"Most of the large consumer apps have already been invented." 🤯

Think about what that means: The everyday experiences we have today with entertainment, health, music, travel, learning, food, mobility, energy, payments, socialization are all defined. Done, unchangeable. These realms of daily life are supposedly locked to innovation—impossible to wrest from the control of a few dominant companies.

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Pulling back the curtain on the magic of Y Combinator

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a year ago · 236 likes · 6 comments · Palle Broe

Our lives are not static, neither can the everyday consumer technology we use afford to be.

Declaring an end to new consumer technology is confusing what is difficult to imagine with what is impossible.

Way back in 2005, Rupert Murdoch probably thought he had pulled off quite the coup in acquiring MySpace for $500 million. MySpace was the most popular website in the world, and assumed to be the owner of the golden moat that would come called the social graph. Facebook and YouTube shredded its dominance in just a couple of years. Our judgement may be clouded by the way a few platforms dominate attention. However, I am all but certain our great-grandchildren will not be watching TikTok.

Imagine what would be missing from our world if all our brilliant minds back then had looked at MySpace and capitulated control. Far worse, imagine the havoc of a world where the shredder is not a human organization, but an autonomous AI.

To me, this position of saying nothing new can be created is a dangerous retreat: As tinkerers, founders, investors, it’s like we are taking both hands off the steering wheel of technology in our everyday life.

Control? What control?

So, have we abandoned all efforts to steer consumer technology?

A peek at iOS Control Center might give one answer: This screen is the culmination of 17 years of intensive development. Our human needs are all there: the joy of music, the spark of personal connection, dials on our physical environment, memories to capture and to relive, the relief-entertainment-numbing of video, and even one of the oldest technologies: manmade light.

Behold the madhouse of buttons and widgets and sliders and text, each with further layers of nested options upon options! Tap any and you are setting in motion the work of a dozen custom chipsets and hundreds of interlocked, networked services. The majority of humans on Earth navigate these glyph-polluted waters dozens of times a day.

It’s easy to take potshots at the interface design itself, a profusion of baubles. Yet most use this screen so often, the visual presentation is more of a guitar fret for the mind guiding subconscious finger movements than a classic visual UI. The design it not the problem.

What disturbs me is the evident disinterest in actual control. The “Focus” button, with an array of fine-grained sub-controls beneath it, feels like a cruel joke. This is not a place for steering our technology towards opinionated and meaningful goals. It is a place where phones come to steer us.

Control Center is a sign of the growing abandonment of human control of our everyday experience.

Consumer ain’t dead yet

Technology already defines so much of our everyday lives.

But technology is not (yet) traveling alone, like a brakeless, ever-accelerating car. Humans designed that car; we certainly ought to keep a hand on the wheel.

Many in our own industry seem to be infected with a kind of nihilism that makes them want to give up all control to the tech itself. They not-so-secretly hope to invent the AGI that consumes much of everyday human economies. The lucre of potential inevitability draws them in.

I believe nothing about technology is inevitable. Yes, tech has a life of its own. There is an organicity that goes far beyond tools. Yet, like all life, tech is deeply interdependent with humanity and with the earth.

Many pioneers in AI have expressed surprise that its largest impacts so far have come not in chip design (though that’s changing) or drug research, but written and visual communication. I am not so shocked: visual decoding and communication are far higher priority in our own biology than scientific abstraction. AI systems are modeled on that very biology and run on chips expressly designed to rapidly solve visual problems.

With the very way we communicate now being altered, how could the fundamental markets for “consumer apps” not radically change too? How could new inventions, new startups, new ideas not even try to reshape what is possible in our human everyday?

AGI, if it is possible, when it is possible, whatever it may be, will participate in the gradient of life alongside human and non-human ecosystems. It will be part of our social world, not outside of it. So we better help shape it.

We cannot give up on the everyday part of the equation, on consumer technology. There are futures where technology helps us steer human endeavor towards harmony, towards creativity, towards regeneration.

Being happy with how phones work today is like being happy with Oreos being our only source of food forever. To abandon the idea that we can control technology is to abdicate responsibility for own future. I know many brilliant founders are not falling for this trap, and I love those rare humans are trying to invent new consumer technologies.

All of the important everyday consumer technologies have absolutely not been invented. But if we abandon control, they will be invented by machines whose interests may only faintly align with ours.

The East Coast was not treating us well. So, in a century-old cliche, we decided to try our luck out West. Investors in SF then seemed to be taking bigger risks. They didn’t look nauseated at the mere mention that we were building a new social media product.

(You might be surprised to hear we had trouble raising money. But it was 2014. Casey was not yet “Casey Nesitat from YouTube, oh my god!” He was a filmmaker who was just starting to vlog. I was an engineer who had helped build exactly one successful social product, Tumblr. Social media was presumed dead and dominated by Meta. We were not important. Fundraising was brutally difficult. )

Out West, we had spent a week driving the cheapest rental car available—a little red Yaris—endlessly back and forth between downtown SF and Sand Hill Road. It was our last day in town, and we still had no lead investor. We were in our car on one of downtown SF’s many unsavory corners. I felt about as deflated as the man across the street who was passed out on a crumbling office chair in the middle of the sidewalk.

We did this fundraise entirely wrong. I can see that only now, having been on the investor’s side dozens of times. The endless chasing and the stunt we were about to pull should have been warning signs.

One investor who kept eluding us was Matt Mazzeo, famous then for having made a bet on Gimlet. We were desperate to meet him, and weren’t trying to hide it, having called in every favor and mutual connection to make it happen.

Suddenly, Casey’s phone rang, flashing Mazzeo’s name. Maybe, finally, we would be able to meet this guy. Maybe he would be the lead investor we were seeking.

Speakerphone on:

Mazzeo: Hey Casey, sorry to give you guys the run-around, but I’m actually headed back to LA in a couple—

Casey: Where are you right now?

Mazzeo: I’m at a coffee shop in South Park, just finished a meeting and about to head to the airport.

Casey looked at me for a signal. His sense of the layout of SF was so bad he had booked us a hotel next the Golden Gate Bridge, near approximately zero of our meetings. I pointed down the block and held up five fingers.

Casey: Meet us in the park in 5 minutes.

I had already plugged South Park into Google Maps. Committing a variety of minor traffic violations, we got there right in time. Casey took inspiration from the gritty flavor of the neighborhood and grabbed a brown paper bag from the backseat. It was the kind of bag someone might use to disguise a beer on the street. “Load up the demo and put your phone in here.” I did as instructed.

We walked into the park and took a seat at a picnic table, shivering, as one always is in SF. Two minutes later, Mazzeo joined us. He was charming and warm as you’d expect from a former talent agent. But underneath the smile, he did not seem thrilled. Our pitch was standing between him and the end of a long day.

After some brief pleasantries, Casey slapped the brown bag on the table and slid it across to Mazzeo. “Brought you something.”

It was a beautiful act of theater: a fledgling company asking for a million dollars, in a gesture that would have looked to any passerby like a minor drug deal.

The mood shifted entirely. Mazzeo burst out laughing as he took the phone from the bag. I talked him through our demo. He listened intently to our now well-oiled pitch. For a moment, we thought we might have found our man.

The other shoe soon dropped: “I don’t think I could get there on this.” That’s VC for “haha no way am I backing this (yet).” Even though the pitch landed perfectly, all the effort had been for naught. He gave us some sage advice and a couple of helpful introductions and we parted ways.

Boil investors like frogs

Where did we go wrong?

We should have made writing a check the logical conclusion to a months-long conversation. Instead, we were showing up out of the blue, with a fully baked plan. Rather than give investors like Mazzeo time to get to know us, we demanded an immediate thumbs up or down.

Casey and I had been prototyping and iterating on Beme for six months. We are thoughtful people, and were probably among a few dozen of the most focused-on-social-video humans on earth at that moment. Many investors who we ended up talking to in the loaded environment of a pitch would have gladly spoken to us much earlier in the process. They would have had time to get to know us, to see that we had made appreciable progress, and to understand our vision.

And yet we hid off in our bunker. We were terrified to speak with investors until we had nailed the entire story and built a fully usable first version of the product.

I absolutely would not go back in time and show investors the horrific early Framer prototypes of our product. First impressions matter a lot, and all these early versions of the product were true flops. I absolutely would, however, have brought investors into our thinking.

We should have developed relationships months earlier, instead of driving around the Valley in a moderately controlled panic, trying to find a VC willing to sign up for a shotgun wedding.

Recruit me, early and often

Now that I’ve been sitting on the other side of the picnic table for a few years, I see things differently. First meetings are the beginning of a personal and financial relationship that will last a decade, with risks to my career as well as yours.

For early stage investors like myself, it’s a ferocious privilege to have founders share their companies! I love meeting founders early in their process, and not just ones already in my network. When the idea isn’t yet fully baked, I feel the thrill of getting to author the story with the founder. I am recruited to your team, not acting as your judge. And most importantly, you are developing a relationship and strong answers to the hidden questions that actually underlie most early investment decisions—about resilience, depth of thought, and founding team chemistry.

Raising money for the first time is as vulnerable as walking into every meeting with a bloody nose. A perfectly practiced pitch seems like armor against this vulnerability. Counterintuitively, though, the pitch becomes a wall between you and me.

Want the brass tacks? Aaron Harris has a great tactical guide to having coffee with investors.

Are you a star engineer who wants to build a consumer product, but feels like no one would ever fund it? Are you a deep expert in an industry, tinkering with an idea but unsure how it becomes a company? Is there a part of the healthcare system that has been driving you mad? A niche change in the way people watch, buy, eat, live, do, that you know is going to become the mainstream in a few years?

Your company might not be a company yet. It might be just you. But you can see how the world is going to play out, and you know precisely what mark you want to make on it. You have the threads and beats and pieces of the story, but they don’t really fit together yet.

This is the perfect time. Find some investors who care about what you’re building, be concise and intriguing in the way you contact them, and don’t get discouraged by some silent no’s.

It doesn’t take a phone in a paper bag to start building relationships that can become funding and lasting partnerships.

The old motto: Build something people want. Anything at all!

The new motto: Build something the world needs.

