The Great Differentiation
Salvation from Slop
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The Great Differentiation
A driving-gloved Vlad Tenev pilots a 1961 Jaguar E-Type through the curves and streets of Cannes, France to the gravel allée of Château de la Croix des Gardes. The Robinhood co-founder and CEO steps out of the Jag, resplendent in “playboy-in-Portofino” chic: crisp ivory blazer cut from lightweight suiting cloth, striped with thin navy pinstripes. Lapels: peaked. Shoulders: roped. Neck: ascotted. On his left wrist, Tenev sports a gold watch. In his right hand, a structured, hard-shell attaché case in British racing green.
The resurrected founder bounds through the Château and into its Italianate parterre, where he is to present the future of finance.
Flanked by colleagues and underscored by James Bond instrumentals, Tenev announces Robinhood’s newest product: Stock Tokens. On Robinhood, in Europe, investors can purchase tokens in public American companies like Apple.
How? Tenev, now bespectacled in golden aviators, will explain, on the very same chalkboard on which Cary Grant purportedly scribbled in To Catch a Thief, when he filmed the movie at the Château in 1955. He slips a stick of chalk from his jacket’s besom pocket, doodles a stick figure French investor wearing a beret, and proceeds to chalk it out.
But wait… there’s more. Tenev pops open the attaché, whips out a small metallic cylinder whose cold-storage thumb-drive, he tells us, contains “the keys to the first ever Stock Tokens for OpenAI,” and SpaceX.
Two of the most desirable, hardest-to-access, private company shares in the world, available on Robinhood. Better: on The Robinhood Chain.
Much has been and will be breathlessly written about Robinhood’s tokenization of stocks, and about its tokenization of private shares. “Did Robinhood Just Solve the Liquidity Crunch?” You should read those analyses. This is an important story.
But that’s not today’s story.
Today’s story is about the presentation. How fresh it felt. How different.
Robinhood’s is the latest salvo in The Great Differentiation.
The Great Differentiation is the race to be different. It is the salvation from slop.
For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. This is Newton’s Third Law of Motion. It is also an emergent Law of the Market.
Sameness has never been cheaper.
Websites look the same. Writing reads the same. Hype videos hype the same.
Copying is free and frictionless. And because it is cheap, it is low status. What might have been 2019’s most beautiful landing page is 2025’s slop.
When sameness is cheap, differentiation is valuable. But how do you remain differentiated when copying is free and frictionless? Make copying expensive.
Neil Strauss wrote about the world’s greatest pickup artist, Mystery, in his 2005 best-seller, The Game. Mystery recommended to his undersexed mentees a technique called “peacocking”: wear a feather boa, a bright shiny shirt, a top hat, light-up jewelry; wear whatever it takes to be different from every other guy at the bar. It is socially expensive to wear silly outfits; other men will make fun of you. But Mystery and his acolytes weren’t signaling to men.
Male peacocks are famous for their feathers. “If a male peacock has a giant array of feathers and still manages to drag it around everywhere and survive,” Nathan Baschez wrote in his April 2022 essay, DALL•E 2 and The Origin of Vibe Shifts, “it’s a pretty good bet that they are physically fit and have good genes.”
This, Baschez says, borrowing from evolutionary psychology, is a costly signal, costly “because it costs something tangible to send them, which is proof of fitness (in the broadest sense of the word “fit”: well adapted to survive in the environment).”
Beautiful images on websites used to be costly, so all of the cool websites looked like this:
Then Unsplash came out, making beautiful images free, and all the websites started looking like this:
“What will happen when DALL·E 2, or something like it, gets released to the public,” Baschez asked. “The first order consequence is there will be a lot of websites and blog posts that now come with illustrations, or other cool visuals these algorithms are capable of generating, like 3D models, faux photos, clay models, etc.,” he rightly predicted.
Where would companies turn to stand out? Nathan thought “At the high end, in the short run I think the most likely path is to run towards interactivity. There are currently no AIs that can make interactive visualizations.” Even then, though, when DALL·E 2 was a private beta toy, he knew that the models would get good enough to do that, too?
“So what is the end game? What happens if we reach a ‘vibe singularity’ in all forms of art, where anyone can create anything by typing a few phrases? How does status get signaled through aesthetic vibes when all the vibes are free?”
Presciently, drawing on history, he observed that, “If all that mattered was absolute performance, then sure, the AI would be able to perform well enough to get the job done without human intervention. But when it comes to status games, relative performance is what matters.”
Because he was writing about websites, Baschez concluded that humans + AI would beat AI alone for the foreseeable future, and for websites, he was right.
But what Robinhood and the other examples we’ll look at show is that with the cost of almost any digital signaling plummeting to zero, those companies who wish to send costly signals have moved offline.
If anyone knows what it’s like to get their website design copied, it’s Stripe.
So when its co-founder, John Collison, announced his new podcast, Cheeky Pint, in June, the studio he filmed it in looked nothing like the bright, flowy gradients on the payment company’s homepage.
It looked like a pub.
That’s because it is a pub: to film the podcast, on which John interviews Stripe’s customers, from OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman and Meta CFO Susan Li, Stripe built a pub in its South San Francisco headquarters, complete with working Guinness taps, dartboard, booths, and lots of (mismatched) framed pictures.
