Food for thought
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Right, then left
The e-Título app checked my face and my GPS to excuse me from voting in Brazil's runoff, but it couldn't let me vote. More than 30 million Brazilians didn't vote either, in a race decided by 4 million. So, I looked into how Estonia votes online and naively built a prototype for voting on the plan instead of the person. Read more
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Peep Watch
Rewritten on Oct 16 after feedback from the writers’ meetup in Louisville. One of them had to read a few sentences twice, fair enough. Thanks to Mallory, Tom, Mike, John, Darrel, Felipe, and Leandra. The guy in the seat in front of me holds his phone up high, at eye level, which is very generous… Read more
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The Early Bird Caught Me
A bird alarm I never bet on quietly beat every idea I loved, and figuring out why meant admitting I’d been reading my numbers backwards for years. I build things for fun, and to fix my own problems. That’s pretty much the whole business plan. There are no VCs involved anymore and no growth team… Read more
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Reader Mode, RSS, and the Business of Interrupting You
I used to be an RSS user, and I loved it. Most mornings started the same way, ginseng tea on the desk, laptop already warm, and Google Reader open before anything else so I could check what was new. I could easily read blogs written by friends (people I actually wanted to hear from, not… Read more
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Smart Devices, Smart Tools, Me Smart?
If my phone’s supposed to be so smart, why do I feel dumb and empty when I’m holding it? Especially in public. I guess it all started with the miracle BlackBerry promised me back in the day… That was the big trick pitch: a corporate fantasy carved into a tiny plastic keyboard. Productivity in my… Read more
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A Drop Ripples Outward
When I first moved to San Francisco, I felt like just another tech bro leech, slurping up overpriced coffee, making rents go up, sucking the life out of the city, and giving absolutely nothing back. I had the whole starter pack: pitch deck, startup hoodie, a head full of “move fast” mantras that sounded deep… Read more
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That time I emailed the Subway CEO because the sandwich artists looked sad
Yesterday I was rummaging through an ancient backup drive when I found a text file from 15 years ago. Inside sat an email I had bravely, or foolishly, addressed to the chief executive of Subway. I had eaten there a handful of times, spotted a pattern, and decided the top guy needed my young adult… Read more
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Neuralese: The Most Spoken Language You’ll Never Speak
Somewhere between thinking and speaking, there’s a strange place where meaning starts to solidify. It’s not quite a word yet, more like a haze of associations, a sketch your brain tries to turn into something it can share. Most of the time that doesn’t work, at least for me. I tend to mumble a lot.… Read more
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Not Loud, Not Lost
At some point, someone decided a “strong personality” meant loud opinions, fast answers, and the kind of handshake that says I drink protein shakes with my eyes closed. And the rest of us, with our awkward silences and well-timed nods, just quietly slipped into the background. For a while, I bought into that. Thought maybe… Read more
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Faith Popcorn's Click, 23 Years Later
In 2002 a teacher made my whole class read Click, by Faith Popcorn, and I wrote down the first four trends so I wouldn’t forget them. The book came out in 1996 with sixteen trends in it, and reading my notes again now, it’s funny how many of them came true, just not the way… Read more