The old method: Pivot until exponential growth.

The new method: Work backwards from utopia.

I meet many people who are beautifully eager to start companies, despite the low expected value of pain-to-payoff. Founders early in their journey, more whirlwind than dynamo, seek an answer to a simple question:

How do I decide what to work on?

(AKA What should my startup do?)

I’ve spewed some version of the received wisdom on this many times: Find a set of customers who has a problem and build something quick and dirty to solve it. Use that initial traction as your base camp to solve the same or adjacent problems for an ever widening set of people. Rinse, repeat, billionaire!

That advice today is not just bad, it’s irresponsible.

We used to send the brightest entrepreneurs out into a field with a divining rod, a pep talk, and a $2M seed round. Maybe they’d turn their ambition into a world-changing product and strike a rich vein of oil! If not, try, try again. (No wonder even this method’s biggest boosters are expressing regrets.)

Lean startup ideas date from an era when the financial establishment was on fire and founders were the optimistic barbarians at the gates. In the late 2000s, it felt like we could freely experiment around the ashes and hope to build something new, and the cash flowed to make it so. Hacking was entrepreneurship. We owed the world little.

Now Los Angeles is on fire, tech runs much of the socioeconomic show, and we owe the world much more. The stakes for humanity right now are higher than they have ever been. Some have incredible abundance; yet material suffering is as widespread as it is unnecessary, feeding the righteous indignation of working people everywhere. The climate crisis threatens to change the planet beyond its ability to support our population. An anti-cooperative world politics could slide all too easily into nuclear annihilation. You are probably addicted to the news, so I’ll leave the list there.

Startups have moved from the edge to the absolute center. Founders with moral hearts and clear minds are rejecting the old ways. I don’t want to invest in startups that wander blithely the way we did 15 years ago. I want all my money and effort to go only into possible futures worth inhabiting. The world needs startups to imagine those better worlds and pull them forward to the present.

The old ways

Circa 2008, the release of the iPhone and quantitative easing combined into a potent acid-base volcano of opportunity. Anyone with a modicum of programming ability and common sense perceived that every industry was gleefully up for grabs.

It felt like code gave us the power to build skyscrapers without blueprints. Find a problem you understand, hack together something that solves it in a small way, then experiment relentlessly until you’ve solved it for a much larger market of millions of people.

What a product would eventually do, what impact it might have? Not nearly as important as maneuvering speed. Instagram began life as Bourbn, an unpopular Foursquare clone whose photos were the draw. Slack was a failed gaming company’s chat tool. Both amplified a small feature of unrelated software into culture-defining platforms and massive sales.

(I know the origins of our startup-building methods well, because they date from when I caught the startup bug myself. Before I ended up at Tumblr, I had a turn as one of these feverish pivoters. After spending 8-10 hours at my relatively demanding actual engineering job, I would take the subway home to Brooklyn and spend the whole evening in front of my laptop, trying to build products that I hoped would become companies. Something massive, something important, seemed just an evening of clacking in TextMate away. I had a rotating cast of co-conspirators, building things with absurd names like FollowWidget. It was enormously fun.)

The new ways

So, you’re a founder in 2025. How do you know what to build, and how do you get started building it?

My advice is to work backwards from utopia.

Illustrate the worthwhile future

Put yourself in a world a decade from now, maybe even twenty years ahead. Look around. Describe vividly the world you want to live in. Isolate the elements that make it safe, sane, joyful, surprising, creative, beautiful, livable, nourishing, alive. What, in that perfect future, is abundant which is today rare or impossible?

Illuminate a tiny slice of of a compelling human future. Give us your solarpunk, your scaleable housing for all, your clean water distilled from the air, your fully automated food supply. Gravitate towards your personal expertise. Make this future real in words, in drawings, in whatever form gives the vision power.

I choose the word utopia intentionally. What you seek is a vivd guiding myth, not a master plan. This vision is not the end of your work nor a roadmap.

Thinking this way is harder than it seems. Short-termism and greed dominate our current culture, masquerading as grand visions. Avoid those traps! Don’t take this a call to build the perfectly moated monopoly of American lawn-trimming.

But also don’t limit yourself to basic utility: The world needs joy as much as it needs clean energy. I’d gladly fund founders with a vision to bring us exponentially greater amounts of either.

Build its first artifact

With this sharp vision of the future in hand, now comes step two: work backwards. Envision all the developments needed to get to that future, however fanciful, however wrong, until you unwind all the way to today.

Put yourself in the shoes of a historian in the future. You are looking back at the year 2025. What first seeds of the beautiful world were planted? What surprising elements of technology and culture combined to augur the greatness of today? What necessary infrastructure was built that opened the door to your utopia?

Isolate that first artifact, that first product, the very first node in the development tree that leads to the world you want. The first step may not look like much, it may even look like play. No matter. Go build that first little nugget of the history of the better world. Build it today, for that future to be possible.

An example may help. Take fan favorite tech company, SpaceX. In Musk’s utopia—which, I’ll be honest, I have some qualms with—humanity has ready to access to the stars and spreads across the solar system. If you were a historian from 2100, you would note that it all began with innovations that radically lowered the difficulty and cost to reach space in the 2010s. And this is exactly what SpaceX has built.

This method works for more earthbound founders as well. I was the first investor in Headway. At their inception in 2018, the utopia they imagined was simple enough: Everyone in America who needs a therapist, should be able to see a therapist. At first, they solved what seemed like an absolutely niche but real problem. They made it easy for people who did have insurance to get more easily reimbursed for seeing an out-of-network therapist. This isn’t even part of their business today, but it was the critical first waypoint—it was what would need to be true in 2018 for everyone in America who needed it to be able to see a therapist in 2030.

Who will build like this?

The best founders today know what the Good Place looks like, and they are building by tiny increments to get there.

Companies like this are not easy, not that any startup ever is. Only a select set of founders will switch to this mode. The old ways have a way of sticking around.

The best founders of today will not look like the last crop. New methods require an outsider’s mindset. The next great founders will be artists turning their practice into products; quiet experts in scientific fields jumping from the research bench into company-making; college students who didn’t drop out, who studied their history and want to alter the timeline in a very precise way. I think of recent investments like Opponent, which represents Ian Cheng’s vision of a future where screens can offer kids unbounded, mind-building play instead of virtual drugs.

The earliest versions of our better future are being built right now, not by founders seeking miniature problems to kickstart their empires, but by clear-headed historians of the future, working backwards from the world they want to live in.

If you’re one of those venturesome few, I’d love to meet you.

I wrote a kind of interim eulogy of her I shared on Instagram, which I share again with you at the end of this email. I hesitated at first to bring this news into my “professional” world. Her death will color every part of me, as her life did, so I am taking the risk.

As I sit more with this grief, I am struck by how familiar it feels.

I am fairly attuned to conversational elephants. Working with sharp and ambitious people is impossible without developing a sixth sense for what is going unsaid. M. John Harrison calls this device in his fiction “Dialogue that doesn’t say what it means, although what it means is clear enough.” Our real lives—especially at work—are filled right now with conversation that really doesn’t say what it means.

Today we all swim in a mounting flood of losses: of the plans we had, of kids’ years of development, of weddings and funerals delayed, of the elders and friends who have passed on, of the simple pleasure of dinner with the people we love. Losses by the hour! Yet when I talk to entrepreneurs and collaborators recently, we say little beyond a “when this is over” lament.

Grief surrounds us and yet we fight tooth and nail to deny it. Francis Weller writes about this contradiction in contemporary society generally, yet his words feels crafted to this past year:

The accumulation of losses are pressing on our psyches and demanding that we engage the multiple sorrows that are enfolding our world and our lives. This crack in our denial is one of the most hopeful signs I see for our planet. We are beginning to take in the wider expanse of loss that is happening in our culture and our ecosystems. In addition to our personal wounds and losses, we are hearing the earth itself calling for our attention and affection, our care and action.

… The interweaving of personal and planetary losses has left many of us feeling uncertain, anxious, and ultimately heartbroken.

… This should not be seen as a depressing truth. Acknowledging this reality enables us to find our way into the grace that lies hidden in sorrow. We are most alive at the threshold between loss and revelation.

Weller’s call is one I want to share with you: To run at that crack in our denial. To try to embrace grief, metabolize it in our communities, our work lives, and our selves.

I don’t pretend to have the script for any of this, but my particular grief calls me to reach out and ask about yours. Grief deserves its due space, and I won’t cede this fertile ground to trite lessons of how we learned to “stay productive” in this thousand Tambora year.

About my mom

My mom died in early January. I wasn’t prepared—to ask the police hundreds of miles away to find her body, to write her obituary, to tell her siblings and oldest friends, to try to mourn in this isolation. Not prepared at all. She died painlessly in her sleep: a thin solace.

You feel compelled to hoard grief like this, afraid to share it. But it’s time I try.

I loved her fiercely. Ours wasn’t the easy story of “best friend and inspiration!” I read here every mother’s day. Addiction and incapacitating depression were frequent interlopers in her life. She doubled the hurt by hiding it. She often made me miserable, and I love her no less.

I was born when she was still a kid herself, a few years after my dad took the Polaroid here. She didn’t even make it to 60. The past five years, I have dedicated a piece of my heart to trying to save our relationship and, in a way, her. It felt like the fitful start of something bright, now cruelly extinguished.

Archie made dinner last night in a red tin my mom gave him last summer. I had offhandedly mentioned his pandemic experiments with Julia Child, and one day this enormous red soufflé pan just showed up. Packing her desk, I found a post-it with “Archie’s birthday - June 10” underlined three times. There were days last year when she could hardly get out of bed. But the person I love? That mattered.

“You’ve been my biggest cheerleader these past few years,” she said in one of our last conversations. It was only pennies of payback for a lifetime of her being mine.

I love you, Mom, and I’ll never stop missing you.

So, about 2020

My professional bread and butter is building, tweaking, and debugging systems to help groups of people build big creative and technical things together. Working within a company or with a founder, I insist on making space to reflect, honestly dissect, and improve. Feedback loops, retrospectives, 1:1s, goal setting and communication, etc, etc. I genuinely love perfecting these things.