The pub studio is a nod to the Collison brothers’ Irishness, a genealogical moat; it would be odd for a non-Irish podcast host to steal the setting, and even those who tried wouldn’t build with the same budget or skill that Stripe has. Within the pub, the format of the podcast itself is differentiated and protected: there are very few hosts with the depth of knowledge or gift of gab required to hold a conversation with Meta’s CFO on capital allocation while playing Ring-the-Bull.
Cheeky Pint’s Irish pub backdrop is entirely different from Robinhood’s polished French Riviera setting, but they’re both examples of the same thing: companies with the resources to differentiate differentiating.
I was so happy when I saw the Cheeky Pint trailer and even happier when I realized that it’s part of a pattern. I don’t want the world to gradient descend into bland uniformity, and it was starting to feel like it might. For most people and companies, it’s just easier to copy what seems to be working with as little effort as possible.
That disease, however, contains the instructions for its cure.
When they go cheap, go costly. When they go same, go different.
This reaction to ease is one of the things that attracted me to hard tech. In my July 2022 essay, The Good Thing About Hard Things, I wrote:
The main reason hard startups can be great businesses is that, because they are hard, they’ll face less competition if they succeed. All of the things that make it hard for them to succeed in the first place makes it hard for others to copy them. That’s doubly true because, by being first, they’ll often attract the best talent, lock down the most willing buyers, build a strong brand, and achieve economies of scale.
This is playing out. In the context of The Great Differentiation, what is notable is that by building things that no one else can build, they also create content that no one else can copy.
Rainmaker, a startup that makes it rain by flying drones into clouds and spraying microscopic nucleating agents onto which water vapor freezes or condenses until droplets are heavy enough for gravity to pull them down to earth, has a distinctive website.
A human with an AI could copy its 19th-century Romantic cloud oil painting and oversized Didone font in seven minutes to a close enough approximation.
A human with an AI cannot copy its precise precipitation over Texas or its team’s flights through the clouds.
Those are incredibly costly signals, and they do their job: attracting employees, customers, and investors. Rainmaker recently raised $25 million from Lowercarbon Capital.
The point is aqueous abundance; the side benefit is differentiation.
Hard tech is full of similar examples.
Monumental Labs carves beautiful statues from stone, so it earns beautiful content. In 2024, it carved a statue for … Stripe, in a Great Differentiation ouroboros.
In a similar (but, of course, different) vein, Paris’ Atelier Missor plans to “cover the west in giant titanium statues.” Its tweet announcing an upcoming fundraise earned 5.5k likes and 470k views and I am certain a check is soon to follow.
Look at that image. The team dressed and groomed as if from an entirely different era. The French flags drooping against a distinctly French building, a Third-Republic 19th-century French civic building qu’on appelle une mairie. The light bouncing off the window to suggest the end of a long day. The bronze of Hercules that Atelier Missor conceived, casted, and finished, and then donated to the French city of Rueil-Malmaison ahead of the Paris 2024 Olympic Torch Relay.
Maybe another team could copy the beards and the outfits and even the setting, for one picture, but they couldn’t make the statue, they couldn’t do any of it authentically, and they couldn’t be as convinceably… French. This is who Atelier Missor is. Good luck faking Atelier Missor: The Story of a Bankruptcy.
Earth AI films on-site from the remote interiors of Australia (this one has 509k views).
Astro Mechanica test fires turboelectric adaptive jet engines from its facility in San Francisco.
All of this is differentiated. All of it is just so cool.
Perhaps because hard tech offers so many opportunities for hard-earned, real-world footage, one of its biggest success stories has zigged. Anduril unveils its arsenal with anime.
Differentiate. Always differentiate.
It’s certainly possible to ape the anime, but if a competitor attempted to appropriate the animations, the body would reject it. That is Anduril’s style now. Imitation would be cheap, not just not costly but negative signal.
Because it’s not just the physicalness or digitalness of something that determines whether it can be effectively copied. Many, many companies have produced Steve Jobs-esque product reveals. Without Jobs himself, they fall laughably flat.
Look at Rabbit.
Look at Humane.
Look at them now.
The funny part is that, were he alive today, Steve Jobs would not be presenting like Steve Jobs presented in 2007. Copycats killed the style; move on.
Differentiate. Always differentiate.
Everything novel and valuable gets copied, at higher or lower fidelity. This is what René Girard warned about. Mimesis.
Look at me, after all this, copying Peter Thiel’s interpretation of Girard’s insights. Mimesis comes for us all.
Copying is inevitable, and I feared that our new infinite copy machines would drag us into a pit of paltry plagiarism.
What is wonderful about The Great Differentiation, though, what gives me hope, is that people seem to be copying the desire to differentiate.
Instead of faking the form, they are emulating the essence: create something unique and true to you, something that only you have earned. Something different.
This is good advice for all of us.
Differentiate. Always differentiate.
Thanks to Ben Rollert and Dror Poleg for giving me feedback on the essay I threw out to write this one.
That’s all for today. We’ll be back in your inbox this week with a Deeper Dive and a Weekly Dose. In the meantime, get your company compliant with Vanta, pick out your finest Red, White, and Blue, and get ready to celebrate America’s birthday.
Thanks for reading,
Packy
Banger alert.
Really great distillation of one of life's biggest themes - "Don't aim to be the best, be the only."
This essay belongs under lock and key in the Antimemetics Division.