Special thanks to artist and writer Jeremy Finch for his help with our new logo. I can’t thank him enough. Sometimes the true value of an artist is their ability to hear what is never even said. Make sure to bookmark his latest essay, “why post things online.”
— Daniel
Here’s your reading list for the week of October 12th, 2025.
Sunday: The Future of Media-Driven Startups
Earlier this year I spoke with the managing partner of a venture capital firm about the “Every” Thing blueprint and the creator fund from Jack Raines. We talked about how the venture studio model seems poised for a renaissance in the agentic age and he challenge me to try and develop a thesis as a fun though exercise.
My core thesis is a stack:
Collectives → Ecosystems → Communities → Products → Capital
Collectives blend creative and technical talent to rapidly test and build ideas.
Ecosystems (like Substack) are leveraged by collectives to build communities.
Communities become the moat—offering organic growth, trust, and feedback.
Products emerge from within, often launched through essays and content first.
Capital follows influence; it becomes most powerful when paired with trust.
Startups have always been laboratories—spaces where people test ideas, fail fast, and pursue concepts that seem crazy until they work. The best founders do things that don’t scale, engage directly with the market, and iterate rapidly.
That won’t change.
But how startups are formed, funded, and grown is undergoing a fundamental shift.
I have a lot of conviction around venture studios in the agentic age because you can take more shots on goal instead of going all in on one idea. Venture studios often raise capital from LPs similar to traditional venture capital firms but it’s now feasible to form a viable studio with far less capital.
When the cost of software development approaches zero, you have to rethink everything — business models, metrics, burn rates, revenue per employee, etc. Investors have to consider the purpose of pre-seed and seed rounds when tiny teams can go from zero to profitability on their own. Bootstrapping isn’t new, but it’s now far easier to get to venture scale without venture capital.
Startups are hiring agents instead of leaning on growth capital.
I read an essay from signüll a while back about the new power stack.
platform > creator > audience > company > capital
This helped me form the basis of a thesis for where I think startups are headed.
I’m calling this the collective stack.
collective > ecosystem > community > products > capital
The Collective leverages an Ecosystem to build Community and Products.
The Community reduces customer acquisition costs and serves as the marketing fuel for new product launches. Successful products generate Capital which is returned to the collective. The dream of the one-person billion-dollar startup is still alive but more and more creators are realizing it’s far easier to win if you collaborate with others.
What happens when you toss a brilliant entrepreneur, engineer, designer, and writer into a room? You get things like Spiral and Cora.
The members of the collective are the founding members of the community.
Members of the collective serve as both creators and curators, building in public while attracting others who share the vision. The collective model allows for rapid ideation, shared resources, and distributed risk. Each member brings their unique audience and expertise, creating a flywheel effect that accelerates growth.
When successful, these collectives can spin out multiple ventures, each benefiting from the combined network effects and creative capital of the group. The key is finding the right balance of autonomy and collaboration.
The most powerful ecosystems are YouTube, Twitter, and Substack.
The smartest people on earth are in at least one. Two of my favorite writers, Packy McCormick and Anu, use two quite well.
Ecosystems > Platforms.
Bluesky is trying to be a viable ecosystem but it unfortunately is running into headwinds from competing protocols I don’t believe you have to choose only one ecosystem and it’s becoming increasingly easy to manage several. It could be an advantage to have different members of a collective leverage the ecosystem that they’re most active in and understand intimately.
Followers and newsletter subscribers alone won’t be good enough.
Community is the metric that truly matters.
Show me your subscriber count and I’ll ask for your engagement rate.
Community will be one of the last moats standing in the creator economy.
A strong community provides organic distribution, rapid feedback loops, and built-in product-market fit validation. They act as both early adopters and evangelists, spreading the word through genuine enthusiasm instead of paid advertising.
The key is fostering authentic connections between members.
This creates a self-sustaining ecosystem where value flows naturally between creators, community members, and the broader market.
The future belongs to creators who understand this dynamic.
An essay should be the first product.
Every spent years building trust by creating brilliant content.
I do believe that software is now a form of content but the focus should be on writing and community building first and foremost.
Engineering as Marketing is a viable tactic to grow an audience but it shouldn’t come at the expense of great writing and storytelling.
A mix of code & prose, one informing the other, is probably the answer here.
Having a ton of money is no longer an advantage. Products are cheap to build and capital is becoming more of a commodity if there’s no influence behind it.
But capital paired with influence and community?
That’s a moat.
Influence amplifies capital’s impact and creates opportunities that money alone can’t buy. When collectives combine capital with the trust and attention of a thriving community, they unlock unprecedented leverage.
— Daniel
Monday: Leap Capital: How Much Do You Need To Quit?
Tuesday: “Be Different” doesn’t work for building products anymore
Wednesday: What’s it like to live in 2025?
Thursday: Why post things online?
Friday: Weird prompts, better answers
Saturday: In the Costco Era of Software, Design Is the Differentiator
I appreciate your feedback. If you enjoyed this piece, drop a like or comment below. You can also send a note to daniel@indiethinkers.com. Would love to hear from you.