Welcome 👋🏻
About me and my newsletter, Above The API.
My name is Dave Edwards and welcome to my newsletter, Above The API.
Above The API is a bi-monthly newsletter about what matters – and why – in technology, music, and startups.
"Today, you’re either above the API or below the API. You either tell robots what to do, or are told by robots what to do." - Venkatesh Rao
What Should I Expect?
Above The API is a twice-monthly newsletter with two primary components:
Summaries and Commentary
Every two weeks, you'll get links to and summaries of the most important stories in technology, media, and startups. This won't simply be a list of links: each story arrives with background and context on what you really need to understand to stay informed.
Monthly Longform Editorial
Roughly once per month (or more when time permits), you'll get a deep dive on topics shaping our collective future across tech, media, music, venture capital, and startups.
Who is Above The API for?
Above The API is for anyone who wants to deeply explore – and better understand – the forces shaping our collective future.
In 2014, I made a career pivot into tech, trading nights spent in recording studios as a music producer for days at a bootsrapped startup. I quickly realized that despite spending most of my life surrounded by tech, I hardly understood it. Forget being able to code – I was clueless about the technologies, people, and companies increasingly shaping nearly every aspect of our daily lives.
Over the past seven years, I've become progressively more immersed in, and obsessed with, learning and thinking about tech and where it - and we - are going next. I've been truly fortunate to work with an incredible team at Audiomack, turning that bootstrapped website, started in a tiny shared office space in Brooklyn, into a leading music app with over 50 million downloads, five billion monthly streams, and recognition as a Fast Company Most Innovative Company in 2021.
Watching bits of code turn into something millions of people around the globe use every single day has been a humbling and inspiring experience. While I will periodically use this space to share my experience in building a successful startup, that isn't why I'm starting this newsletter: rather, it's something else I've noticed along the way.
As I've become more immersed in the world of tech, I've noticed a trend in my conversations with those who aren't: it often feels like we're speaking two entirely different languages altogether. As software progressively eats the world, this chasm increasingly concerns me: thoughtful public debates on innovation, business, and policy can't exist in a world where the many feel such a strong disconnect from the powerful few. While an income gap may have defined inequality in the first twenty years of this century, I firmly believe a knowledge gap will define the second.
More urgently, whatever disconnect exists today will only accelerate over the coming decades: the march of exponential technological progress means we will likely see more advances in the next 20 years than we did in the prior 200. The last twenty years gave us 140 characters, on demand sushi, and TikTok dances; the next will likely give us synthetic biology, mixed and augmented reality, virtual celebrities, People As A Service, autonomous everything, and, if you're especially optimistic, escape velocity in human aging, decentralized everything, and commercial fusion. If I lost you with a few of those, don't worry – we'll talk about them (and the dozens of other trends out of a sci-fi movie I had to omit) a lot more.
This newsletter is my humble attempt at helping to bridge this gap. Whether you're outside tech and hoping to better understand where we're heading, or inside the industry and merely looking for a fresh perspective, I aim to help you find it here.
What Does 'Above The API' Mean?
"Above The API" is a term familiar to most who work in technology but few who work outside of it. 'API' is an acronym for Application Programming Interface: a bit of software that allows an application (like a music or dating app) to exchange data and information with other applications, servers, or devices.
At its most basic level, the phrase delineates those who build and operate our digital world (those above the API) and those who are subject to the creations built by the former (those below the API). While the phrase was originally used in a mostly economic context – discussing the ever-increasing plight of those trying to compete in a world increasingly driven by technology they can't control - it has become only more relevant and prescient in other facets of life since. If you've used your phone today – and my guess is you did so first thing this morning, before brushing your teeth, pouring your coffee, or feeding a pet – your mental state, emotions, and thoughts have, whether you are consciously aware of it or not, been influenced and shaped by those above the API.
As Rao brilliantly points out, this line of demarcation isn't static: rather, the knowledge and effort required to keep one's head above the technological water line only rises with each passing day, month, and year.
None of us – myself most certainly included – are guaranteed a future above that line. This newsletter will merely be my public attempt to try, and one I hope you'll join.
About Me
I currently oversee revenue at Audiomack, a top music streaming app for Gen-Z and Millennial listeners, where I've worked since 2014.
Prior to my time at Audiomack, I was an electronic and pop music producer with placements on Atlantic, Republic, Island, Big Beat, and Dim Mak Records, racking up over 20 million global streams, coverage in Billboard, Indie Shuffle, This Song Is Sick, and Dancing Astronaut, and features on Spotify New Music Friday (U.S.) and Viral 50 (Netherlands).
In my free time, I am an early stage investor (Seed thru Series B) in ~20 technology startups spanning remote work, information security, space exploration, synthetic biology, and other sectors that deeply excite me.