It's been a few months since I wrote one of these - unusually busy end to last year. But January feels like a fresh start, and I'm back.

With everything feeling like it's tearing at the seams right now, I've been leaning into a small and simple practice I found in this Merlin Mann post from last year: noticing when things are good and taking a beat to think (or say) "That was good."

"It's a really simple idea. You just roll around conducting your life as you normally would, except you want to find yourself noticing things that are good. Just regular life stuff. And the smaller or more inconsequential the good thing is, the better.

Your bagel toasted perfectly. You correctly plugged in a thumb drive on the first try. A baby farted and it was funny.

The important part is you're noticing. Got it?"

One small thing to try in 2026 as a way to not lose sight of what's working while we get through everything else. Read Mann's full post - he frames it better than I can.

Now onto some recommendations...

Things I've been into recently

🎓 Clay Shirky on AI in higher education - I ran for our school board last year partly because I wanted someone directly familiar with the relevant technologies (phones, social media, AI) informing the decisions about how our kids interact with them. I try and learn as much as I can on the topic and this Chaos Agents episode with Clay Shirky (Vice Provost for AI and Technology at NYU) is one of the most thoughtful conversations I've come across. He's consistently been one of the best at deeply understanding a new technology and its implications. Here he walks through the kinds of things his university has wrestled with AI over the past three years and its fascinating. If you're education-adjacent - educator or parent - it's worth a listen (the Shirky interview starts at the 15 minute mark.)

🎸 Nine Inch Nails Live - then and now - This 1990 video from their Dance Party USA performance is incredible. Check out those dancers vibing! I was lucky to see Trent and co. at the Barclays Center in September and they still put on a fantastic, though very different, kind of show. They've added tour dates for 2026 if you're a fan.

🧠 The Importance of Letting Yourself Be Bored - This 5-minute video with Dr. Arthur Brooks explains how valuable boredom is for emotional and intellectual development. Letting your mind wander for even a few minutes can seem daunting if you've trained yourself out of it. If you're over 35, you probably remember when boredom was just part of life. I imagine younger folks and kids might need some help getting there.

🧁 BTS at the GBBO - If you cherish The Great British Bake Off as comfort TV like I do, you might enjoy this look inside the tent from season 4 contestant Ruby Tandoh.

🎷 Ezra Collective - Here's a British jazz group I discovered over the holidays and I'm kind of obsessed. Super fun, upbeat vibe with some hip hoppy influences. I bet they put on an incredible live show. Try their 2022 Mercury Prize-winning album Where I'm Meant to Be, their newest Dance, No One's Watching or just start with this banging collab with Fred Again...

📚 Ezra Klein Show Book Recs All in One Place - If you're a fan of the Ezra Klein Show, you know guests recommend three books at the end of each episode. I've found incredible reads through these recs and so was delighted to see that Michael Sippey built 3books.net - a site that pulls all those recommendations into one searchable place. Read about how he vibe coded it here. Great resource if you're looking for your next read.

🍟 Heinz for the win - Every once in a while you see design that just makes sense. This new Heinz fry box with a built-in ketchup dipper is that. Seems so obvious once you see it.

That's all for now. Hope everyone had a great holiday. See you in February!

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It’s been a while since the last newsletter. I blame the always‑crazy, post-Labor Day, back‑to‑school madness that is September. I felt moved to write as today the sun has officially set on a product that defined a distinct four‑year chapter of my career. I spent a total of seven years at The New York Times, and the team I built and the work we did in Audio between 2020–2024 is the Times work I’m most proud of. The launch of the New York Times Audio app was our first and biggest milestone on that journey.

After Friday, October 3, NYT Audio will no longer be available or supported. Even while I was at the Times, it was clear this was how the story would go. We built NYT Audio as a standalone product because we knew we could move faster and explore audio more broadly than we could inside the News app. Too many eyeballs. Too many stakeholders. I’m really grateful we got the support and investment to head out to Audio Island for a couple of years to craft our experience and learn what worked, what didn’t, and what might make sense to bring over to the News app.  

For any NYT Audio fans out there, the good news is you can still listen to Times journalism right in the News app on the Listen tab, an experience that shares much product DNA with NYT Audio. The Listen tab was also the last product I shipped before I left the Times in the spring of 2024.

The team we built and the product we shipped during those four years will always be a career highlight.

Part of this was because it was the first new app the Times had launched in over nine years. Part of it was because it was a chance to build something genuinely new at the intersection of emerging consumer behavior, ubiquitous technology, and storytelling. Being a builder in those moments is rare and special. Part of it was because it was an opportunity for me to get back to my zero‑to‑one startup roots and help envision a new product - and nurture a new team culture - from scratch.