And yet, when I finally made it through last year, my reaction was: Great! Let’s just triple seal the big ol’ Pendaflex of 2020 shut with duct tape and label it “SLOG!” That’s all the reflecting I need on the year of our lord 2020, thank you!

While you do not have to be good, more often than not I find it worth a try. When I jerk so strongly away from a thing I know is valuable, I’ve learned to pay attention. It’s not that doing a review of my year would not be worth it, but it might be really hard.

Then my friend Schlaf went and made things easy: He posted a straightforward template for doing an annual review for yourself.

I dug in. There was indeed some pain. He suggested looking through your digital ephemera for the year, from emails to calendar to photos. The plans to spend the spring months in Mexico City and September learning about homebuilding in Vermont appeared. All dashed, of course. As did the dozens of news headlines I screenshot, all a bit too 28 Days Later / La Jetee for my taste.

There were triumphs, too, though, which I felt compelled to revive this newsletter and share.

One goal that came out crystal clear in that review as well is that I need to share more of my writing. I’ve got tens of thousands of words just hanging around in Ulysses, with more coming each day, and I am being too precious to just share them. 2021 is going to be about not worrying so much about the polish—so if you aren’t up for a rough draft in your inbox every few weeks, opt out now and my feelings will not be hurt.

Anyhow, what did I accomplish in 2020? Well…

Oda launched!

Oda, which I cofounded and have been putting a good chunk of my time into for more than two years, launched.

Do you love music? Do you miss hearing it in person? Do you want a beautiful speaker that looks like no speaker you’ve ever seen? We’ve sold out the first few batches, but you can order for the next batch in time for the spring season.

There are so many stories I’ll share in the future about how this company went from Nick’s touching, wild idea to today, where we of shipping the first units to our paying members. As every founder of a company that involves hardware had warned me, it’s been a harrowing journey.

I got to try the COO seat

Though I’ve led an engineering organization, started a startup studio, been GM of a unit within a big company, and just generally and joyfully sampled many flavors of managing the operation of teams, I’ve never explicitly been a COO. That changed last year, in a trail-by-fire way that I love.

In early spring, conferences and events around the world were being cancelled. Organizers of all sorts were flocking to Hopin, which I had invested in only a few months earlier. Growth was off the charts, faster than anything this soon out of the gates myself or any other investor I spoke with had seen. With an a team of only 25, and a waitlist of thousands of enterprise customers including much of the Fortune 500, the need to scale and level up in absolutely every part of the business was terrifyingly present.

Johnny, the founder and CEO, would call me for advice. At first every couple of weeks, but quickly it accelerated. He said “It’s lockdown. You’re in the mountains doing nothing. Why don’t you try out the COO job for a few months?”

It was an absolute thrill ride—so much so though that I truly agonized over whether I ought to stay on permanently. There’s so much to share of even those few months about hiring an executive team, communicating well, onboarding when 95% of your team has not ever met in person, etc, etc.

I invested in 3 new startups

… none of which are public yet, so I can’t share the names. Ack, sorry.

Three was a lot fewer than I had intended to invest in in 2020. And not for lack of dealflow! There were a ton of companies I saw raising last year. It felt to me and other investors I know who focus on pre-seed and seed like one of the hottest years they’ve ever seen. But with the intense months spent on Hopin, and my own biases against the flavor of company that I saw most this year (MBA-solves-middle-market-problem-with-best-practices, ugh), I didn’t jump at any others.

Hopefully, 2021 will be back on track.

And plenty of other startups in my portfolio managed to have a great year as well

• Headway has dramatically expanded the number of customers it helps connect with insurance-covered therapists, and turned to helping its network of mental health providers go virtual on a dime.

• Airhouse and Northstar launched the products they’ve quietly been working for several years publicly to strong receptions

• Kapwing continues to lead in video editing from the browser, something that also took a leap in Covid.

• And Gossamer continues to impress me with their commitment not just to growing their brand and products, but also justice:

I wrote almost all of this earlier this week, and am just now sending it out simply because I was bikeshedding some Substack settings. But I have to include a note about yesterday:

You, like me, might be feeling the strong urge to bury your head back in your work. You might feel the best thing to do is to just focus on building your company and not pay attention to “politics."

If you’re building in America, and even if you’re not, this does affect you. Functioning democracy is the kernel every startup and creative endeavor depends on to run. Bitcoin can't make sure your team goes to bed not fearing for their lives. Google cannot impartially settle a dispute with a vendor. No VC can fund for the kinds of foundational research on which the vaccine to end a global pandemic is based. And the kernel that provides all that functionality is not in great shape today.

Believing you can just go on, because technology is above all this, is living in a fool’s paradise. I’m going to do my best to keep contributing even in some small way to the maintenance of that kernel. Otherwise, the vile mob will be happy to make some hard-to-revert changes.

Ouch, that was such a lengthy update, I’m sorry. I promise this year is about short, sweet, and off-the-cuff with this newsletter. I’m so glad you’re here.

Why I Angel Invest

Examining what I do and why seems to be a theme of this moment of life. I took a hard look at why I spend so much time and money on startups, and ended up with an uncomfortably true answer from my past. I wrote about it here.

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Why I do everything else

I struggle to define what I am professionally right now. I’m busy as hell with a range of things that don’t add up to any simple title. As an order-craving engineer, this bothers me enormously.

I turned to biographies for an answer.

I’ve never liked reading biographies. What the great men (too rarely women) did with their armies, how they toiled alone with a decision that decided the fate of millions… Ugh. I’ve tried. Biographies too often read like dull histories of ego or thousand-page definitions of luck.

Early into this exceptional biography of artist and activist David Wojnarowicz, I changed my mind. Something just clicked: The way artists made their way is just so much richer material. Case in point: Wojnarowicz made many of his art world contacts working as a bar back at Danceteria. That’s a life I can identify a lot more with than one that starred in Yalta.

After finishing his bio, I wanted to read more about his peers. Queer artists in the East Village scene of 70’s and 80’s New York in particular feel so relevant and urgent to me, not least because I live there.

Arthur Russell, whose biography I hoovered up next, is a prefect example:

A cellist, composer, performer, disco producer, and a million other things, Russell was relatively unknown until a handful of posthumous records released in the mid-2000’s struck a popular nerve. When I first heard Wild Combination circa 2007, I assumed it was a hot new Pitchfork-worthy band. Hardly. It was recorded in the 70’s. That’s how far ahead of his time his work was. Russell had been dead for more than a decade—gone far too early, like Wojnarowicz and so many gay heroes.

How did he make this astonishing music? Russell was a wide and wild collaborator. He studied traditional Western classical, then went deep into Indian composition. He created multiple disco hits. He played cello on one original recording of Psycho Killer with the Talking Heads. He recorded spoken word pieces with Allan Ginsberg, his upstairs neighbor in an Avenue A tenement. He met a drummer in Harlem at a time when even New York music was still embarrassingly segregated, and the next day brought him to the studio to join the session of a disco track.

As his biographer puts it:

When faced with an array of choices, Russell’s modus operandi was one of inquisitive digression. Instead of “progressing” from one style of music to another, or even one group of musicians to another, Russell followed an illogical logic, pursuing a bemusing number of sounds. Like a vine, he only moved up or down if that movement helped him move sideways, and his striking wanting to do everything at so much stop time as open up other ways of experiencing it.

I’m inspired by such intuitive, unapologetic, ravenous collaboration.

I am doing a variety of things for a small set of very early startups that I am incredibly passionate about. One I’m a cofounder of, many I’m an investor or advisor to. I also just love getting coffee with founders or engineers or designers or thinkers whose work is not in the container of a “company.” If it feels like something is worth digging into for ten hours a week, then I dig in. Why not work out the titles and the details when they matter, if ever?

I’ve tried to stop wondering “Where does this lead?” and simply follow my intuition. Perhaps a good career is less a parade of titles and more a web of collaborations.

(Very relevant to Russell, I’m well into one such collaboration on a music-related product that a friend has been working on for three years. We’re barreling out toward a debut early next year. More about that in a few months…)

Collaborating with whoever feels right is freeing, if a little terrifying, but as Russell would put it: Let’s go swimming!

By Matt Hackett

I'm an entrepreneur and engineer, currently in exploration mode. Subscribe to follow along.



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Every time I send one of these newsletters which still does not include “so, here’s the new company I’m working on!!!” I feel irrationally apologetic.

For me, writing in public without a company is as if I’ve nicked myself badly shaving, am bleeding profusely, and just totally ignore that while I proceed to tell you at length about how good the space-travel novel I just read is. (The Wanderers was really good.)

This is in part why I’ve been shy about sharing a major thing I’m working on right now, a beautiful sound- and indie-music-related project and company that I love, and you might just too. More on that down the line.

I put myself under an inordinate amount of pressure to “find my next thing.” In truth, next things always come when we least expect them. They distill in an instant from all the messy, gee-that-seems-interesting, oh-you-have-to-talk-to-her-about-this of the incidents in between.

In that spirit, I present a peek at the current messiness: some explorations I’ve been doing around travel. Without an apology, even! (Though with a thanks to Luck and Privilege, understandably least venerated of all the gods, who’ve made it possible for me to do this exploring sans day job.)

Why travel?

I’ve been going deep on travel the past several months. Not traveling, per se, though I have been doing a bit of. That’s a recent shot from Guanajuato, Mexico.

Much like my explorations around real estate last year (which are not forgotten, just running in a background thread), I center my research with a purposefully naive question:

How might you make enriching travel possible for more people more often?

I believe more travel is good for humanity. The increasing availability of travel to people of every class all over the world creates far more than economic activity. Travel dramatically increases cultural liquidity. Like financial liquidity, it is a necessity for peace, prosperity, and common human purpose.

I don’t think my own horizons would be terribly wide had I not fallen in love with going elsewhere. At 19, I convinced my parents to lend me $800 (not small change to them or me!) to spend the summer in Thailand as a volunteer English teacher. That launched a passion that’s taken me to 40-some-odd countries, from Canada to the DPRK (aka North Korea).

