After four years: a passion project grows

This week was an interesting week:

• It marked roughly four years of writing my newsletter, ?? Exponential View
• The 400,000th person followed me on LinkedIn, which seems like an unfeasibly large number (thanks!)
• I rolled out (gently) a members-only community for Exponential View.

Exponential View kicked-off as a way of sharing some interesting thoughts around the pace of change of technology and how that was going to impact society. It was purely a passion project, written early on a Sunday morning (4am), informed and informal (lots of emoji ??). I chose email as the format because I felt a public declaration that I would email this every week was the best way to make a commitment.

Format and fun aside, I wanted to bring a critical lens to our discussions on technology. That seemed much rarer in 2015 than it does in 2019!

Hopefully, I could bring to bear my experience as a company founder in the tech space, an occasional investor, as well as someone who had sat in large companies. I hoped my educational background in economics and philosophy, while having been steeped in the tech industry for 25 years, would bring some perspective.

It seemed to work. Over the past four years, that mailing list grew from 22 to more than 35,000. And I engaged with readers from every discipline and domain, from senior religious figures to user interface designers; from professors of machine learning to vocalists; from venture capitalists to charity heads; and from university students to retired engineers...

In that time I have read tens of millions of words. About artificial intelligence, blockchain, CRISPS, decentralisation, energy technology and so much more. I have written perhaps close to 500,000.

Alongside, I must have given close to a hundred talks outlining my thesis on how this technological change will unfold and what its impact on society could be. (No time to go into this now.)

We also rolled out a podcast, where we humbled by the quality of the guests. You can find that here.

The next stage, after many requests for readers, was a members-only paywalled community which will allow for deeper and better access to some great doers and thinkers exploring our changing times.

If you are one of my 400,000 followers on LinkedIn who isn't subscribed to one of the EV outputs, why don't you try now?

The newsletter can be found by here. You can just sign-up for the free one or go the whole way and join the community.

And the podcast is here.

Hope to see you somewhere in Exponential View soon!

Azeem