I started building that team in December 2019 and had only hired two people when we all decided to work from home “for a few weeks” on March 7, 2020. We know how that story played out. Overnight we became a distributed team — something new for the Times — and without missing a beat we drove a discovery process that shaped the vision for NYT Audio. Over the next four years, we grew into a team of 40+ incredible humans and brought that vision to life. We did this during a uniquely challenging and uncertain time for the country, and I remain in awe of the collaboration, creativity, compassion, and resilience everyone showed while never letting their push for great work fade.

I’m so grateful to everyone who poured a bit of themselves into NYT Audio and helped make audio as big and important as it is for The New York Times today. To that crew I say one last time... We Hear For You 🎧 ❤️🫡

Things I've been into recently

📻 This Is How the AI bubble Could Burst - Excellent discussion on the Plain English podcast with Paul Kedrosky on the state of AI investment today, what has to go right for it to pay off and what could happen (and when) if it doesn't.

🎥 📻 One Battle After Another - One of the most memorable movie-going experiences I’ve had in a while. The acting. The story. The music. What a fucking film. See it in a theater if you can and if you have seen it and want more, this podcast conversation from Wesley Morris’ Cannonball is great. 

At a certain point we’re gonna have to build up some machinery, inside our guts, to help us deal with this. Because the technology is just gonna get better and better and better and better. And it’s gonna get easier and easier and more and more convenient, and more and more pleasurable, to be alone with images on a screen, given to us by by people who do not love us but want our money.

📖 David Foster Wallace - I’d of course heard of him but never read any of his work. This post from Ted Giaoa on 8 things DFW Tried To Warn Us About kind of blew my mind. He talks about the implications screen addiction - in 1996 - in a way that could be ripped out of today’s headlines. Makes me want to dip into some of his work.  

I’d say that since around 2016 we have been living in a state of constant escalation without a destination or cliff. Every day, everything stays the same but it also somehow gets worse. Every month there is an event, or series of events, that promises rupture. Every single moment feels like the air is about to snap in half, and is as boring and stifling as a hot summer day with no wind. It’s all too much, and nothing seems to happen at all.

👂 The Shepherd tone - I found this piece about an engineered sound from the mid-20th century to do a pretty spot-on job of describing what it has felt like to exist in this country over the past nine months. Listen to it and tell me it doesn't exhude how this time has felt.    

📉 Social Media In Decline? - I found these two charts from this Financial Times piece from John Burn-Murdoch to be both depressing (the reasons people give for using social media) and hopeful at least globally (we seem to have hit a peak in social media in 2022, with younger people leading the charge on the pullback) Unfortunately, the United States seems to be the exception 😞

It would be a hugely welcome development to discover that we have not merely reached social media saturation point, but that the experience has been degraded to such an extent that it has shocked people out of their stupor and is causing them to pivot to healthier uses of their time.But that brings me to the catch. There is one notable exception to this promising international trend: North America, where consumption of social media’s diet of extreme rhetoric, engagement bait and slop continues to climb. By 2024 it had reached levels 15 per cent higher than Europe.

🃏 Designing and Building a Card Game - I loved this conversation between Cal Newport and Tim Ferris, particularly the part where Tim goes into detail about his process designing a new card game from scratch in collaboration with the Exploding Kittens crew. Ps: the game is called Coyote and we got it - it’s really fun. 

🥧 Bake off is Back - Someone recently asked me what my favorite "comfort watch" is and it is without a doubt, The Great British Bake Off. With new episodes dropping on Fridays on Netflix, it is the perfect balm at the end of the work week as we head into the weekend.

That's all for now. Thanks for reading. If you want each new edition in your inbox, you can subscribe below or follow right from your favorite RSS reader.

Oh boy. The craziness of the last month of school and summer has resulted in an unintended hiatus from writing this newsletter. Between the kids finishing school and getting them off to camp, a 10 day trip to San Sebastian (a truly wonderful place that I would recommend to anyone) with our son and his travel soccer team to play in a tournament called The Donosti Cup and a busy period at work, I haven’t made the time to write. I'm still figuring out my workflow and its clear there's room for improvement. I really miss it and I'm gonna try and get back on that horse today and start with a few thoughts on... therapy. 

For most of my adult life, I’d had a feeling I would benefit from therapy. But after one not-great experience in my early 20s with a therapist who didn’t feel like the right fit, I quietly filed it away as “probably not for me.” The idea of starting over and navigating the logistics of finding someone I connected with - just felt too heavy. So I let it go.

