The ONE Thing #8: The Art Of Timing, Tokengated Commerce, Regenerative Economies & More

Happy Friday, my curious friends.

In this issue, we explore:

• ⏱ Art Of Timing

• 🛒 Tokengated Commerce

• 🏎 The Formula 1 Turnaround

• 🌳 The Regenerative Economy

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One Idea

On Tuesday, I saw photographer Paul Ripke speaking about storytelling at OMR Festival.

In his talk, he shared a video he shot for Swiss watch company IWC. Although it’s an ad, I love the vibe and found the story touched me.

It’s about the art of timing (well, it’s about a watch) and the role time plays in our lives. My favorite points:

• Timing can be as important as skill. Every so often, you find yourself at the right place at the right moment. But it's not just luck. It's essential to be prepared to seize the opportunity.

• The biggest success is the freedom to truly decide what to do with your time. Amen.

This post is not sponsored by IWC, but if anyone from the company is reading this, I'd be happy to listen to your offer 😉

One Article

Tokengated Commerce (Not Boring)

What happens when brands and developers can build unique experiences and collaborations based on tokens or NFTs that are in your wallet? That’s tokengated commerce is about.

The article is an interesting conversation between Packy McCormick and Alex Danco, who leads Crypto & Web3 projects at Shopify. Some of the exciting things they think will come out of tokengated commerce:

1. New shopping experiences like exclusive products or merchandise for holders of certain NFTs.

2. New ways for brands and their fans to collaborate online.

3. New opportunities for brands to collaborate and endorse each other.

Why it matters: It looks like the fashion industry is the early adopter of Tokens and NFTs. Shopify has already launched a handful of tokengating apps. It will be fascinating to see what comes out of these experiments.

This is a long article, and there’s also an audio version available if you prefer to listen to it.

One Tweet

Joe Pompliano @JoePompliano

Formula 1 was acquired by Liberty Media for $4.4 billion in 2016, and it's now one of the fastest-growing sports globally. They are up billions of dollars on the investment already, and it's one of the best case studies in business. Here's the story 👇

This thread combines two of my passions: sport and business.

In 2016, Liberty Media bought Formula 1, a sport that had lost over 200 million fans in eight years. Through good decisions and a smart media strategy (especially the Netflix show "Drive To Survive"), the new owner managed to reverse the trend. This year, Formula 1 should surpass the 1 billion fans mark, with 77% of new fans under the age of 35.

Take-away: It doesn't matter if you sell shoes or software or race cars in circles. These days, every company has to think like a media company. 

Case in point:

dillonfrancis @DillonFrancis

When the fuck did everyone become a F1 fan lol

One Quote

Last week I stumbled upon a fascinating quote, and it opened the door to a deep habit hole for me: Regenerative Finance (ReFi).

ReFi is reimagining the financial system. Simply put, regenerative finance uses money as a tool to solve systemic problems and regenerate communities and natural environments. Its goal is to heal and create shared value. Profits are not the end, but rather a means to further progress.

How it works: ReFi It puts a price on externalities, charging those who create negative externalities and rewarding those who create positive externalities.

• The lack of pricing of externalities (i.e., anything that’s a by-product of a product, but not included in the price like the cost of climate change) lead to an inefficient resource allocation.

• Because companies are not charged for the consequences of polluting our air or burning down forests, the prices for these products are too low and therefore demand is too high, leading to an inefficient allocation of goods.

• ReFi changes this by putting a price on these externalities and drive towards a more efficient allocation of resources —> produce less of what does harm, produce more that does good.

When it comes to behaviors, I'm a big fan of creating incentives instead of rules. There are some crypto projects like Celo which create a new digital currency partly backed by assets like carbon offsets or tokenized rain forests, creating incentives to produce more of those.

See you in the rabbit hole. 🐇

That’s it for this issue of The One Thing. Subscribe to receive fresh ideas and curated content every other Friday.

Until next time, friends. Keep learning!