DFOS Hype House — NCE.DFOS Weekly

Hello friends —

Our weekly posting schedule took a hit last week, as we found ourselves underwater in a bunch of different things. Thankfully we're through that particular sticky week, and with something extra special as a reward: a DFOS HypeHouse.

HypeHouse is the term we use at Metalabel Studios to describe a ritual where we spend a week physically together where one of us lives, using that time to work collaboratively IRL rather than our normal distributed working style.

This HH — our twelfth (I think?) — is here at our space in NYC. Brandon (Texas) and Ilya (Portugal) flew in to spend the week with Lena and I, who are based here.

The agenda: planning out the next year of DFOS.

This includes questions like:

• What core audience is DFOS building for?
• What specific problems are we solving for them?
• What's their status quo and how can we better it?
• What killer apps does DFOS uniquely enable?
• How can we make what happens in DFOS more IRL?
• What new opportunities and experiences does DFOS create?

We're working through these questions from multiple vantage points. Over the next few days, we'll dig into each of them deeper, arriving at a roadmap of what we need to build, and a sense of how to sequence them to create the most coherent and durable value for everyone using it.

We enter these weeks with a hazy agenda. But by the end of the week, things emerge that seem completely obvious, yet never would have revealed themselves otherwise. This only happens when you don't force it; you let the space and conversation develop the way that it needs to, with minimal intervention.

The outcome of pretty much every HH in our history has been an acceleration. A month of remote work can happen in two days IRL in a concentrated environment like this. And there are things that happen in this context that wouldn't otherwise. Smiley and the New Creative Era zine, for example, were improvisations that came out of conversations together, which we executed on the spot.

This year we're doing this while being very much aware of you being in the room with us. We're making this for you. With you. For ourselves too. This isn't theoretical or speculative. This makes it feel very different.

We'll be posting updates here in the NCE DFOS throughout the week. If there are topics you think we should dig into or want to ask about, we'd love to hear them. We feel fortunate and privileged to be building in community with you.

— DFOS