Cryptonite’s creative and editorial brief
Cryptonite honors great entrepreneurs, great innovation, and the money-making spirit.
10 min readJan 5, 2020
That is our core value, and that is who we are. We believe that entrepreneurs who are passionate about innovation can change the world for the better. Our editors are privileged to see this happen, up close, almost every working day.
We honor these champions by providing a global community platform where they can learn, test their ideas, build their reputations, gain support, and build wonderfully innovative products and companies.
As Apple co-founder Steve Jobs is famous for saying, ‘The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.’
Staying informed, connected, and relevant in a noisy world of 1 billion professionals is a great challenge. In a complicated world riddled with fake news and suffering from infobesity, we believe it is critical to clearly articulate our brand values and aspirations.
In this spirit, we present our current thoughts on our product and brand values. Our thoughts are presented in a random series of unpolished snippets rather than a dense and well-reasoned treatise. These snippets will evolve and be updated over time as we learn more from our members on our journey to deliver something of true value.
Product development and design philosophy
- We respect that there is a tremendous amount of craftsmanship between a great idea and a great product. As Cryptonite has evolved, the network is different from how we originally imagined. You learn a lot when you get into the subtleties of a product. Every day we discover a new problem or opportunity that we need to consider. To get where we wanted to go, we needed to make tradeoffs. We rely on our values to make those choices during this process, and we know that is where the real product magic exists. If we are lucky, that spirit gets transmitted into our product so our users can feel it and identify with it. Modern social media brands offer people a great way to be a part of something bigger than themselves. Making this connection is the goal of our product development team. This is how you achieve cult brand status
- One person never does great things in business; a team does them. Our business model is The Beatles. Four guys who kept each other’s negative tendencies in check. They balanced each other out, and the sum was greater than the individual parts. Our number one company goal is to build a product team of ‘A’ players — people out on the edge. In the end, you can’t con people with marketing and PR; the product has to speak for itself.
- We have found that ‘A’ players like to work with other ‘A’ players. But part of the price of admission to the product team is the risk that some of your ideas will be called stupid. Conversely, you enjoy the freedom to tell others they are full of shit as well. Brutal honesty on the product team is a critical component of our creative process. It’s not personal; it’s not about you; it’s about creating a network experience that delights users like no other. That is our reward.
- It’s in our DNA that technology alone is not enough. Technology is married with liberal arts, and the humanities give a product culture and soul. Therefore, we start with the human experience and work back toward the technology — not the other way around.
- Design is not just what it looks and feels like. Design is how the product works. For us to sleep well at night, the aesthetic and quality of the experience have to be carried all the way through. Details matter. We think it’s worth waiting to get it right. How you mold and shape the details is what gives your product culture.
- A focus on simplicity is one of our mantras. But simplicity can be harder than complexity. Simplicity means saying ‘no’ to hundreds of good ideas. We work hard and try to think very clearly about what really matters to make Cryptonite simple.
- Part of our ‘make it simple’ strategy is to strive extra hard to be radically minimalistic in design. No cartoons, no Skittles running across the page, no noise, no ads popping up all over the place, slowing down your experience. Our stark canvas takes a back seat to the content the members come to Cryptonite for. Clean, simple, intuitive. Our job is to serve, not to give orders.
- All shapes within Cryptonite embody a mash-up of artistic design and mathematics. The result is cosmopolitan shapes that are more holistic and comfortable for the eye. We avoid tangency (where a radius meets a line at a single point) and craft our surfaces with curvature continuity. Specifically, we use circles, superellipse, and rectellipse curves. Apple iOS uses a superellipse curve for app icons, replacing the ‘squircle’ style used up to version 6. A superellipse is a two-dimensional curve that varies in shape between a four-point star, diamond, circle, or rounded rectangle depending on additional parameters. The superellipse is a beautiful shape first formulated in the 19th century by Gabriel Lamé, a French mathematician, but made famous by Danish polymath Piet Hein. Hein, a physicist-mathematician-designer.
- Speaking of science and art, it was the renowned 17th century English mathematician, physicist, astronomer, and theologian, Sir Isaac Newton, who decided that the magic number of colors in a rainbow was 7. Truth be told, Newton realized when he broke white light apart using a prism (or raindrops), he got a visual spectrum where each color bled into its neighbor, rather than a distinct set of colors. But for easier reference, Newton broke up the visual spectrum into 7 colors: red, yellow, green, blue, purple, orange, and indigo. Newton picked the number 7 after learning that the ancient Greek philosopher Pythagoras believed that there was a connection between color and music. Pythagoras discovered that there are 7 natural musical notes (do, re, mi, fa, so, la, ti,) and these notes could be translated into mathematical equations. To honor two great titans of innovation history and join in this great scientific and philosophical tradition, we have developed our own palette of 7 rainbow colors.
- In the Western world, seven has always been a lucky number. Pythagoras, whose teachings influenced Plato and Aristotle's thinking, first observed that 7 was a magical number that somehow connected disparate phenomena. Pythagoras discovered there are seven natural musical notes, and these notes could be translated into mathematical equations. He also had a theory about how the heavenly bodies (seven of which were known about at the time) moved according to mathematical patterns. In the ancient Hebrew book of Genesis, God created all of His creation in 6 days and chose to rest on the 7th day. Thus we now have seven days of the week, seven liberal arts subjects, seven deadly sins, seven wonders of the world, seven dwarves, and a Seven Story Mountain ascent one must climb to become a Cryptonite ‘Power Player.’
