10-year narratives

Decades deep#

Jeff Bezos famously said it’s more important to know what will not change over the next ten years, versus what will.

“If you base your strategy first and foremost on more transitory things — who your competitors are, what kind of technologies are available, and so on,” he explained, “those things are going to change so rapidly that you’re going to have to change your strategy very rapidly, too.”

A business needs a foundation of constancy. For Amazon, no matter what else might fluctuate, “Customers are still going to want low prices. They are still going to want fast delivery. And they are still going to want a big selection.” Those fundamentals are eternal (or close enough).

Bezos’ insight is crucial but incomplete. We don’t merely want to understand what will be the same tomorrow as it is today. Many things fall into that category without being strategically useful.

We want to understand what goals and needs will persist even as the means of accomplishing them changes. It is the combination of permanence and change that offers promising opportunities.

For example, Amazon succeeded by satisfying the evergreen consumer desire for convenience better than the pre-internet shopping modality. The opportunity to outdo Walmart et al in the age-old arena of daily commerce was only available because of the internet.

Hence, the complement to Bezos’ formulation: What is changing now that will still be changing in ten years?

Better yet, a century.

For the past fifty years the answer to that question has been computers. For the past thirty, the internet. “Count me with those who believe the Internet is on par with the industrial revolution, the full impact of which stretched over centuries,” as tech industry analyst Ben Thompson wrote in 2013.

As for the “narrative” part of “10-year narrative” — stories are how humans share information that we care about. A narrative is a causality hypothesis, a theory of how and why events are connected.

Goals and needs#

Split contracts are for getting paid, together. Teams is for using money, together.

In other words, our products address two fundamental desires:

• People will always collaborate, manage collective resources, and divvy the fruits of their labor.
• People will always want their money to be safe and accessible.

The purpose of Splits technology is to empower builders and creators who’ve formed productive groups. “Pooled capital to achieve shared goals and shared upside” is the magic of crypto, as Jonny from Hypersub likes to say.

Splits’ mission is to help people take control of their earnings. That’s our north star.

Splits has a unique vantage point, straddling the whole Ethereum ecosystem. Our contracts are used for financial wizardry by the likes of Obol and Airswap, on one end of the spectrum, and by individual artists and creators allocating mint proceeds, on the other end. In between are onchain groups like Protocol Guild and MOROS NET, and the platforms used by those artists and creators, such as Zora or fxhash.

Today it’s a pain for onchain groups to share resources and stay in sync. Teams is our first step toward solving this problem. But it’s a big problem, and there’s a lot more work to do. It’s still Day 1.

The Splits team is continually inspired by the companies and collectives we work alongside. Here’s to the next dozen decades of building together, and leveling up as an ecosystem.