Travel has made me me, and given me a lot of strong opinions about how it best functions as a product. I’m very familiar with the consumer end of travel, so I wanted to push myself beyond that comfort and look more closely at the “supply” side of the existing equation. That’s taken me from dry 10-K annual financials to more colorful conversations with seasoned executives.

A peek at how hotels work

A major hotel chain can make $500-600 annual average revenue per user (ARPU). Facebook, by comparison, makes around $140 annual ARPU in the US. Of course, one of those companies has a much less flexible cost structure, what with the buildings and the service workers.

Hotels at scale are thus desperately trying to become a kind of software company, a thin client on top of the messy hardware of physical rooms to sleep in and caretakers thereof.

Mega-merged companies like SPG-Marriott are divesting themselves from owning actual hotels and fast. They sell the hotel itself and simply license the name and services back to the new owner. Marriott, for example, owns less than 30% of its physical properties. From the tenor of their annual reports, they wish they owned 0%.

AirBnB was built in exactly the opposite way: They made a powerful software tool, which is a uniquely cheap method to create a brand in the modern era. The tool attracted the hard assets (short-term rentals closer to the places travelers wanted to be than any hotel could ever get). AirBnB has dabbled in hotels, but even with the HotelTonight acquisition, they are blissfully avoiding owning physical things, like any good millennial.

Hotels must sell a huge amount of inventory: at just one property, hundreds of rooms, every single night, every day of the year. The room sales problem appears to be a classic software one. If the specificity of a hotel room were a bit lower, it would be an ideal fit the real-time auction marketplaces that have given Google and Facebook FANGs.

But it a problem currently only marginally solved by software, with an inefficient and fractured set of systems. Hotels pay Expedia commission to book you in a room, or they pay you directly (and far less) in the form of loyalty points to book with them, or they hunt down locked-in corporate sales one large company at a time with human direct sales.

All of these intermediaries–including such seemingly customer-friendly sites as TripAdvisor–work for the hotels themselves, not you, the consumer. In fact, no one in the travel booking equation works for you, unless you’re paying the highest end of travel agents. Even if your company pays for corporate travel management, they are the customer. Corporate travel is all about cost management for the company, not a better experience for you, fellow worker-traveler.

Opportunity is written all over a messy marketplace with no one working for the consumer. So next I’m back to the product side of imagining just what a solution might feel like.

Question for you

What keeps you from traveling more and more meaningfully?

(I know cost is often number one–and all these creaky middlemen aren’t helping there!)

A book you should read

The Wanderers by Meg Howrey

I loved this novel about the first astronauts destined for Mars. A sort of antidote to The Martian, Meg Howrey takes you inside the heads of three imperfect humans doing their job, which just happens to be to bring humanity to Mars. She shows you how the most extreme kind of travel would feel. To me, that’s just as exciting as the speculative engineering of it all.

A music video you should watch

Aldous Harding - The Barrel

I’ve been spending a lot more time on new music recently than in many years, thanks to aforementioned semi-secret project. Here Aldous Harding is a sillier Kate Bush with an unbelievable voice and an album coming in a few weeks I can’t wait for.

www.youtube.com • Share

By Matt Hackett

I'm an entrepreneur and engineer, currently in exploration mode. Subscribe to follow along.



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I’m still processing the Camino experience, if I’m honest, so holding back on that for now. But I do have some thoughts on the current state of my corner of the tech world from SF. If that sounds dull, skip to the end for an overshare, a book recommendation, and a review of the Apple Watch that’s really a review of our future as AI symbionts.

Are the tech good times over?

Six years ago, after I had left Tumblr and all of my possessions in storage New York, I had an acute sense that everything was on the table. I might live anywhere! Berlin and San Francisco were the only real candidates, so I gave each of them a month trial.

I loved “lively, provisional” Berlin but there it felt like technology was on the edges and cultural creation was the core. San Francisco was so obviously the inverse, I abandoned any notion of moving there a week in.

That 2012 trip was hardly a loss, though: meeting dozens of tech folk new and old, I got a survey of the energy in the Valley. Weirdo technologists showed me their side hacks, VCs tried to rope me into their companies where the idea/management see-saw was tipped firmly in the wrong direction. It relit my excitement for building products and companies and threw me on the path that eventually led to starting Beme.

I’m currently antsy as hell to get to work, to build a team, to execute on SOMETHING. So I headed to SF for a week and did the same exercise of meeting about 30 people, half friends, half friendly strangers.

In contrast to the feral optimism of six years ago, what I found was a pervasive (though not universal) discomfort. The toxic smoke appearing toward the end of the week defined the mood. Many people I met, investors and engineers at the heart of the last wave of consumer mobile technology, felt adrift in the current ambiguous trends of ML and pure-logistics-execution everything. They felt the party was over. Others, designers and engineers I really respect, were more critical and reflective than I’ve ever heard them, seemingly asking “what the hell kind of party is this, anyway?”

The pessimism felt like a symptom of startups’ shift toward the mainstream. I learned to write C so that I could add features to a MUD that I loved playing, a deeply uncool, primitive social network of teenagers sneaking hours on the family computer. That clandestinely won skill has turned out to be the keys to the kingdom of this current moment of the global economy. We are not hacking away in the middle of the night, we’re being called to testify to Congress. The limelight burns.

I find many reasons to be optimistic still:

Being thoroughly mainstream means startups get to play in industries that were totally off-limits, monopolized by rent-taking, entrenched players. Consumers consistently are running to new companies, because they have learned the prices will be lower and the service will be better. The capital is more available to technologists to attempt audacious, difficult things than ever before–regardless (at least for 2-3 years) of where public markets head.

I’m also optimistic about the other source of pessimism, the idea that automation and AI will soon destroy most jobs. Tech encroaches on every imaginable industry, and growth does mandate that we invent new economic activity (or reinvent our concept of the economy altogether) once its efficiencies set in. But as Luke Kanies argues brilliantly, increases in efficiency tend to lead to higher quality and the expansion of the whole definition of work and entertainment. We will see inventions of many new categories still of entertainment, gaming, media, etc, and distributed software (my home turf) will be at the core. Some of these new categories will count as work (as much social media has), some as leisure. Happily for our threatened planet, most will consume remarkably little in the way of physical resources.

I’m also optimistic that tech’s being out in the light means massive expansion in what gets made, who it gets made for, and who gets to make it. The tools are now inexpensive, the skills are widely learnable. The culture within tech companies still lags, but that gap is closing too.

Having met the founders of companies like Even (great to meet you, Quentin), and given the opportunity to fiddle at experimental places like Dynamicland (thanks, Carl), I don’t think we’re at the end of startups.

Out in SF there were sparkles of optimism at the periphery, some part of which will inevitably become the glowing core.

An experiment in professional oversharing

🔗 Google Doc - Matt Hackett: What I Think I’m Good At

I still don’t know what I’m working on next. It could be joining a company, it could be starting another, it could be a more directed version of the finger-in-many-startup-pies I’ve been up to this year.

I do know that the peg of “CTO” is a strong and uncomfortable one. I am absolutely an engineer and a manager, but I identify less and less with just the technical. I’ve managed teams of journalists, led brand designs, accidentally done a half dozen kinds of sales.

In an effort to better describe all that, I’m publicly sharing a (still very rough) doc of what I think I’m good at and enjoy doing. A provisional, hopefully more honest sort of resume.

I’d love to know what you think.

If you know me, are there things I’m missing? If you don’t, does this give you a better idea of what I do? Make it sound like you’d wanna work with me?

On living at the command of nascent AI

Apple Watch: A (p)review of cyborg life – Matt Hackett – Medium

I’ve so wanted to love the Apple Watch, not quite successfully. I tried version 4 again, and at least got something out of it: a taste of cyborg life.

medium.com • Share

#1 sci-fi book recommendation

🔗 Light by M. John Harrison

I cannot stop recommending this novel, on par with Neuromancer for the way it hurls you at full speed into the middle of a psychotic future world. You could read this in a couple of holiday flights.

Next up

I wanted to throw an update on my angel investing in here, but it just didn’t fit. I want to share as many real numbers as I can about my investments (11 so far this year), and will do that with you all in a couple weeks.

I’ve also started collaborating with a good friend on a hardware music product I’m really excited about. It’s too early to reveal yet, but early next year I think I’ll have some bits to share.

Thank you so much for subscribing and letting me work out my weird ideas on you. If any of this makes any sense, I’d love to hear from you.

By Matt Hackett

I'm an entrepreneur and engineer, currently in exploration mode. Subscribe to follow along.



This newsletter is for people who, like me, believe making mass technology and serious critique are not mutually exclusive. Product design, philosophy, management, book and app recommends, queer art, etc.

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Embracing ugly process

Back in 2010, Mayor Bloomberg proclaimed the end of one of New York City’s most ubiquitous annoyances: scaffolding. Finally, the haphazard plywood supported by a dangerously random configuration of metal bars was out! No more would walking New York’s sidewalks be interrupted by blocks-long, dark, featureless construction tunnels!

I was thrilled at the announcement, this being basically the best thing Bloomberg’s three-term technocracy had done for the city. Sadly, the futuristic scaffolding was virtually never deployed. My own apartment building is currently covered in the good ol’ green-and-steel variety for the foreseeable future, facade inspection pending.

The year being halfway over, I am beginning to beat myself up for not having made sufficient progress in figuring out My Next Thing(s). I take solace that even the great Michael Bloomberg, who left an unprecedented physical mark on the city with rezonings and capital projects galore, couldn’t manage to make scaffolding look a little prettier. Construction is ugly.

Centre Pompidou is all about loving mechanicals

I suspect many creative people are unkind to themselves as I have been, treating transitory, preparatory time as unproductive, useless, painful. A programming analogy comes to mind:

As I get deeper and deeper into tinkering with home and space automation, I’ve been coding in multiple languages and at scattershot layers of the stack, from hexdump’ing infrared signals to working with perfectly lovely iOS SDKs. The vast majority of my coding time so far has been spent just on getting setup: toolkits downloaded, compilers and libraries updated, firmware flashes, etc, etc.

