Crone AI Memo

Crone's mission is to make the contemplative life less rare.

Civilization started with the exchange of words. We call the crown of this exchange the Great Conversation and it has kept the human spirit alive for millennia. Those who participate in the Great Conversation are said to have had a classical, humanities, or liberal arts education; or they're said to be "well-read," "cultured," or "living the contemplative life."

Crone will bring the Great Conversation to life by making active participation more rewarding than passive consumption. This strategy is described below. We will elevate humanity and its leaders by bringing the Great Conversation to life.

In most markets, people default to passive learning through YouTube, podcasts, and books. But when someone launches a product that's high return-on-effort (ROE), the market consolidates around that product.

Duolingo reached 500 million users by providing a high-ROE alternative to passive language learning. Others are doing the same in music, math, memorization, and coding. (Notice that all of these fields have definite answers and clear progressions.)

AI makes it possible to create high-ROE for active learners in fields with fuzzy answers and fuzzy progressions.

When ROE flips in these fields, more people will spend more cognitive effort in exchange for a more rewarding experience. In other words, AI will cause an exodus of passive consumers becoming active learners.

Imagine this exodus in industries like self-development, leadership training, and liberal arts education. Today these industries are fragmented. But as we've seen, when someone delivers higher ROE, a market will consolidate.

Crone recently pivoted from its initial product, an "entrepreneur coach." We spent a year iterating and watching users learn in an AI-first UX. We're now using what we’ve learned to build an "AI journal and mentor." On the new Crone, users complete bite-sized reading, writing, and journaling with the world's great minds.

This sounds like a small product. On the contrary; we're inventing a new format to be used across self- and professional- development. The internet gave us universal access to the world's great minds. The bottleneck is now the emotional and cognitive bandwidth of the learning format. Passive formats are inherently low-bandwidth as is evidenced by the preponderance of great content and the dearth of human greatness.

Bloom's "2-Sigma" experiments show that the average student individually tutored sits in the 98%ile of her control group.

It’s now obvious that AI will give us 2/3-sigma tutors in math, science, and other “concrete” fields. It's also obvious that ChatGPT et al. will continue to evolve as our personal advisors, giving us ad-hoc feedback in a passive paradigm.

It’s less obvious that:

The thesis becomes obvious when you see the myriad of ways AI increases the ROE of active learning. Having become experts in this topic, Crone is now executing on this vision relentlessly. We're building a new format where humanity can live in active immersion with its heroes. This new format will be provide the beachhead to build an AI-first media and training company.

Imagine the world when a writer can apprentice with Woolf, a politician with Lincoln, or a producer with Oprah. Imagine how big and bold your own life could be if you were living in lockstep with the world's greatest minds.

Help us build this world by emailing kyle@crone.ai.