Then a few years ago, I noticed a colleague’s Slack status: a little couch emoji and the words “Therapy until 1pm.” That small signpost stuck with me. After a few weeks of seeing it, I messaged him and said that I’ve been therapy-curious for a bit but was struggling to figure out where to start and asked if he had any tips. He responded with such thoughtfulness - sharing how he found his therapist, gave me a few tips, and even offered to introduce me to his if I wanted. He also pointed me to a few different platforms you can use to research and find licensed therapists. I decided to use Alma, but there are others out there.

That was the nudge - and easy-to-use tool - I needed.

I wrote down a few things I was looking for –  experience with anxiety, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (as that was an approach I’d tried on my own and had some success with) and mid career stuff. I browsed a lot of profiles on Alma, made a shortlist of five therapists, and booked 20-minute intro calls (free!) with each. I asked them all the same set of questions so I could easily compare and after those conversations, one of them stood out - both for his answers to the questions but also because of the ease in rapport we had. I’ve been working with him for nearly two years now and it’s honestly been transformative.

There’s a lot I could say about what therapy has helped unlock for me, but the reason I’m sharing this post is because therapy is so much more accessible than it used to be. If you even have an inkling that you might benefit (and I’d venture that most people would) and you’ve been on the fence, I’d encourage you to give it a try - it doesn’t need to be forever, just as an experiment to understand whether it might be helpful for you.

A few quick tips if you’re curious:

1. Write down what kind of support you’re looking for. Try to be specific.
2. Think about the kind of therapist or approach that might resonate with you (e.g. CBT, career transition experience, parenting, etc.)
3. Try a platform like Alma to search for therapists with those qualities.
4. Make a shortlist.
5. Do intro calls. Ask the same short set of questions to each person.
6. Choose someone and try a few sessions.

You might not get it perfect on the first try but it’s never been easier to begin and that's the biggest step. 

And the other thing I took away from this experience: just being open about therapy - even in small ways - can make a huge difference to someone else. That tiny Slack status from my colleague ended up nudging me toward something that’s been incredibly meaningful for me. For so long therapy has been stigmatized or kept private but it shouldn't be. If my own Slack status, a quick mention in a meeting or this post ends up encouraging even one person to find support that helps them, that’s worth it.

PS: If you've considered it and have any questions, I'm happy to answer them at alex@alexrainert.com.

Things I'm into this month

🏃🏻 Simple Ways to Build Habits - I love the simplicity of this Apple Watch fitness habit hack my buddy Dennis uses to stay motivated to hit his goal to run 30 miles every month - just keep the miles higher than the date.

🎙️ Reflecting on Your Family Patterns - Sticking with today's therapy theme, I wanted to share an episode from one of my favorite pods, The Gray Area, where host Sean Illing and family therapist Vienna Pharaon explore how childhood experiences influence our behavior and relationships as adults. This episode really resonated with me and pushed me to reflect on how some key experiences from my own childhood continue to shape how I respond to certain situations today.

🤖 Giving AI Agents the Keys to Your Life - Meredith Whitaker, CEO of Signal, succinctly captures the inherent privacy and security risks wrapped up in the promise of the AI-powered agentic internet. Sure it sounds great to say that an AI agent can research and book concert tickets for you, but once you stop to think about what kind of access to sensitive information that entails, you may think differently.

💫 Switching from Spotify to Apple Music - I put up with it for as long as I could but ultimately decided the switch from Spotify to Apple Music. Why? Because Spotify's desire to be the everything audio app (I like a standalone podcast experience and don't do audiobooks) and the degree to which their various algorithms were shaping my music habits. It's been over 3 months now and I'm really happy with the decision. If you're interested in exploring, there are some pretty seamless ways to bring your library and playlists with you.

🎙️ A Brief History of Enshittification - If you're young enough to only know an internet dominated by Facebook and all the companies they've acquired, you might not know that this isn't always how it was. Cory Doctorow, who coined the term "enshittification" to capture the process by which online platforms gradually degrade in quality to maximize profits for shareholders at the expense of users and business partners, made an excellent 4 part podcast series for the Canadian Broadcasting System called Understood: Who Broke the Internet. Check out the trailer below.

In Understood: Who Broke the Internet?, Doctorow traces the downward spiral from the heady days of ‘90s tech-optimism through to today’s rotten “enshitternet.” You’ll meet everyone from visionaries to villains to regular people just trying to survive in today’s online world. And you’ll discover who broke the internet — and, more importantly, a plan to fix it.

