VP Tech @Lyft | prev. @Coinbase, @Google | 3x founder | builder & writer | Alum @MIT & @UWaterloo | ⚠️ high risk of sports takes | 🇨🇦🇺🇸🇹🇹
Boston, MA
Joined November 2008
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To me, the consultants and MBAs running the NBA come from a "Boomer B-School" mindset that treats control over brand expression as the way to protect brand value.
That thinking comes from the old consumer-packaged goods (CPG) model of "mind-share branding": pick a position, buy mass-media reach, and repeat the message until it sticks.
The brand manager defined the meaning; consumers were the audience.
Social media broke that model. Consumers now help create the meaning.
Marketing theory calls it "brand co-creation": fans supply the stories, rituals, and shared references that give other people a reason to care.
A 20-second clip of Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown doing a non-handshake gives fans something to talk about, argue over, and send to friends.
It's worth more than reach. Those interactions build attachment to a player and a team; fans are building brand equity for free.
In 2024, the NBA opened 25,000+ hours of footage to select creators, so it understands creator distribution.
The @WolvesClips complaint suggests it's less comfortable with participation outside the approved network. That's a costly bias.
Adam Silver understood the economics in 2015: "for the most part, highlights are marketing."
A fan creator acquires customers for the NBA, and the league pays nothing for the placement. Why make that harder?
The strategic question is substitution: does a clip replace paid viewing, or give someone a reason to watch?
A pirate stream competes with the live product; a short Wemby highlight builds demand for it. Different economics call for different policies.
I'd measure whether fan activity grows game viewing, ticket demand, subscriptions, and sponsorship value.
"Unauthorized views stopped" doesn't answer that. You can improve the enforcement dashboard while weakening the business you're trying to protect.
The NBA competes for a place in someone's day against games, music, YouTube, and whatever their friends care about.
Fans help it earn that place. Brand stewardship should make their participation easier.
Silver's run as commish has routinely put short-term profits and stunts (NBA Cup, second apron, flopping & fouls, streaming fragmentation) ahead of the core product.
This is the Boomer B-School crowd running its playbook again, on his watch. Hopefully he figures it out.
I want to address an ongoing issue affecting NBA content creators on this app. Recently, the @NBA has started targeting accounts with mass copyright claims on recent posts, which can eventually lead to accounts being suspended. My account was previously suspended because of this, but luckily, I was able to get it back.
At a time when the NBA is becoming less and less accessible, I genuinely don’t understand why the league would go this route. Why make your product even harder to access by taking down accounts that essentially provide free advertising? It makes no sense to me.
The NBA’s play-by-play highlight feature has also been down for weeks now, making it even harder for fans and content creators to access clips through their website.
To make matters worse, the NBA does a terrible job of posting highlights on its own pages. If you check their accounts, you'll see how limited their content is compared to the amount of games being played every night.
So how exactly are NBA fans supposed to keep up with their favorite teams if they can't afford to watch games live? For many fans, it's through the highlight accounts on this app.
Adam Silver once said, “There’s a huge amount of our content that people can essentially consume for free. And this is very much a highlights-based sport.” He said this while responding to concerns about the rising cost of watching NBA games across multiple streaming services.
I find it extremely hypocritical that the same content fans are supposedly able to “consume for free” is now being targeted with copyright claims and taken down.
The league should take notes from the NFL. They consistently post highlights across their platforms and make it easy for fans to keep up with the sport, even without watching every game live.
Highlight accounts help grow the game, keep fans engaged, and give players more exposure. Instead of treating these accounts like a problem, the NBA should recognize the value they bring to the league.
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Started playing with @runpod’s serverless GPU hosting for a personal project and was so ridiculously easy to put up a Docker container and get going in no time.
Game changer cost-wise vs calling model provider APIs.
…I have no affiliation, just a fan.
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For those dunking on lack of adoption of Agentic Commerce right now, may I share...
US FAA says it will phase out floppy disks from air traffic control by 2028 reut.rs/4zsSsu2
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1/ Anthropic's economic impact report is worth reading yourself (don't ask Claude to grade mom & dad's homework).
To me, the assumptions they make, and the implications they gloss over, are frightening for the "working class"...by which I mean, anyone of us who make their living by working.
anthropic.com/institute/econ…
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9/ But, even if you too hold that belief, it still implies that we can't judge the future through today's lens, especially for our kids.
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10/ Anyway, the paper is here, and it's worth drawing your own conclusions from it all:
anthropic.com/institute/econ…
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Classic issue explained by this phenomenon:
rishidean.com/the-disruptors…
every project management software starts out really nice but eventually gets JIRA-fied as they add more and more features I really don't care about. I switch to a new one, and then the same thing happens.
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Why do streaming services make it impossible to just keep watching a show you're in the middle of?
I watch some episodes, return later, and am inundated with recos for everything else, except the one I was watching is buried.
What metric are they're optimizing for?
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I've been playing around with a single Navigation / Control Bar to replace redundant tabs, and navigation, and instead have one that is smart to what the user needs in the moment.
Here's my v1.
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So this dude is just a “Bootleg Bobby Axelrod” who is just a puppet to his private equity overlords. 🙄
Just because someone has a private equity background doesn't mean they will operate the team like most private equity firms today -- cutting costs, maximizing profits.
Chisholm's deal with Sixth Street compromised the Celtics maximizing roster budget.
xitter.gq/joonlee/status/2027051… xitter.gq/alexludoboyd/status/20…
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