I used to think this inordinate amount of time futzing with the scaffolding was unique to building software. With the distance of having mostly managed for several years, and overseen a ton of video production, I now understand that futzing with the tools is where we spend the majority of time in human creative endeavor. To shoot a great video, scripting, staging, lighting, coordinating, test shooting, production organizing take up at least half the work, editing another 40% and the actual shooting of the damn video-perceived as the delightful kernel of creativity-is a measly 10% of the time spent.

So, as you go about your work, take a little breath and try to appreciate the scaffolding. I tend to treat everything that is not flow as its enemy, when in fact, all that plodding, flowless work is what makes flow even possible. If I didn’t putter around the apartment changing light settings for thirty minutes, I would never be able to write a damn thing.

Investing

I’ve made six investments in (pre-)seed companies this year, and am aiming to make 4-6 more before the end of the year. I am trying to keep a true beginner’s mind, embracing that I have no idea what I’m doing. My friends who are years into the VC career advise me that their earliest days were riddled with error, so this has the benefit of also likely being true.

The best thing to do when you have no idea what your doing is to learn as much as possible, as cheaply as possible. Investing in startups, especially right now, is hardly “cheap,” but my investments so far are comparatively small checks ($10-20k).

Over the course of 2-3 years, I want to construct a kind of Minimum Viable Portfolio, from which I’ll learn whether my theses and practice around investing play competitively in the market. It might sound strange, but I’m realizing that most angel investors are motivated by many factors that are hardly economic or measurable. For me, this has to become something I’m very good at or it doesn’t justify the (extremely high!) cost.

I also hope to be as radically transparent as possible as an investor. More on this in the future, but for now, a question: What do you want to know from a very new, very early-stage investor?

Experiments in space

My current obsession is a vague one. So vague I’m afraid to share it, for fear of looking ridiculous or uncertain. But here goes.

There are abundant opportunities for software to make space, especially urban space, much more dynamic than it currently is. Radical applications of software to physical human space-not as art, but as viable business-is where I’m going to keep poking for a while. Nothing may come of it.

My tinkering is switching rapidly between different scales, a lack of focus I am trying to trust will resolve itself. A sampling:

• What I wanted when I set out to automate my house was an API for my physical apartment. HomeKit, Apple’s SDK for modeling and interacting with a very limited set of approved devices, is the closest thing on the market, and it hardly does the trick. So I’ve started to build such a REST API on my own. Raspberry Pi parts are strewn about my desk as we speak, the “server” in this scenario.

• The primary input layer for automation of space is so obviously voice, yet voice interfaces erase spatial and tactile reference in a way that is almost painful. I miss touching my light switches, the kinesthetic memory of spots on the wall that alter the atmosphere. I’m tinkering with MIDI drum pad/sampler controllers used by DJs to control and display state in my apartment. So far, fairly awkward, but the squishy buttons are nice.
  

• The home is a pretty limited scope, and I’m now wondering what that API looks like outside my house, roaming the city. Why is there no Amazon Web Services for physical space? An ever-expanding bundle of services that let developers provision and deploy physical space. Spin up an r3.xlarge for four hours to host your pop-up, deploy a cluster of showrooms in us-west1-seattle and us-east2-washingtondc to sell your new merch line.

• In that vein, if I leased a microscopic retail space, on a prime Manhattan block, and made reserving and configuring it possible via a simple API, who would use it? What would go in?
  

• Why are mortgages the only means for delivering permanent housing with financial upside to customers? Why are we stuck with a 30-year term, when the majority of our generation rarely inhabit a place for more than 10 years? (I’m about six books deep here, longform coming soon.)

• What could software do to dynamically program the sidewalk, an abundant and underpriced resource in every city? I was surprised to learn that in New York City, as of around 2008, the city in one fell swoop did away with private ownership of newsstands, because they wanted to own the advertising space on the outside of them for revenue My vision of softwaring-out a newsstand, dashed. (To license one, you must apply for a 2 year license from the city and it has to be your primary occupation. Also, the law seems to say you have to sell actual paper newspapers. Hmm.)
  

This may seem quite scattered, and ti is, but I’m deploying a critical startup trick: I’m seeking a microscopic but ubiquitous problem, a much smaller unit to operate on so as not to get obsessed with the pure programmatic abstraction. Where I land, or whether I land here at all, time will tell.

If you made it all the way through this mess...

… you’ll probably love another entrepreneur’s newsletter, a week-by-week, blow-by-blow account of building a consumer video product in a world that thinks there will never be another one of those that scales (ha!). My friend Hannah Donovan, designer, thoughtful manager, and former GM of Vine among other things, is just killing it with this raw view of her journey. Highly recommend a subscribe.

Let Go and Haul by Hannah Donovan

A weekly logbook: the journey of entrepreneurship from a woman’s perspective.

tinyletter.com • Share

By Matt Hackett

I'm an entrepreneur and engineer, currently in exploration mode. Subscribe to follow along.



This newsletter is for people who, like me, believe making mass technology and serious critique are not mutually exclusive. Product design, philosophy, management, book and app recommends, queer art, etc.

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First theme: Place

For April and May, and maybe beyond because it is proving very shiny indeed, my explorer’s theme has been: place.

I’ve been reading writing, and even doing some hacking on increasingly wild home automation ideas as I try and scratch an itch to understand what current hardware and software is doing to our sense of where we are and where we belong.

Space is physical, it exists in the world, you can quantify and model and manipulate it directly.

Place is not something intrinsic to the world, but rather one of humanity’s foundational technologies that has been under constant but often slow revision since we first came back to the same cave and called it ours.

Place is separate from architecture or construction. Place, or the many genres of place, are as much technology as physical and social networks.

Many of place’s component technologies don’t have clear names. The Room I write this in decomposes into Walls decompose into Drywall and J-bead. Going up a layer, you have Apartment and up a layer from that Real Estate and up from that Private Ownership and on and on. The end result of all these technologies messily bundled together is rather profound: a shared understanding that this is my home.

These technologies are being rearranged around us at a shocking rate. Place is being cleaved from space, from physical locality at all.

Not a bad area for tinkering. And as I tinker, I write to understand and guide myself and hopefully share something useful of what I find.

My recent writing

Home Automaton Will Automate Us Right Out Of Home – Matt Hackett

I took a long detour in the history of the first multi-user computers and came back with an idea about where smart homes are taking us.

medium.com • Share

Instagram Makes Me Like New York Less – Matt Hackett

Social media is planning our cities, and I think I’m okay with that.

medium.com • Share

A thing to subscribe to

Laura Olin's newsletter

I’ve been using some of my puttering time to aggressively unsubscribe from email lists. We’re talking thousands of companies and individuals machete’d from my inbox. One that will never get cut is Laura Olin’s weekly email of links she finds “lovely and/or meaningful.” It’s thoughtful, positive, nourishing stuff for those of us that (for professional or addictive reasons) spend a little too much time on Twitter.

www.lauraolin.com • Share

A thing to listen to

John O’Donohue — The Inner Landscape of Beauty | On Being

An Irish poet on how landscape defines humanity. His metaphors are so powerful and useful, like “stress is a perverted relationship to time.”

onbeing.org • Share

A book to read

How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They're Built - Stewart Brand

An uncategorizable book about the built world as messy, living, relentlessly modified, but predictable. To a systems engineer’s eye, this is like the missing guide to understanding how real buildings run in production.

www.amazon.com • Share

By Matt Hackett

I'm an entrepreneur and engineer, currently in exploration mode. Subscribe to follow along.



This newsletter is for people who, like me, believe making mass technology and serious critique are not mutually exclusive. Product design, philosophy, management, book and app recommends, queer art, etc.

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…eaten an extraordinary meal at the new Noma. Rene Redezepi told us exactly the same tale about foxes that he told the LA Times. (Having had to sell the same thing earnestly many times—aka fundraise—myself, I sympathize). Copenhagen, you were charming but cold!

… camped (glamped, really, given our guides even went so far as to make fresh scrambled eggs in the morning) in The Empty Quarter, the world’s largest sand dessert. The desert is so surprisingly soft and silent, like an endless brown blanket fell on to the hills.

… had my preconceptions about Dubai shaken by actually experiencing it.(Thanks, Will!). There is more entrepreneurship and culture than photos of the wild skyline-about all we know of Dubai in the US-would have you think.

Now I’m off to Brazil, for two weeks of intensive language courses to get my Portuguese beyond its current basics and see what the startup scene there is like.

(Not a stock photo!)

LA Times goes to Noma

Chef Rene Redzepi’s celebrated restaurant Noma restarts in a new space in Copenhagen. The New Nordic cuisine is a dream you can eat.

www.latimes.com • Share

Writing careers

Before I left New York, I found myself giving a lot of advice to former Beme team members who were figuring out what next to do in their careers. I have pointedly decided not to figure out this question for myself yet, and the irony and privilege is not lost on me.

The theme I found myself returning to in every conversation was how important it is to effectively tell the story of your career and how often engineers I’ve interviewed or worked with neglect this. With a story, the next chapter us necessary. With a resume, the next job simply folks in the blank on a form.

Told poorly, my own story looks like random leaps from contemporary art lackey to the second tech hire of a fashion magazine to a weird little blogging service to a startup studio to founding a company with some YouTuber. Many of these leaps may have had a bit of randomness to them, sure. But told as I tell it, starting Beme was a necessary next chapter, just as whatever I do next will be.

Most importantly, as I help former Bemers, forwarding a resume, making an introduction, I lead with a story of a person and their career. The only way for people you know to help you get what you want or near it is to distill that story down so you and they can share it again and again and again. The story can be in constant flux, edited for each new person or opportunity, but simply having it is an extraordinary competitive advantage.

I’m working on a piece with a bunch of tactical advice on how to define and land the ideal next opportunity as an engineer, but it seemed worth sharing this small nugget to this list, which I’m sure counts no small number of folks in career transition.

Early plot developments for me

The other power of having a story is that it prevents you from being molded into the stories others project on you.

When I left Tumblr in 2012, there was essentially only one question all professional conversations reduced to: “What kind of company are you going to start?” Right now, an alarming number of people in my position are out raising small venture funds, so half of conversations are “Are you going to raise a fund?” To do that without knowing why it fits uniquely into my story would be a recipe for a disaster. (Which is not to say that I wouldn’t ever do it, dear future LPs out there!)