🏊‍♂️ A Floating Pool is Coming to NYC (!?) - I live in the burbs now so maybe this is old news but I recently learned that NYC is getting a pool that apparently has been in the works for 15 years. Its called the +Pool and the renderings look kinda awesome. You can learn more about it here.

That's all for this week. Thanks for reading. If you want each new edition in your inbox, you can subscribe below or follow right from your favorite RSS reader.

For those tuning in after last week where I shared that I was running for our local school Board of Education along with some reasons why, I’m thrilled to report that I won one of the two seats and will be starting my three year term on July 1st 🎉

I'm grateful to all the people who helped me make it happen - hosting a lawn sign, getting the word out, handing out flyers, drilling me with questions ahead of the candidate forum and more than anything just dealing with me talking about little else beyond the race for over a month. It was an all-consuming experience that I'm so glad I got to have. All that said, I was so excited to get to follow it up with a 3 day weekend with no plans, no sports games to go to, nothing. The fam got to catch up on sleep and do all sorts of Summer kickoff stuff and I feel rejuvenated.

As for the Board - now the real work starts and it starts with an all day training session run by NY state for new trustees on Saturday June 28th followed soon after by another day long planning session with our district board where the new trustees will be sworn in. Lots to learn and I'm excited to dig in.

Things I'm into this week

🧀 Last week was the annual Cooper’s Hill Cheese Rolling and Wake in Gloucestershire, England and this BBC liveblog has some great highlights and photos for you. If you think it looks like a swarm of zombies from The Last of Us racing town a steep hill after a wheel of cheese, you are correct!

If you have no idea what this is and your interest is piqued, I highly recommend you check out the segment about this race in the Netflix documentary We Are the Champions about unique competitions around the world. It's a great watch.

It's so emblematic of the moment we're in, the Who Cares Era, where completely disposable things are shoddily produced for people to mostly ignore.
...
In a moment where machines churn out mediocrity, make something yourself. Make it imperfect. Make it rough. Just make it.

👨‍💻 In case you missed it, last week both the Chicago-Sun Times and the Philadelphia Inquirer published an entire feature recommending children's books that don't exist and had been created by Generative-AI. This little episode is a microcosm of what's happening at a grand scale with GenAI and Dan Sinker summarizes this time we find ourselves in a great little piece called The Who Cares Era.

🎧 For all my fellow pop culture obsessives out there, this pod conversation between Derek Thompson and Spencer Kornhaber on the latter's hunt for objective measures of whether pop culture is worse than ever, is a fun listen. (ps: if you're more of the reading type, Kornhaber recently wrote Is This the Worst-Ever Era of American Pop Culture 🎁 for The Atlantic covering the same topic.)

🎼 I'm a sucker for orchestral renditions of pop songs I love and this version of Fred Again's Delilah (pull me out of this) by the Kaleidescope Orchestra is a beaut. (you can find the original here)

😍 The intersection of ambitious and whimsical always gets my attention and I am SUPER into this new Japanese restaurant in East Village, NYC called Shirokuro, who's entire interior is designed to look like a two dimensional drawing - all sketched in black and white. (h/t to Kottke)

🔥 Finally, with Memorial Day behind us, it's officially Summer time so I wanted to share one of my favorite old Soundcloud mixes to throw on at the BBQ from Mick Boogie + DJ Jazzy Jeff.

...that retro, soulful, cool out, bbq eating, suntan getting, beach chair sitting, rosé drinking, two miles an hour, so everybody can see you music. Enjoy!

If you're into this vibe, he's got a bunch more where that came from.

That's all for this week. Thanks for reading. If you want each new edition in your inbox, you can subscribe below or follow right from your favorite RSS reader.

The good news is... 🗳️ Election Day is this Tuesday so the sprint is almost over. Almost. Today I'm planning to canvas our neighborhood, hand out flyers and hopefully meet some folks as the weather's looking up.

