Would You Share Your Income?

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Welcome back from the Christmas magic, Future Party. Some bad news to start your day for all you party people out there — Party City is officially going out of business. The company announced that all 700+ of its stores will end its business festivities in February. So, if you’re looking to throw a New Year’s bash, there are probably some excellent liquidation deals going on right now.

DAILY TOP TRENDS

College Students Can Sell Shares of Their Future Income

A startup called Prospinity is connecting college students in income-sharing “success pools” that redistribute wealth among a cohort of ambitious peers.

Why It Sells: The students already involved with Prospinity’s success pools know they all have the potential to realize their dreams and strike it rich… but the odds of all of them actually doing so are slim. So, they’re investing in the community on the chance that one of them rises to the top. Talk about a new way of diversifying your portfolio.

Behind the Payments: Prospinity — founded by former Yale students Aarya Agarwal, Samvel Antonyan, Andrea De Berardinis, and recently-graduated University of Chicago student Andrea Zanon — just raised $2 million from Slow Ventures for their year-old startup.

• Prospinity allows cohorts of students studying in any field to legally bind themselves together to contribute a part of their income for a set number of years (usually 10) that gets distributed evenly among the group annually. The company takes an annual 5% fee.

• Members can start collecting distributions even if they’re still in school. They can also set a minimum income limit so that if someone in the group falls below it, they can’t participate in that year’s distribution.

• Hundreds of Yale, MIT, Harvard, and Princeton students are already using Prospinity. With the funding round, the founders are looking to expand it beyond the Ivy League, starting with UC Berkeley. 

• That process involves the startup pinpointing “a handful of high achievers to create or join a success pool,” per Insider.

Closing Thoughts: Agarwal said the philosophy behind Prospinity is the “power law” — “a principle in venture capital that describes how a small number of investments often create the majority of returns while the rest break even or fail.” Or, as Slow Ventures managing director Kevin Colleran calls it, “Part insurance policy, part lottery ticket.” Making money on the way to realizing your dreams can be a long road, especially as the earnings timelines of certain fields are so vastly different. Prospinity may provide an avenue for how to hedge your bets on yourself.

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Surf App Wants to Unite the Fediverse

Software company Flipboard is set to unveil an app next year called Surf that connects platforms across the fediverse (the open, social web that Threads, Bluesky, Mastodon, and others are a part of) in customizable and interactive feeds.

The Big Picture: Fediverse CEO Mike McCue is betting that the future of social media will not be about walled-garden platforms and websites but instead revolve around agnostic, searchable, and scrollable feeds of your favorite creators and publishers that combine everything they post across the internet.

Behind the Profiles: Surf, which is already in public beta, wants to be “the world’s first browser for the social web.”

• Surf culls together feeds from three sources: ActivityPub (such as Mastodon and Threads), AT Protocol (Bluesky), and any RSS feed (Reddit).

• Users can search for these vertical-scrolling feeds by creator or publisher, customize feeds by combining those from different creators, and share those feeds with others. 

• The feeds include text, images, video, and podcasts. Users can filter the feeds only to show one or more specific types of media.

• In the future, Surf plans to make the design of feeds customizable and will also roll out feed-monetization programs.

The Future: The Verge notes that Surf still has a long way to go — the app is still not fully functional in every aspect, and the public beta is not entirely public (it’s geared toward getting known online curators and creators onboarded first), but the potential is exciting. In a Surf-first internet, where people post will no longer matter — all that matters is the what. For those who already know what they’re looking for, Surf could be a seminal tool… leaving algorithmic discovery to the individual platforms themselves.

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DEEP DIVES

• Listen: Don’t Kill the Messenger chats with Brian Grazer, co-founder of Imagine Entertainment and the legendary producer behind movies such as A Beautiful Mind and Apollo 13.

• Watch: WSJ interviews comedian Nikki Glaser, who’s had a banner year roasting Tom Brady and getting tapped to host the upcoming Golden Globes.

• Read: NYT profiles Teddy Blanks (great name), the genius behind movie typefaces such as Barbie, Nosferatu, and Severance.

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QUICK HITS

→ Technology

🔍 Google has offered to revise its exclusive search contract with Apple to avoid a heavier punishment put forward by the Department of Justice.

₿ Quantum computing could totally upend the crypto market and break the encryption that makes Bitcoin worthwhile.

🤖 xAI is testing a standalone app for its Grok chatbot, offering real-time data from both the internet and X platform.

→ Fashion / E-commerce

🏬 The Nordstrom family is teaming up with Mexican retailer El Puerto de Liverpool to take Nordstrom private in a $6.25 billion deal.

☕ The Starbucks workers’ strike is expanding to 12 states after the union was unable to reach a deal with the company.

👨‍⚖️ The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau sued Zelle, JPMorgan, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo for fraud committed on the money-sharing platform.

→ Creator Economy

📱 Amid its legal woes, Telegram has somehow turned a profit after launching several monetization tools.

🤳 Video platform Rumble scored a $775 million investment from crypto stablecoin firm Tether.

👷 As Gen Z opts for blue-collar jobs, blue-collar content creation is on the rise.