In my now-five weeks of wandering, I’ve already been gifted two thoughts about where my own story ought to go. Each one made my mind click instantly with the pleasure of a clue found.

1. The OG Beme investor, when I told him I was going to be exploring widely this year, admonished me not to wander too far from the problems I know well in social media. He put is succinctly: “You’re uniquely positioned with one foot in pop culture and one foot in technology. Few in either industry can say that.” Indeed, this is the thread that ties together my career most closely, that makes sense of my liberal arts degree and dabblings in art and fashion worlds.

2. Meeting (via Twitter first, of course) a writer and investor in Copenhagen with whom had surprisingly many mutual connections: Some Germans I had met in 2012 when there for a couple months pondering a move to Berlin post-Tumblr, some Swedes I knew through NYC tech companies. The clue here was that I have an unusually global network, in part because I’m always thrilled to hop on a plane.

I don’t know what these clues add up to yet. I’m still collecting more. But it’s insttructive that they both came out in conversation. As an engineer and by disposition, my default is to attempt to figure out everything in my head. I chart the perfect course before talking about where I’m going with anyone. This is wildly ineffective, thus me forcing myself go out to the world with what little I know and ask for help. This newsletter is part of that necessary opening up, so thank you for reading and replying.

What I’ve been reading

From Bubble to Bubble – Sahil Lavingia

The founder of Gumroad tells a very different kind of “leaving San Francisco” story. Provo, UT is not your typical next move, nor is the depth that Sahel finds there.

medium.com • Share

Let’s fly – Craig Mod

I’m definitely the type to arrive at the airport as late as possible, but Craig takes a very different approach to travel I’m trying to live a little more.

medium.com • Share

Book: The Left Hand of Darkness - Ursula K. Le Guin

I just finished this gorgeous novel. A stranger, an actual alien, arrives on a wintry planet and tries alone to bridge his culture and its. LeGuin is so much more than “sci-if” and I’m mad at myself for not picking her up until now.

www.amazon.com • Share

By Matt Hackett

I'm an entrepreneur and engineer, currently in exploration mode. Subscribe to follow along.



This newsletter is for people who, like me, believe making mass technology and serious critique are not mutually exclusive. Product design, philosophy, management, book and app recommends, queer art, etc.

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When Your Startup Stops – Matt Hackett

How the end felt

medium.com • Share

I GOT FIRED... -Jack Coyne

Jack launching like a rocket

www.youtube.com • Share

What now?

What do you do when a major chapter of life concludes? My immediate instinct is to hop on a plane.

This past week, I travelled with the boyfriend to Mexico City, spending most of our time with artists gathered there for a cluster of art fairs that happens every February. I started my career in contemporary art, so this feels as familiar as foreign. Our eyes got plenty, from the transactional Zona Maco, set in a massive conference center, to a joyously unsettling performance piece in a friend of a friend’s Centro apartment. Yoshua Okon’s video works at MUAC, scratching disturbingly at truth, affected me most.

Speaking with so many artists, I was struck by their voracious appetite for visual and intellectual material outside of their own work. They actively seek out what is far different from and even directly in conflict with what they make, whether that be scientific research or daily life in a different country. The best art is fueled by an orientation of uncertain gathering which is rare in tech product makers, myself included.

2018 for me must be a year optimized for broad learning. I hope to share what I learn with you, here in this newsletter.

I have no idea what I want to do next. Honestly. Before I can do anything, I need to be a beginner again. In the four years that my singular focus has been Beme, technology and the society interwoven with it have changed dramatically. Neural networks, drones, creator support platforms, blockchain, pre-seed, AR, and hundreds of other technologies and frameworks were nascent then, and I haven’t been able to prioritize exploring them deeply. Now I can.

When I left Tumblr in 2012, which was a ride on the roller coaster almost as bumpy as Beme, I was in no state to evaluate new directions for myself, my mind and habits hardwired to my job. 6am datacenter conference call? Great, I’m there, fully present! But 6am meditation, 6am writing, 6am hacking on some hardware, 6am reading CS papers? Unthinkable.

Back then, after a couple weeks of trying to fight those accumulated brain hacks in New York, I bought my round the world ticket. Spending a week completely alone in a beach hut as close to Null Island (on the actual São Tomé), visiting old and new friends in the startup scene in Berlin, experiencing the entirely different stance on urban life of Beijing for the first time, then returning to New York and exploring ideas at betaworks: It took more than two years of wandering for me to meet Casey and find my next professional home at Beme. Maybe this time I can cut the time in half, not that I’m going to force it.

Random Bits of My 2012 Round-the-World

matthew.tumblr.com • Share

What I will definitely be doing

There are a few things I’m committing to this year:

• Reading. I have a habit of buying 1.5 books a week and reading about 0.5. That means I’m roughly 208 books behind. I try to keep one fiction and one non-fiction book going, and am currently thoroughly enjoying Homegoing, a deeply affecting multi-generational novel on slavery, and The Spread Mind, a surprisingly readable thesis that consciousness is woven into the physical fabric of reality.
  

• Writing. The past year at Beme has been intense, and saw me drop from writing essays multiple times a month to publishing zero things in 2017. Writing is how I come to truly know things. I have to do more of it.
  

• Investing. I’ve made a smattering of investments in the past, and been lucky enough to have a backseat view of what my friends Alex and Nick are building at Notation Capital. In the next year, as I explore, I’d like to put my money where my curiosity is, and invest in more early stage companies. I hope to share some of what happens in this process as well, as the earliest stages of fundraising are still so opaque and confusing for new entrepreneurs.
  

Caveat

I must acknowledge that the ability to set a side a year for learning is extraordinarily fortunate. Few have the financial and family situation to do this. That I am able to is nothing but privilege and luck in concert, and I’m beyond grateful.

Immediate future

Until the dust fully settles, my sole professional focus is helping anyone on the former Beme team who decides that they want to find a new opportunity to find it. Whether that’s connecting them with folks in my network (you!) or simply being a sounding board for advice, I’ll be heading back to New York for two weeks before my next adventure and focused on that.

In early March, I’ll be going to Copenhagen, The Empty Quarter and its opposite in Dubai, then spending three weeks in Brazil intensely improving my Portuguese. I’ll be sharing bits about all of that right here.

Questions for you

What should I be learning? Who do I have to meet? What technology or problem should I be exploring? What city’s startup ecosystem do I have to see up close? Reply to this email and let me know.

By Matt Hackett

I'm an entrepreneur and engineer, currently in exploration mode. Subscribe to follow along.



This newsletter is for people who, like me, believe making mass technology and serious critique are not mutually exclusive. Product design, philosophy, management, book and app recommends, queer art, etc.

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To this person, CNN may be suspect, but I, personally, am still worthy of respect. Through Beme or Twitter or these emails, they have developed a respectful relationship with me, one so strong that an association with an institution the president calls “fake news” doesn’t shake their belief in my earnestness, or make them stop listening to me.

Last week I spent a day down in Atlanta, CNN’s global headquarters. What strikes me as I get to know more and more CNNers is how much getting the facts straight is a personal mission as much as it is a job. The correspondents and editors and producers and executives are honest people, personally obsessed with accurately informing the public.

Yet, for many outside, no profession is more suspect. I can’t help but wonder if this disconnect is caused by journalism itself: by a mid-century newspaperman’s concept of objectivity, where the personal is subsumed by the institutional. Authority here stems not from me, as a dynamic human with integrity, showing you the facts and how I got them, but instead simply from this abstract thing called Journalism. Untethered objectivity seems like a weak argument in our social media era, and a trap I want to make sure our new company (still no name, sorry—more about that next week) doesn’t fall into.

We’ve chosen to tackle news, because it feels the most urgent and necessary thing we could do with our talents. But by choosing news at this moment, I have the ominous sense that we are not picking an area of focus so much as a theater of battle. I’m certain we’ll be accused of collaborating with the current administration as much as we’ll be accused of being dedicated Marxists.

I’m increasingly convinced that if we put more of ourselves out there, are more honest about our perspectives, and most importantly grow our platform to be a magnet for real perspectives beyond the typically journalistic, and far outside the liberal urban ones that currently dominate our team, we can succeed. Products like Exit Poll hint at the path.

What we have to do is not strike the illusory “center,” but illuminate the truth. We no longer live in an environment where this can be done by journalists pretending they are fact-dispensing robots, because we know from their social media accounts that they are real humans with opinions.

There are going to have to be some firm rules to make this work. Fact and opinion will have to be separated. Personalities can’t be permitted to override truth. In the all-video, all-social realm our company will play in, we’re going to have to invent the rules ourselves.

Getting this right will be a brutal challenge. I hope you’ll keep those lovingly critical tweets coming to tell me how we do.

Links

The news media loves nothing more than to talk to and about itself. This week there were some especially trenchant discussions about whether objectivity makes any damn sense these days.

The Ties That Bind - On The Media

Leaks from a chaotic White House, reconsidering journalistic objectivity, and the failed promise of the Internet.

www.wnyc.org • Share

Why Nobody Cares the President Is Lying

A conservative talk radio host on false information, the erosion of media, and the way forward.

www.nytimes.com • Share

Michael Wolff v. Brian Stelter

Are some journalists being hysterical and losing their bearings? Don’t agree with the extremes either Wolff or Stelter take, but a sharp debate.

www.mediaite.com • Share

By Matt Hackett

I'm an entrepreneur and engineer, currently in exploration mode. Subscribe to follow along.



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The world and my work has changed drastically since you probably signed up for this thing. From today, I want to share here what it’s like, personally, to build a new news company in 2017. This is exactly what myself, Casey, our new friends at CNN, and the remarkable team behind Beme, are trying to do. It’s terrifying in all the right ways.

I haven’t been sleeping well this past week, and it’s not just the whiplash of the new administration. My head is buzzing with the many urgencies of our new company, how desperately I want it to exist right now to tackle the news in front of us.

There is not some grand plan under wraps. We don’t even have a name yet, though some horrible contenders like “Lepton” and “News AF” have been rejected. Startups often resort to boastful claims of innovation to elbow their way into the market. We’re doing the opposite. We’re going to enter the crowded field of news through the side door.