For today's newsletter, I wanted to share a bit about what led me to decide to run for this volunteer position:

1. As our country is getting increasingly polarized and chaotic at the national level, I wanted to invest my own time and energy in a way where I believe I can avoid the noise and have a positive impact on something that matters to me in a way that would more deeply connect me to our community (as we all as starting to learn - deeper social + community connections are a critical ingredient to a healthy and hopefully longer life)
2. There are multiple challenges our schools are wrestling with that are related to technology in one way or another - cell phones in schools, social media and social-emotional wellbeing, the role of AI in education - and I felt my background working in tech the past 25 years could be a useful voice on the Board as we navigate these questions as a district.
3. I've never been part of any kind of campaign for office and it demands things that are not only not in my wheelhouse but as someone with many introverted tendencies, they are things I often instinctively try to avoid. In the interest demonstrating to myself that you're never to old to learn and evolve, I wanted to put myself in a situation where I was going to be uncomfortable so I could see how I show up (and hopefully grow). This involved a lot of "putting myself out there" through hosting meet and greets, distributing signs, recruiting volunteers, actively engaging individuals in the broader community and preparing for a candidate forum where all three candidates had to be ready to answer 10 different questions live in front of an audience. The forum was by far the most stressful part of this whole process. Through it I learned that with the right preparation (color coded index card system 🤓, multiple practice sessions and a beta blocker) I was able to do it and I think I did ok! Maybe someday I'll be able to watch the whole video all the way through 🙈
4. I think it's important both for my own mental wellbeing, and to demonstrate to our kids, that while work is important it shouldn't be the only thing you invest yourself in. I've definitely had periods of my life where my work and my identity were more deeply intertwined than I think was healthy (for me, but ymmv) so I got excited about this opportunity because it was something I could pour some of myself into that wasn't work-related.

The whole process has been stressful but also satisfying and kinda fun. I've got a few Get Out the Vote activities planned for the next 3 days and then it'll be over. I'm proud of the campaign I've run, grateful to all my friends and family who've supported and encouraged me through the whole process and excited to see the results on Tuesday 🤞!

Things I've been into this month

(Not intentional, but I realize there's a slight education-related angle to these recommendations.)

Here’s where I actually am: I think we’ve just been going through a catastrophic experiment with screens and children.

And right now, we are starting to figure out that this was a bad idea. Schools are banning phones. My sense is that they are not relying very much on laptops and iPads. There was a big vogue for a while that every kid gets their own laptop or tablet. I think that’s beginning to go away, if I’m reading the tea leaves of this right. So I feel a bit better about that as a parent of young kids.

I really feel badly for the parents whose kids have been navigating this over the past 10 years or so. And right now I see A.I. coming, and I don’t think we understand it at all. I don’t think we understand how to teach with it. I don’t think the studies we’re doing right now are good yet — there are too many other effects we’re not going to be measuring.

There’s the narrow thing that a program does, and then there’s what it does for a kid to be staring at a screen all the time in a deeper way. I believe human beings are embodied. And if you made me choose between sending my kids to a school that has no screens at all and one that is trying the latest in A.I. technology, I would send them to the school with no screens at all in a second.

But we’re going to be working through this somehow. And what scares me, putting aside what world my kids graduate into, is their moving into schools at the exact time that educators don’t know what the hell to do with this technology. And they’re about to try a lot of things that don’t work and probably try it badly.

🎧 📖 This is an excerpt from a recent episode of Ezra Klein's podcast, ‘We Have to Really Rethink the Purpose of Education’, and it deeply deeply resonates with me.

If you have even a passing interest in the topic, if you have children (or are planning to), it's worth a listen. It's a conversation Jessica Winthrop, author of The Disengaged Teen: Helping Kids Learn Better, Feel Better, and Live Better, a book I'm now planning to check out.

🎧 📺 I learned about a documentary on Hulu called Social Studies on a recent episode of Search Engine called 'What are teenagers actually seeing on their phones?' The podcast is a great conversation with the filmmaker, Lauren Greenfield, about how she made a documentary where a bunch of kids gave her access to what shows up on their phones for a year and it sounds fascinating:

A group of teenagers agrees to allow a filmmaker to record the things they do on their phones for a year-long experiment. To see the world they see through their phones, to encounter their algorithms. The results are honest, at times pretty upsetting, and tell us a lot about the internet that Gen-Z finds itself on. In the middle of our big, confusing, national argument about teenagers and their phones, a few answers.

We're planning to watch with our tween/teens.

In a previous issue of this newsletter I shared a podcast from Derek Thompson about the incredibly interesting life of James Garfield (if you haven't listened yet, I highly recommend). Now that I've been totally Garfield-pilled I was excited to discover that Netflix is working on a series produced by D.B. Weiss and David Benioff (Game of Thrones, The 3 Body Problem) about the former president starring Matthew Macfayden, Michael Shannon, and many more amazing actors and actresses. You can read about it here.

🎶 Here's a neat little interactive experience from The Pudding where you can move through music and see how influences get passed down along the way. Really fun to play with and listen to. (h/t kottke)

Finally, I came across this lovely little limited-edition product being hand built in New York by a small team called Poetry Camera. It's a custom-built camera that takes "pictures" but the pictures are generated as poems using AI and large language models. Don't worry - of course there are settings for "haiku" or "sonnet". Each camera costs $699. You can read more about it here and you can follow their progress by subscribing to their newsletter.

