Alex Rainert

Hello everyone! For those keeping score at home, this "weekly-ish" newsletter has been dormant the past ~4 weeks. The reason for that is that after weighing it the past 2 years, this year I decided to throw my hat in the ring and run for one of two seats on our local Board of Education. Since making that decision in mid-April, it's been a 4-week sprint of a campaign where I've had to learn a lot, stretch myself, create signs, flyers and a simple webpage, and all that has taken up almost all of

Welcome to The Finite Scroll - a weekly-ish newsletter for curious people. It should take less than 5 minutes to read and give you something that piques your curiosity.  I ended up missing a week on the ol' newsletter as we were away in Curaçao with the kids for Spring Break and I was very excited to turn off my devices and relllllaaaax. Back at it now with a short look back at my first real "Product" job. "Like Friendster for your cellphone" - Last week my friend and former co-founder Dennis

Welcome to The Finite Scroll - a weekly-ish newsletter for curious people. It should take less than 5 minutes to read and give you something that piques your curiosity.  On creating space for ideas to happen I’ve always been drawn to consuming information. As a result, I tend to fill any gaps in my day with something. Standing in line for 5 minutes? I open my phone and read. Going to the grocery store? I throw in my AirPods and chip away at a podcast. Hopping in the shower for 5 minutes? I br

For people coming of age after 2010, it’s easy to assume Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn are just what being social on the internet looks like. It’s a reasonable assumption as those products (especially Facebook and later everything else they picked up along the way) have become so ubiquitous, and their businesses massive. People treat them like water or electricity - a necessary utility to maintain social connections - to friends, schoolmates, local parents, and others. While many companies ha

Like many, I came into this year with the wholly unoriginal goal of majorly resetting my relationship to “content.” Last May I came off 7 years working at the New York Times, where most of my waking life was intertwined with what was and continues to be an overwhelming period of news. That professional reality was paired with a deeply entrenched addiction to the pull-to-refresh slot machine of new information honed through 16+ years of heavy Twitter usage. It was clear these habits weren’t playi