A Magritte painting I had never seen before sold for $121 million at Christie’s last week. Fascinating to think that someone could make a single thing of such value.
Meanwhile, I’ve tasked myself with a similar goal: creating hundreds of millions of dollars of value. My strategy has some key differences. Instead of one very expensive thing, which might not even have its value fully realized until 60 years post-mortem, I need to make a lot of things, which individually will be worth much less. I’ll need to communicate their value to thousands of people directly online, who would then make their purchases through Shopify, versus a handful of billionaires who pay people spend their money for them at Christie’s. To achieve this I have to do something completely counter to how Magritte created value—something painful, courageous even: outsource production.