To me this is as much of an art piece as it is a "product." It's the kind of whimsical take on tech meets art project that made my graduate program at NYU, ITP, so special.

That's all for this week. Thank you for reading. If you want each new edition in your inbox, you can subscribe below or follow right from your favorite RSS reader.

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 Crowley shared this article with me from April 7, 2004 (21 years ago!!!) covering when he and I officially launched dodgeball.com - a text-messaging-based social network to help people keep up and meet up with their friends that started as our graduate school thesis project. The article was pretty short lol so I'll just paste it all here:

It's like Friendster all over again: we're being barraged by requests to add people to our Dodgeball friends list. Anyway, Dodgeball is a new service which can tell you which of your friends are within a ten block radius of where you are. Once you've signed up and registered your cellphone number with them, you can "check-in" by sending a text message to Dodgeball with your location (it only works in NYC, Boston, LA, Philadelphia, and San Francisco right now, which is already two more cities than we're likely to be in anytime soon), and then if anyone on your friends list (starting to sound familiar?) has also checked-in and is within range, you both get a text message.

For those unfamiliar, Friendster was the first social network that kinda looked like the ones we know and love/hate today (you can read more here if you're curious). We built dodgeball at a time before iPhones, when phones had only recently begun to be able to take and send photos, and not that far removed from a time when you couldn't even send a text message to someone on a different network (🤯 right?). All to say, simpler times back then.

Prior to dodgeball, I'd worked as a front-end developer and interaction designer, always focused on a very specific slice of a digital experience. dodgeball was my first real experience as a "product person" - where Dennis and I had to think of the whole experience our users were having while also figuring out whether we were able to turn it into an viable business (while also both designing and coding day to day). The dodgeball story ended with us getting acquired by Google and going to work on it for a few years over there. It's funny to dig up what our close advisor, patron saint of Social Media, Clay Shirky ❤️ said at the time about the acquisition:

Building something that at the time tens of thousands of people used and loved was an incredible, intoxicating, experience that introduced me to Product work broadly and ended up being the first stitch in a thread that has run through my career as a product builder - building software to help people get more out of their experiences in the real world vs driving engagement for engagement sake by keeping people buried in their phones.

It started in my 20s with dodgeball helping people meet up with their friends when they were out drinking, then in my 30s with foursquare (a spiritual successor to dodgeball in a post iPhone world) where we built the best personalized local discovery experience to help people discover new bars, restaurants and places to go no matter where they were and as of October in my 40s at Tripadvisor where we're building tools to help people confidently plan great travel experiences built on a foundation of rich guidance from real travelers.

Things I'm into this week

If you stopped evolving—if you clung to the job you had in 2004 like it was your birthright, if you refused to stretch your skill set or rewire your perspective—then yeah, you're not relevant anymore. But that’s not injustice. That’s inertia.

You mistook consistency for growth. You confused repetition with mastery. You were offered a hundred chances to adapt, and you said no—over and over again—because, what, you stopped being counterculture and bought into the myth of the American Dream? So now you're mad at the system for not wanting what you refused to update?

That’s not Gen X. That’s just fucking stupid.

The generation I remember—and still feel damn lucky to be part of—was built on flux. We watched analog die in real time. We moved from cassette to CD to Napster in under five years. We had one foot in zines and one in HTML. We came up in online chat rooms and dot-com implosions. We are the generation born in the epicenter of constant and radical change.

This sentiment from Brilliant Crank in response to that NYTimes piece that made the rounds a few weeks ago about the impact of AI on the creative class (The Gen X Career Meltdown) really resonated with me. I feel so grateful to have gotten to be part of the generation to truly know all sides of the the tech evolution we’ve seen over the past 30 years. It certainly hasn’t been a steady ride but for those who are always curious and eager to learn and evolve as they go, it’s been incredibly satisfying.

🪷 If you enjoyed Season 3 of White Lotus and are sad that it’s over, I recommend you give this 30 minute podcast reflecting on the season with creator Mike White a listen. He’s always a good, funny and honest interview and he shares some thoughts about Season 4.

Marathon was my introduction to LAN gaming back in college (some backstory on the game back then). We were obsessed with it and it earned a place in my own Gaming Hall of Fame (we all have one right?). Well, I just came across this trailer for a new Marathon from the folks at Bungie and I. Am. HYPED. You can read more about it here and we’ll all be able to play it this September.