News needs to leap forward into the age of messy, distributed, bottom-up video our politics is already happening in. The past week has been about visuals, about decentralized, fractured, uncertain facts told in mobile tidbits, and I’m as lost in at all as you are.

The Times, CNN, Washington Post, etc. are doubling down on Journalism, but I can’t help but feel this noble pursuit also has a necessarily limited, homogenous audience. BuzzFeed and their ilk have mastered the ability to get a video about a random thing in front of a massive audience, but when it comes to news, they’re a lot more sizzle than steak. In the space between there is a media and technology product that illuminates and contextualizes a range of perspectives, without wonkiness. It lets us actually hear each other. It involves the subjects of the news as much as reports on them. That’s the space I hope we will slowly begin to fill.

Our team is working on a couple of prototype mobile products (current names: Goji and Vomment, if that gives you a sense of the level of polish), one or none of which may make it into your hands. Casey is starting to use his credentials.

My focus is on the structure of every week: how do we ask the right questions, experiment in the right ways, and get the right people into the room to play around, to try, to tweak. Right now that means talking to people smarter than us about the news, inside and outside CNN, and likely adding a few of them to the team.

In just a couple of days, Beme shuts down, and I’ve also been thinking a lot about what about the product hat made it’s small community so willing to share their lives so honestly. We need that ethos in news so desperately. I’ll also miss holding my phone to my chest and hearing that little tone (composed by our teammate Colin, BTW.)

As we build this thing, I’m going to keep sending rough notes like this out. What do you want to know about starting a new company, building a new product? What perspectives do you wish you were seeing in the news?

Reply, I’d love to hear from you!

—M

Some self-promotion

Beme is Shutting Down, But Our Work Is Just Starting

ICYMI: the mission for this new venture.

medium.com • Share

AWS Podcast

Me talking with Simon Elisha about how we built Beme, and the technical side of starting up more generally.

soundcloud.com • Share

What I'm reading

A Personal History - Katharine Graham

The former publisher of the Washington Post, through its scrappy early days to Watergate and beyond, Katherine Graham led a remarkable life, and I’m learning a hell of a lot about the newspaper business that is relevant even today. Also learning how alarmingly cozy publishers and politicians used to be.

www.amazon.com • Share

The Plot Against America - Philip Roth

The phrase “America First” is not new, and hearing it come front and center again made me pick up this Roth novel, a dark alternate history in which isolationist (and America First Committee booster) Charles Lindbergh wins the 1940 election and America never enters WWII.

This is the fourth Roth novel I’ve tried and the only one I can’t put down.

www.amazon.com • Share

Quote!

My instinct is everybody hates media right now…that has to be an opportunity

—Barack Obama, on his way out the door.

By Matt Hackett

I'm an entrepreneur and engineer, currently in exploration mode. Subscribe to follow along.



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To accompany that, I want to experiment a bit in this newsletter.

This week, the links are almost all books, in a variety of genres related to the history and future of live video. I’ve personally learned a lot from reading each. Let me know what you think about including more of these books and long reads in the future.

Self-promotion

Live Video: It’s Not About The Content — Medium

My take on the current state of live video: Everyone’s doing live, few will succeed. Live products could learn a thing or two from network morning shows.

medium.com • Share

Scaling Empathy — My Talk at Webbdagarna Malmö

I’ve been doing a lot more speaking recently. Here’s one of my recent talks, on how most social media products really failed to bring more empathy into the world. The new wave of video products might stand a better chance if we build them right.

www.youtube.com • Share

Books: TV, doing live for a century

Top of the Morning: Inside the Cutthroat World of Morning TV

Before I read Brian Stelter’s book, I had no idea what remarkable profit engines morning shows are, how complex and finely tuned their product is, and the endless high-stakes dramas that happen behind those cheery living room sets. This book gets into the business details without ever being pedantic (if anything, it can be a little too catty).

www.amazon.com • Share

The Columbia History of American Television

A very detailed but still super readable history, with lots of great technical details: format wars, financial scandals, etc, etc. So many parallels to the current wave of consumer tech products.

www.amazon.com • Share

I Want My MTV: The Uncensored Story of the Music Video Revolution

MTV started as a joint venture between AmEx and Warner Bros, yet managed to become the definer of cool for almost two decades. Live, particularly the absurd fly-by-night operation that was the VMAs, was a huge part of this. (Half of the book rehashes Behind the Music drama you may already know as a 70’s or 80’s kid, but the business-centric chapters are revelatory.)

www.amazon.com • Share

Long listen: startup story

How Justin.tv Became Twitch — Startup School Podcast

Justin Kan, founder of Justin/tv and thus eventually Twitch, describes the meandering path that led him from clunky head-mounted cameras to creating the only truly successful live video product (outside of TV) to date.

blog.ycombinator.com • Share

By Matt Hackett

I'm an entrepreneur and engineer, currently in exploration mode. Subscribe to follow along.



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Every launch is sheer terror. All the engagement data and all the user interviews in the world can’t tell you whether what you’ve made actually works, those are just little nods of encouragement. Will long-time users ragequit? Will the tech press eviscerate you? Did you provision enough servers and suss out enough of the bottlenecks? Is it simply too late to turn things around?

I’m a bit of a junkie for the launch day terror—I’d even call it fun. To have gone through a few dozen launches of one sort or another and yet keep coming back, I had to learn to love that feeling. Like any crisis you pour all of your adrenaline into, the day after the launch is always a minor letdown. “The pleasure of expecting enjoyment is often greater than that of obtaining it” etc etc. Though with launches, it’s not so much a wish attained as a new and more terrifyingly nebulous set of wishes revealed.

Onward! We’re rolling along reinvigorated by hundreds of thousands of new users, with plenty to build for them in the coming weeks.

This week’s issue is appropriately about putting app launches in perspective.

Self-promotion

Building A New Social App Today is Insane

My thoughts on the relaunch, and why we’re pushing against the current with Beme.

medium.com • Share

VR is Hacking Perception

No matter how hard you’re working on something, it’s important to have intellectual distraction. Mine for the past few months has been VR. I wrote about why I’m bullish on VR and what tools I really wish existed. (BONUS: embarrassing childhood photo)

medium.com • Share

Relaunching is hard: Digg

The original Digg.com was one of the darlings of the pre-mobile internet wave, right on par with Tumblr. Yet in 2010 it did a relatively straightforward redesign and rebuild and almost instantly failed. There are plenty of compelling post hoc explanations of what went wrong, including Kevin Rose’s own, but honestly, no one can predict a catastrophic failure like this or uncover its “root cause.” Imploding overnight is a real risk to building high-speed social products. Remarkably, Digg also successfully re-relaunched with a killer new team over at betaworks and is still doing quite well in its third incarnation.

And launching major games is harder

In consumer tech, high-budget video games are probably the most stressful launches imaginable. $250-500 million of eggs are all in one basket. If you get it right, you make that back by 1-2 days after launch. And if you got it wrong…

AAA game development is high-risk gambling | Polygon

Making games is hard. Making AAA games is close to impossible.

www.polygon.com • Share

Pixel pressures | The Economist

A blockbuster launch may bring an extra life to British games makers

www.economist.com • Share

... But launching planes is the hardest

You don’t know if a new aircraft design is truly a success until 10+ years after it goes on sale, which is likely 20 years after work began

Airbus A380 Haunted by Feeble Orders Marks Decade in Skies - Bloomberg

At the tender age of 10, the Airbus A380 is already entering a mid-life crisis.

www.bloomberg.com • Share

By Matt Hackett

I'm an entrepreneur and engineer, currently in exploration mode. Subscribe to follow along.



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Truth be told, I anticipated a lot more haters from both sides: Righteous radicals angry at me for mixing queerness and capital, for playing fast and loose with terms, for not including enough others in my essay. And on the other side, the more predictable, infuriating claims that we are a color- and sexuality- blind industry and how dare you desecrate our Church of Meritocracy with your philosophical gay bullshit.

I was pleasantly surprised! Friends texted me almost immediately, strangers emailed me with their personal stories of feeling estranged. The Internet can really reward thoughtfulness sometimes. There were a few of the anti-diversity crowd who showed up in my @-mentions, but not enough to drown out the many engaged responses. (Note to Twitter product folks on my list: Blocking a lot of users in a row is extremely advanced finger calisthenics. It shouldn’t be so hard.)

This week’s links are thematic with the article, and fairly book-heavy. (Wait, come back! There’s a great clip I found from ACT UP on Donahue!)

Self-promotional

Passing in the Valley

My essay on how being queer has made me a better technologist, how few tech queers make noise about it, and how people on the margins are what make social media companies successful.

medium.com • Share

Practical

A More Ethical and Inclusive Technical Interview Process

Moishe Lettvin, engineering manager at Etsy, discusses ways he’s tuned the technical interview process to meet candidates where they are and help them show off their abilities, not trap them in gotchas.

www.moishelettvin.com • Share

Book: Design for Real Life

I have not yet had a chance to read it, but based on plaudits (and intro) from the likes of Anil Dash, and the quality of posts author Sara Wachter-Boettcher has shared on related topics in the past, this looks to be an important guide to compassionate, inclusive design.

abookapart.com • Share

Artistic

Video: K-CoreaINC.K (section a) - Ryan Trecartin

Ryan Trecartin has to be one of my favorite artists working today. To call his video/performance work frenetic would be a gross understatement, but it is a deeply queer reading of internet-age media that I find very compelling. A review of more recent gallery work provides some helpful context.

vimeo.com • Share

Historical

A Queer History of Computing | Rhizome

A series of posts examining often overlooked queer figures who have had an outsized influence on computer science.

rhizome.org • Share

Video: Larry Kramer and ACT UP on Phil Donahue

This clip is a gem in so so many ways. What’s most shocking to me, though, is the slow pace, the civility, the room to speak and draw out a thread given to guests, hosts, and audience. The level of discourse in 1990’s daytime talk looks like Charlie Rose compared to TV now.

www.youtube.com • Share

Book: The Fire Next Time - James Baldwin

I got a few nastier responses to my article. What seem to have chafed all of them most was something that seems pure fact to me: Whiteness is fiction. Maleness is fiction. Tai Nehisi-Coates makes a beautiful, irrefutable articulation of this in his recent book. But Nehisi-Coates is reverently echoing James Baldwin, whose writing never ceases to unlock new things for me. If you’ve never read this, run, now, read one of the greatest pieces of writing from the 20th century.

www.amazon.com • Share

Book: Cryptonomicon - Neal Stephenson

A spectacular novel weaving threads from Bletchley Park codebreakers to contemporary corporate computer wars. What I love most about this book is the life it gives to Alan Turing’s homosexuality. Unlike that recent movie where he has a pitiable, one-dimensional secret, in Stephenson’s novel, Turing loves and pines and breathes like the real human he was.

www.amazon.com • Share

By Matt Hackett

I'm an entrepreneur and engineer, currently in exploration mode. Subscribe to follow along.



