wild collaboration
Oh hey, I’m Matt, and I send these so irregularly you may have forgotten who I am or what this is. This is a strange kind of personal newsletter, with bits about how to build thoughtful products and teams, bits about startups and investing, and bits about art and music. You probably subscribed because you read something I wrote or used something I’ve built, like Beme or Tumblr or a number of other smaller projects.
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.
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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