It’s certainly refreshing to have a simple, private way to share photos with family, other than emailing them or posting them on social media (something my teenage kids refuse to let me do). I gave my mom an Aura frame to test the sharing feature, and while I knew she would love seeing new pictures of the family, I was surprised at how she reacted. Rather than just commenting on a social media post or replying to an email, she called to talk about the photos I’d shared to her frame. That felt a lot more social.

I love our Aura digital picture frames and can't recommend them enough. They just launched a new one called the Aspen and it looks great (here's a review). They're such a simple way to enjoy all the photos you take, are easy to set up with automations like "grab any photo I mark as a favorite and add it to the frame", make fantastic gifts for family members who live elsewhere, are incredible well designed (both hardware and software) and most of all - the regularly rotating photos make for great, unexpected moments of reflection and conversation.

Also, in a world where companies are trying to get you to subscribe to everything, I appreciate Aura taking a different approach:

Unlike some competitors, Aura doesn’t charge a subscription fee for its cloud-based photo storage. Its business model is based on people buying one frame, and then inevitably buying more. “Today, we know when we sell a frame to you that you buy for your mom, that you are going to buy a certain number of frames in the future. That accounts for more than half our sales,” Jensen says. “That network growth is what drives the business.”

While it is still incredibly early to say for sure what the device ultimately will be, I imagine a new generation of smartphone, for lack of a better word, that eschews apps for connectors. A device that starts with a text box and an always-listening voice mode that uses your apps and services for you, that does not take you out of context or distract you periodically through the day. The OpenAI device could actually be the antidote to much of the societal damage the current generation of smartphones has done.

I'm still thinking about this piece from Parker Ortolani speculating on what the device that OpenAI, Jony Ive and Laurene Powell Jobs are connected to could be. It does feel like we've hit a ceiling on what a "cellphone" is so I'm very interested to see what an ambitious take on a totally new interaction model could be.

🧟 And finally, how great does 28 Years Later look?

That's all for this week. Thanks for reading. If you want each new edition in your inbox, you can subscribe below or follow right from your favorite RSS reader.

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 bring a speaker. Few moments are too small to squeeze in a little information, insight, or entertainment. This behavior became second nature to me. It felt normal. It felt productive.

This compulsion partially stems from how I’m wired and has definitely been exacerbated by the busy working parent life. With little “free” time, consuming something interesting during those spare moments gives me a sense of control and makes me feel like I’m making the most of that limited time.

I recently reflected on whether this habit might be negatively impacting my sleep and anxiety. My first clue came from regularly waking up at night with racing thoughts about work, health, family, and often dumb stuff. I started to think that by not giving those thoughts room to breathe during the day, I was inadvertently creating a mental backlog that would surface - usually at 4 AM.

A few weeks ago, I began an experiment. I decided to deliberately not fill every free moment with something. Instead, I’d let more of them breathe with emptiness. My morning hourlong dog walks—previously prime podcast time—became headphone-free zones. I’d just walk and let my mind wander; thoughts, observations, and ideas could bounce around freely.

I was surprised at how strong my initial resistance to doing this was — I felt like I was wasting this time. This hour could be spent learning something new or catching up on a favorite show. The visceral feeling of "missing out" was stronger than I'd anticipated. The difficulty in not reaching for my headphones highlighted how automatic this behavior had become.

After forcing myself to try it a few times, I’m happy to report that it has become easier. It's also allowed me to become more aware of when my mind wants to wander - racing with its own thoughts or ideas that demand attention. I now turn off whatever I’m doing and continue in silence, letting those ideas flow and take shape.

It’s still early in the experiment, but the benefits have been subtle yet meaningful. My thoughts are less fragmented. I am more observant of my surroundings. I can see how ideas connect in ways they couldn’t when they were always interrupted by new inputs. Connections form between concepts that were previously compartmentalized and solutions emerge when I’m not actively seeking them. I still wake up at 4AM more than I like to, but I often can fall back to sleep quickly.

Of course, there's a downside. My podcast queue grows longer, and I feel FOMO about the content I'm behind on. I'm trying to let go of my completionist mindset and appreciate the value of having this mental processing time.

Follow up: espresso + lemonade = delicious?

Last week I mentioned a drink I'd read about called the Thunderbolt that really piqued my interest.

Pour lemonade into a glass over ice before topping with a double shot of chilled espresso. Mix, if you're into that kind of thing."

Not soon after hitting send on last week's newsletter did I find myself at brunch with friends in a position to make my dreams come true.