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In contrast to the intellectual atmosphere of intense creative production, the built environment down on the ground in SV is appallingly bland. Sand Hill Road, the home of most major venture capital firms, where tens of billions of dollars are managed, is an office park so understated you could mistake it for an upscale suburban medical office. Corporate campuses of titans don’t stun either: Take a look at famed One Infinite Loop.

Architecture is a human experience pulled together from physical material, much like tech products themselves. I’ve always wondered if all that energy was just used up in the virtual, leaving none for more creative architecture.

Self-promotion

GoPro Isn’t Doomed Yet

Not at all architecture related, but about an imperiled San Mateo company I admire a lot: GoPro. My thoughts on how they could turn the company around with a focus on software, not increasingly commoditized hardware.

medium.com • Share

Sim City "Light Commercial" zone, or epicenter of entrepreneurship?

Macro

Why Are America’s Most Innovative Companies Still Stuck in 1950s Suburbia?

Tracing the history of the pastoral obsession in Valley architecture from the 19th century to today. Labor politics, Central Park architect Olmstead, corporate estate fantasies, etc. (By friend Hunter Oatman-Stanford)

www.collectorsweekly.com • Share

A Pattern Language

From 1977 UC Berkeley, at the crossroads of compsci and architecture. The authors outline, in succinct, semi-utopian terms, a “language” of components that can be mixed together to create functional cities and communities.

www.patternlanguage.com • Share

Micro

Apple's new campus will be a retrograde cocoon

The Foster spaceship looks great in renderings, but this review from one of my favorite architecture critics shows it for the suburban bunker that it is.

articles.latimes.com • Share

Video: Steve Jobs Presents to the Cupertino City Council

Aside from seeing Jobs’ oratory skills outside of a keynote, this is fascinating for being probably the breeziest California city planning session ever. “We’ll get right to approving that! Standing ovation! No questions!”

www.youtube.com • Share

Photos: Facebook's Disneyland-Inspired Campus

Facebook’s campus has a variety of surreal, simulated low-density urban interactions, like a company barber and a company coffee shop. I’d call it more of a New Urbanist hellscape, but I’m not much of a fan of Disneyland. Allison Arieff puts it more articulately: “There may be a place to get a latte there but there is no Third Place.”

www.businessinsider.com • Share

Long read

The Virtual Architecture of Silicon Valley

A contrarian academic read of SV buildings that sees it as an assertive, alternative aesthetic which favors relatively temporary, disruptable physical spaces over grandiose, permanent ones. (Frustratingly only the first page is available for free online. Because, y'know, so much profit to be squeezed from one-off buys of a 16 year-old humanities journal article.)

www.jstor.org • Share

By Matt Hackett

I'm an entrepreneur and engineer, currently in exploration mode. Subscribe to follow along.



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Trying something new, these links are on the theme of revolutions & technology and are largely not new[s]. I hope they’re useful brain fodder! As always, I’d love to hear what you think.

Self-promotion

As We Become Cameras — Wearable cameras will be ubiquitous. We’ll barely notice.

I broke my streak of publishing an essay a week because of this guy. It turns out digging into the history of time and the arriving era of truly ubiquitous, always-recording cameras takes a couple weeks to tackle.

(It’s also so anxiety-inducing to respond to Susan Sontag, one of the greatest cultural critics of the 20th century. I hope I did her some justice.)

medium.com • Share

Macro: Revolution

[Video] All Technology Revolutions Are The Same: Installation →Bubble→Crash→Deployment

Economist Carlota Perez has theorized that at least since the 18th century technological revolutions follow a predictable, bifurcated pattern: wild hype/speculation, followed by bust and long golden era of deployment. Investor Fred Wilson (whose entire investment thesis is built on Perez’s thinking) interviews her here and lays out the theory in its simplest form.

There is such unbridled optimism to this kind of thinking that needs tempering: in particular, the robber-barons of Phase 1 generally are the same to benefit in Phase 2, one way or another. Also, we’ve seen multiple of these boom-busts around a technology rollout in the past decade. How does society change if this cycle continues to be compressed, with a boom-bust happening in months instead of decades?

Nonetheless, a compelling way to look at technological [r]evolution.

www.youtube.com • Share

Eating Through the Revolution

The French Revolution as told through the menus of food eaten by the revolutionaries.

www.cabinetmagazine.org • Share

Micro: Domain names

We the networks | The Economist

ICANN, the organization which administers domain names (a key part of the web’s circulatory system) is becoming a true international body like the UN. If it works well, it would be a remarkable move towards cosmopolitan, extra-geographic governance. What else could we rule this way?

www.economist.com • Share

Old Country-Code Top-Level Internet Domains Never Die, They Just Fade Away (Sometimes) | The Basement Geographer

Political revolutions since the invention of the Internet (or DNS, to be specific) leave behind strange artifacts in the form of defunct top-level-domains.

Particular highlights:

.dd - East Germany, which ceased to exist before ever used

.tp - East Timor, registered in absentia on behalf of a jailed resistance leader

.su - Soviet Union, still living on as a bastion of spam and Russian botnets two decades later

basementgeographer.com • Share

Inspiration

"Rain, Steam, and Speed" by JMW Turner (1844)

I love this Turner painting from the beginning of the rail boom in England (NPR-breathless discussion). It is such a gorgeous representation of human smallness in the shadow of the technologies we create.

There are three subjects in this painting, all rendered in mad impasto: the train, the rain, and a tiny hare in the lower right corner, attempting to leap out of the way. Pro tip: We’re all the hare.

Diversion

Talka for iPhone

Talka makes perverse musical use of the speech synthesis features of your iPhone. A wondrous little sound toy that was a good distraction from all this heady revolution business. (My good friend Mike Jacobs is behind this.)

itunes.apple.com • Share

Long read

[PDF] Distribution of the Sensible: Aesthetics and Politics - Jacques Rancière

For reasons beyond my comprehension, the dense Benjamin essay was the most popular link last week, so here’s some more continental philosophy for you!

Rancière’s basic idea in these relatively recent essays is that art (aesthetics) defines what is and isn’t possible by defining what is and isn’t visible, Aesthetics are our means of understanding the sensible world, and those apportionments define our public discourse. This PDF is the juicy highlights.

www.bbk.ac.uk • Share

By Matt Hackett

I'm an entrepreneur and engineer, currently in exploration mode. Subscribe to follow along.



This newsletter is for people who, like me, believe making mass technology and serious critique are not mutually exclusive. Product design, philosophy, management, book and app recommends, queer art, etc.

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Is the flow of unicorn gravy slowing down? Yes, but that had to happen. Great products will still break through, though fewer will be ones that need their own networks. I’m also selfishly bullish on video: With 5.5 hours of daily TV still the American average, there’s more than enough room for startups. (Returns to putting head down on the next release of Beme.)

And please, let me know what you think of this first link-and-brain dump. Love it? Hate it? Things you’d like to see more or less of? Please drop me a line.

Macro

12 apps with a billion users - Om Malik

There are a dozen tech platforms as large as the Catholic religion, which has been building for a couple millennia. Android got there in 5.8 years. Will we soon see platforms or apps or ideas or celebrities grow to 1 billion in a matter of weeks?

om.co • Share

Audio: Facebook built the bridge, crossed it, then set it on fire

Jason Goldman & Ian Ownbey, early Twitterers, irreverently explain how Facebook came to dominate the market for attention and leave smaller players begging for scraps.

bumpers.fm • Share

Micro

Too Sensitive — Sara Ann Marie

A healthy reminder that interfaces are pretty much all designed for straight white men, something that needs to change.

medium.com • Share

A Mobile App for Safer Streets: Speed Camera

Activist app concept by my friend Travis Eby. Speed Camera aims to make streets safer by letting anyone with a smartphone record and measure traffic speeds, and share them with elected officials.

traviseby.com • Share

Self-promotion

Portal 2 Taught Me Everything I Know About Onboarding

The team has been revamping everything about onboarding in the Beme app. We botched things royally the first time around, so I dissected one of the greatest onboardings of all time for tips and principles.

medium.com • Share

Inspiration

Christine Sun Kim: How We Listen Determines What We Hear

Sound artist/educator/badass who is herself pre-lingually deaf. Did the radio piece in Greater New York, if you saw it.

www.artnews.com • Share

Diversion

Trailer: Sequenced VR

Animated, episodic, semi-interactive VR story. Think episodic could be really fruitful for VR, if only to give people reason to dust off their headsets from time to time.

vimeo.com • Share

Long read

Critique of Violence - Walter Benjamin [PDF, sorry]

Inspired the title of this newsletter, so I am including here in the first edition. If you’ve ever heard someone (like say, Ta-Nehisi Coates) use violence to mean not bodily harm but a broader kind of power, the roots of that thinking are in this essay.

Benjamin makes a haunting argument that violence is foundational and inextricable from the state and its law. It is a dense but extraordinarily rewarding read, doubly relevant in the time of Drumpf.

english.columbia.edu • Share

By Matt Hackett

I'm an entrepreneur and engineer, currently in exploration mode. Subscribe to follow along.



This newsletter is for people who, like me, believe making mass technology and serious critique are not mutually exclusive. Product design, philosophy, management, book and app recommends, queer art, etc.

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