- Drawing from the symbolic use of numbers primarily found in Judaic and Christian scriptures, Cryptonite favors the numbers: 3, 4, 6, 7, 8, 10, 12, 40, 1,000, and eternity. Numbers play an important role in all major religious traditions and ritual practices to understand the divine. As we architect our community platform and make decisions such as how many items to include on a menu bar or how many profiles we display on a page, we rely on our numerology's symbolic power.
- When approaching mobile design, we borrow from a lesson Steve Jobs learned on Apple’s journey developing the iPod. ‘One of our biggest insights was to design the iPod to function as a way to find music in your library and play it easily. Users manage all the heavy lifting tasks, like searching and buying new music and organizing playlists on their computer in iTunes. Other companies tried to do everything on the device itself and made it so complicated that it was useless.’ The blog platform Medium takes this same approach. The Cryptonite mobile app is designed for members to view and comment on content and view member profiles in a demonstrably more simple format that the web version.
- We expect that most of our viewers will access Cryptonite via a mobile device as with the Internet in general. As a comparison, 57 percent of LinkedIn’s traffic comes from mobile devices than Facebook (at 88 percent) and YouTube (at 70 percent).
Editorial worldview
We are adherents to Bill ‘Joy’s law’, named after the Silicon Valley icon who invented Berkeley Unix, TCP/IP, Java, and co-founded Sun Microsystems. Mr. Joy once quipped, ‘No matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else other than you.’ We assume our most innovative thinkers and commentators won’t be on staff. They are true players in the real world, proving their ideas in the free market every day. As such, our platform is designed so that a high-90 percent of our content comes from members and the neural engine that spews out data and analytics on their behalf. This model is amazing as it leverages shares the meta intelligence of a global community of smart and earnest people while keeping our overhead in check.
Our small band of Cryptonite editors exercises influence by curating the homepage stories, re-writing headlines, choosing art, breaking news, writing our own editorials, and producing videos. Even with a less central editorial role than traditional media, we still uphold the same commitment to transparency as the Economist and the original Red Herring editors. That is, we commit to deliberately and regularly articulating our worldview and perspective on business and geopolitics, so our members can see the framework by which we cover the global Silicon Valley. In this spirit, we have presented some of our core editorial principles below. We welcome input.
- As committed to in the Trusted Network Pledge, we will ferociously honor the First Amendment principles of freedom of speech and expression. Free speech is a prerequisite to a civilized society. By exercising the freedom to engage, we can discern everything from our society's problems to what features we should include in our apps, and develop solutions and reach a consensus. Freedom of expression is a mechanism that America has always embraced and cherished, and it’s the very reason aspiring entrepreneurs from all over the world flock to the U.S.
- Under the First Amendment spirit, we pledge to empower our members to be on the watch to flag any obscenity, fraud, child pornography, speech that incites imminent lawless action and regulates some commercial speech such as advertising. Any personal, political, religious, economic, or other views outside these exceptions will be permitted. We have faith that our membership is largely good and smart and can discern such things as a good political ad versus a bull shit one on their own.
- We generally hope and aspire for freedom, individual rights, self-determination and responsibility, fair rewards, charity, world peace, and a healthy planet for all.
- By nature, we embrace the organizing principle of subsidiarity. That is, most matters ought to be handled by the smallest, lowest, or least centralized competent authority. The Oxford English Dictionary defines subsidiarity as the idea that a central authority should have a subsidiary function, performing only those tasks which cannot be performed effectively at a more immediate or local level. Governments, especially federal governments, should always be the agencies you turn to as a last resort.
- While we are wary of centralized power (e.g., China and Google), we generally like to see the disruption of this kind of power-driven by clever and courageous citizens and entrepreneurs in a free market environment. We do not subscribe to the philosophy that ‘big is necessarily bad,’ however. Most great entrepreneurs want to leverage their ideas, go big, and dominate their markets. This process should not be disrupted as long as they play fair.
- Sequoia Capital partner, Michael Moritz, says, ‘Who you know, what you know, and when you know it is the most valuable currency in Silicon Valley.’ It is for this exact reason that Cryptonite is produced with the eye of a savvy venture investor. We serve as our members’ early warning signal to the most innovative companies and trends. We can provide them with a powerful competitive advantage not provided by any other media brand.
- We do not waste our members’ time. This effort only curates for the best members, the most nourishing content, and simple design. Cryptonite’s average member has high business and technology knowledge, so they ‘talk up’ and their fellow members and spare words. We stress the value of economic expression — i.e., getting to the fucking point — by limiting original posts to 4,000 characters (roughly the length of a Wall Street Journal editorial), and comments on posts and messages between members to 1,000 characters (2 tweets worth), and limiting the number of daily posts per member.
- All content is organized by a community-driven meta-tagging system, which allows for a more exact search and the illustration of each member in a series of highly personalized ‘meta tag clouds.’
- Our street mission: A trusted arms dealer to global entrepreneurs to help them get shit done and make great things happen.
- The 40,000-foot mission: In the post-institutional, peer-to-peer era, articulate (and prove) that we are all basically on the same page, so we all need to cool out.
- Cult vibe — Build a secret global club of smart, innovation-minded, cosmopolitan-wannabes, complete with black membership cards, cryptocurrencies, digital wallets, and a secret handshake,
- Bottom line: Clever and nourishing — never boring, never dumb.
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If you would like to join us on this amazing journey as a partner, advisor, contributor, or investor, please feel free to reach out in the comment section below or get in touch with us directly at editor@cryptoniteventures.com.
