I’ve been doing a bunch of member interviews over the past month, and we’ll soon be rolling out a bunch of improvements in response to the qualitative data we’ve collected.
The first update is simple, though: a forum reorg. 
The high level reasoning for the reorg is as follows:
- The quality of Commoncog’s membership is pretty amazing. Y’all are business operators, advisors, and investors of extremely high caliber and thoughtfulness.
- Social media is only getting worse — Twitter has fallen off a cliff ever since Elon bought it, and LinkedIn is … LinkedIn.
- Let’s create a third space.
To be more precise: let’s create a third space for business nerds. The thing that I’ve learnt over the past year or so is that Commoncog’s membership is united in one thing: interest in the art of business. You could call all of us ‘business nerds’ — regardless of whether we’re investors, or operators, or advisors to businesses.
Business is such an infinite game that we can talk about it from so many angles: psychology, and human judgement and misjudgment, expertise, and self help, and emotional regulation, and operations, and market, and capital, and so on.
Here’s what the reorg means:
- There are a number of new topic categories.
- I’d like to encourage active sensemaking of ongoing events. Because this community is private, we can keep the bar for discussion high, and not worry about a social media mob descending on us.
- Feel free to post links as forum topics (you can just paste a link in the ‘Topic’ field when creating a new topic, and the forum software will parse the link and let you write a short note about why you’re linking to it.) Examples: https://forum.commoncog.com/t/how-to-succeed-in-mrbeast-production-leaked-pdf/2077 and https://forum.commoncog.com/t/why-are-companies-that-lose-money-still-so-successful/2097/1
- I know a lot of the membership are forum lurkers — but feel free to chime in once in awhile with resources, links, or comments on lighter topics.
New Topics
The overall organisation of the forum has changed as a result of this goal. I’ve modelled this community around some of the longer-running value investing forums (with special thanks to @Gilbert_Lee — who urged me to consider this model).
The topics are:
- Blog comments (warning: all topics and comments here are publicly viewable!)
- Business — this topic is about the study of the art of business — post about things like business experimentation, or just sensemaking around specific business events or situations.
- Markets — strategies or topics related to financial markets.
- Books — book recommendations for the business nerd.
- Deals + Recs — deals or recommendation for things from the community’
- Self Improvement — this is an older topic; anything related to self improvement experiments or topics goes here.
- General Careers — this is an older topic; if you’d like to talk about career decisions or get general career advice, post here.
Enjoy!