Digital Native: Top 5 of 2023

The 5 Most-Read Pieces of the Year—So Far

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Digital Native: Top 5 of 2023

Hey Everyone 👋 ,

Happy 4th of July. No new piece this week given the holiday. Instead, I’m sharing my five most-read pieces of the year so far; out of 28 pieces in 2023, these five are most popular.

Hope you can use this week to catch up on reading, and see you next week.

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1) 10 Charts That Capture How the World Is Changing

This has proven a popular series, and I’m overdue for another “10 charts” piece. This piece from March covered topics ranging from loneliness to ChatGPT, tech valuations to office occupancy rates. Sample chart below. I’ve always been a visual learner, and charts help me process information. They’re also an efficient way to encapsulate how the world is changing, and this piece digs into a few important trends.

The decline in teens meeting up coincides with the rise of smartphones and social media (Source: Twenge)

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2) AI in 2023: The Application Layer Has Arrived

I wrote this in January about AI’s emerging application layer. The piece digs into use cases for algorithmic recommendations, language models, and image models. We talk about everything from SHEIN to AWS, DALL-E to ChatGPT, and even what recently-crowned Best Picture winner Everything Everywhere All At Once has in common with generative AI.

Improvements in Midjourney’s output for the prompt “Penguins in Venice”—left is v3 and right is v4; note that penguins no longer have three legs or two beaks (Source)

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3) How Duolingo Grew Its TikTok to 6.6M Followers

If I had to crown one company the king of TikTok, I’d go with Duolingo. No corporate account is savvier at tapping into the zeitgeist or more reliable at going viral. Since relaunching its TikTok channel in September 2021, Duolingo’s account has swelled to 6.6M followers—more than iconic brands like Disney (4.1M), Apple (2.8M), and Nike (4.3M). To learn how a language-learning app became a viral marketing sensation, I tracked down the woman behind the scenes—24-year-old Zaria Parvez. This piece digs into how Zaria did it, and lessons for startups hoping to leverage TikTok for user acquisition.

24-year-old Zaria Parvez is the woman behind the scenes of Duolingo’s TikTok

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4) What Taylor Swift Can Teach Us About Business

Taylor Swift is a fascinating business case study. She’s one of the savviest businesswomen of her generation, and she’s unique in how deftly she’s leveraged the internet from the very beginning. This piece draws lessons from her rise, managing to work in Uber’s underestimated market size and Notion’s unique go-to-market strategy. This topic seems light-hearted, but it’s an interesting framework to approach how startups achieve breakout growth.

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5) What Gen Z Thinks About Work, College, and the Internet

I spoke to five Gen Zs to keep a pulse on their evolving worldviews. Each conversation led to interesting insights about how the younger generation wants to live, work, and interact. These generational behavior shifts have ripple effects across the worlds of business and technology.

The cover image for this one was the Midjourney output for the prompt “Teens staring at their phones with mixed emotions”

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See you next week 👋

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