saves others time. And when you save a lot of people a lot of time, that's an extremely valuable thing!

So why don't we reward it as such?

The Challenge of Measurement

Because it's not easy to measure how much time was saved. We don't have the counterfactual of what happens with trying to build it. There's a lot that you have to do in order to monetize something, because we've created a world in which everyone is highly skeptical of giving their money to someone. You have to show them a future in which they feel they value your product more than anything else in the universe that they could spend that money on then or in the future.

You have so spend a lot of time understanding who a potential buyer is. Most people who create open source packages have no interest in doing so. They solved their own problem and wanted to share it.

A New Business Model

With Build In Public University, I'm planning on showing an open source business model. How can you monetize when everything is free?

Quite simple: you monetize the future.

What you want to do is create a parking meter of sorts that measures the runway for an idea. Anyone can pick up the idea at any time and fork it. Anyone can take previous data and play what-if.

One of the problems in society is that we aren't incentivized to let things die. But things should die, it's part of the cycle. Things have to die in order to be reborn, and I think this is true of ideas as well.

That's where I think the transparency comes in. Is the product worth the cost? This actually creates an interesting path to success as well, because the people who benefit from it so much that they want it to keep going no matter what are incentivized to pay more.

I believe prices should be individualized based on what you can afford. If you can benefit from something, but can't afford to pay, you shouldn't be kept from it. (this is particularly true with digital goods, but with effective planning I believe you can actually extend this to physical goods).

The interesting thing is that this can actually be used to isolate and penalize bad actors, because the goal is to keep playing, and when you don't behave in cooperative ways, people won't want to keep playing with you.

That's essentially what happens with investing, right? You are monetizing the future because you are buying a stake in what comes next. That gives someone else the capital to execute now.

That's why the tuition structure of Build In Public University is the way it is. I want to reward people for the work they've already put in (publishing their ideas online to help others learn about the state of the world) by giving them a way to raise capital without taking actual investments.

How do you invest in creators?

Maybe a better question: how do you invest in ideas?

The current investing structure doesn't quite work for creators. That's where this idea comes in as an alternative. So, if you don't gain upside in the actual business, what do you gain upside in?

The (potential) attention of the creator/professor.

Tuition is 50/50 to the university and the professor. Ideally, the professor will use their funds to pay students to do work at a below market rate. The hope here is that the professor will use the funds to run "what-if" scenarios. Asking for the same thing in multiple ways or from multiple students. This gives them a way to see how different things would look, helping them get a better idea of what they are looking for.

Then, my hypothesis is that professors will bring students on full-time or recommend their work to others.

This is another form of multiplying attention. I want to have the university monitor these transactions and publish data on the cost of work. This can act as a baseline for the work done from a student, and move up from there. One of the hardest things to do in the current economy is determine how valuable a given skill truly is.

Build In Public University will be researching that so that others can benefit.

That's the mission: we want to be a trusted source of data and research that isn't economically motivated by what we are studying, we are economically motivated by sharing our research in an accessible way that gets others excited about the future we are building towards.

Research is multiplied attention. Pulling attention on multiple sources together to come up with a new insight that allows attention to be used more effectively. You get to monitor more while paying attention to less.

Education is multiplied attention. Giving students the ability to learn things guided by someone who can help them evaluate where they are.

Instead, we've created a world that forces attention on all sorts of different things individually and we are being wasteful with people's attention.

Connection to the Thesis

That's why my thesis is that people are the world's most undervalued resource. In the post I linked, I outlined an experiment I wanted to run. Unfortunately, I didn't have anyone that ended up being interested in helping me run that yet.

So I'm going down this route now. Because I believe that, if we valued their attention and gave them ways to pay as much or as little attention as they wanted. That's another interesting piece of this model because one of the hard parts of angel investing is that it requires tracking to see how you do. If you don't do it a lot, you don't have data to improve. So you have to pay attention down the line, or provide help down the line to make it work. But what if that wasn't part of it? What if you could invest as a placeholder for future attention back? The earlier you are, the more pull you should have, in theory.

But it's all optional, not guaranteed. No future attention is ever guaranteed, because that depends on all sorts of other factors. If you give someone a bunch of money but then act like a dick to them?

Nope, you are gone. That's exactly why there's never any guarantee of access. The goal of this university is to only reward positive sum behaviors. There's an abundant future out there for us if we are willing to build it.

I've been working on it for years. And I'm hoping that you'll join me.

If this sounds interesting to you, sign up for the email here and send me an email or slide into my DMs on Twitter.