Network Force: The Unseen Hand

Your education about network effects will not be complete without this section. And this section is not just about your startup. It's actually about your life and about the life of everyone you know. As such, this is the section you should share with other people, even if they're not startup founders. We've been working with founders building these network effect businesses for a few decades now. We've seen how they work, what the forces are, what the math is. And we started to notice the same patterns showing up not just in startups and growing businesses, but in people's lives - pretty much everywhere we looked.

We started to dig in and realized that while we seem in control of our own lives, we're actually much less so than we think. There's an unseen hand at work. And that's a network force. The same network forces that make the giant companies giant. Let's walk through what we've seen, so you can understand the impact on your life and how it affects you and the people around you. Understanding this network force can help you better navigate and choose where to go within the network and play with the network force, use the network force, or fight against it to try to drive your life to where you want it to be and give you more options.

What Do Nodes Exchange?

You are being driven by these unseen mathematical principles, but let's talk about your life in specific. Consider yourself a node in the network of people. You're in a particular city. You're in a particular social network. You are connected to other nodes, hundreds of them, or even thousands of them, and there's links between each of you and on those links travels a whole bunch of things. Let me give you a list of some of the things that you might not have thought of actually travel between you and other nodes. Ideas, capital, money, connections, jobs, status (like being invited to a party), aspirations(other people will start to think like you do about what they should be doing with their life). Language is shared. If I use word like Web 3.0 instead of crypto, then you might start saying Web3 instead of crypto. This is how language evolves. Requests are shared. Standards like standards of cleanliness or standards of how close you stand to someone. That really differs between cultures. Expectations, affirmation, belonging. You might share real estate. So, many things are shared between these nodes that you think it's just sort of living, but these are actual mathematical values that are being shared that cause you to decide to move to Cleveland or to move to Seattle or what to do with your life or which job to take or which school to go to or who to marry. It's all in the interactions.

It's almost as if you're walking around with a dashboard in front of your face, giving you data and you feel like you're in control. You feel like you have free will, and you're making your own decisions and you are, but you're making those decisions based on whatever data is in front of you on your dashboard. Who's putting that information on your dashboard? Your network.