I ordered the two drinks and mixed my own Thunderbolt at the table and I can report that it was... pretty bitter (the lemonade in question was not sweet at all) and therefore not for everyone but I enjoyed it and would definitely get it again in the summertime as I found it to be both refreshing and zippy!

Things I’m into this week

Over the past month I've been playing Split Fiction with our 11 year old son and it's been a total blast. The game is unique as it's co-op only - i.e. you have to play with someone else, and work together, to get through the game. It weaves various game genres and mechanics together incredibly well and the creative direction is wildly whimsical and exceptionally well executed. At a time when so many games are shifting to online play, a game that depends on communicating and collaborating with someone right next to you is a real breadth of fresh air.

"Always go to the funeral" means that I have to do the right thing when I really, really don't feel like it. I have to remind myself of it when I could make some small gesture, but I don't really have to and I definitely don't want to. I'm talking about those things that represent only inconvenience to me, but the world to the other guy. You know, the painfully under-attended birthday party. The hospital visit during happy hour. The Shiva call for one of my ex's uncles. In my humdrum life, the daily battle hasn't been good versus evil. It's hardly so epic. Most days, my real battle is doing good versus doing nothing.

Loved this quote from Deirdre Sullivan's piece "Always Go To The Funeral" on All Things Considered.

The average student has seen college as basically transactional for as long as I’ve been doing this. They go through the motions and maybe learn something along the way, but it is all in service to the only conception of the good life they can imagine: a job with middle-class wages. I’ve mostly made my peace with that, do my best to give them a taste of the life of the mind, and celebrate the successes.

Things have changed. Ted Gioia describes modern students as checked-out, phone-addicted zombies. Troy Jollimore writes, “I once believed my students and I were in this together, engaged in a shared intellectual pursuit. That faith has been obliterated over the past few semesters.”

I can't stop thinking about this piece from a college professor of 30 years reflecting on how students' engagement and abilities in the basics of reading, writing and math have so meaningfully degraded.

I also have no patience for those who try and make the case that the proliferation of cell phones and social media aren't the leading contributor to this clear and alarming problem. This was a good recent conversation on this topic between Jonathan Haidt (author of The Anxious Generation) and Ezra Klein: "Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of"

The Torpedo bat, with its distinctive bowling pin-like design, proves that even products with 100 years of history can be revolutionized through a precise combination of data, design, and scientific analysis. It also illustrates that established order is often transformed by outsiders who aren’t bound by traditional thinking. Just as Apple revolutionized mobile phones in 2007 by abandoning physical keyboards, Leanhardt’s physics-based approach challenged baseball’s century-old assumptions about bat design.

Enjoyed this brief deep dive from Om Malik into the new oddly shaped "Torpedo Bat" the Yankees have been using to crank dingahs in the early days of this new baseball season.

That's all for this week. Thanks for reading. If you want each new edition in your inbox, you can subscribe below or follow right from your favorite RSS reader.

Next week we'll be on Spring Break with the kids so not sure if I'll get an issue out but I'm going to try. Have a great week!

While many companies have tried to build alternatives, none have gained enough momentum to survive or thrive. It turns out that once everyone is on one service (and Facebook was famously good at growing their network early on), inertia takes over and moving to a new one is incredibly hard (Snapchat and TikTok are exceptions though not without their own challenges).

It doesn’t have to be this way! The internet has always been an incredibly social place. The ease of engaging with the major social platforms has made it harder for people to discover other, often more rewarding and memorable, pockets of connection. The opportunities are out there, but you need to put in more effort to find and nurture them.

I’d like to share an example I’ve enjoyed being part of recently: the Photo Challenge Project run by the author of one of my favorite weekly newsletters, Hiro Report (if you want to read about new physical products and apps, with a strong design sensibility, check it out).

The Photo Challenge Project had a simple promise…

Each Monday, for five weeks, I'll email you a different essential composition technique to focus on while taking photos that week. I'll include a short write-up introducing the technique, maybe give some famous examples, and hopefully provide a little inspiration to go make some great pictures.

It doesn't matter if you're taking your Hasselblad on an Arctic safari or just taking an iPhone shot of your coffee in the morning. You should be able to find easy ways to put these things to use and hopefully sharpen your skill set along the way!

...it’s been fun to be part of it over the past 4 weeks. I’ve enjoyed re-learning core photographic techniques, welcomed the push to be more present and observant as I move through the world and appreciated the opportunity to participate in something with others who share an interest, where I can control how much time I devote to it.

Even if photography isn’t your thing, there are many projects or communities to discover. Be on the lookout and follow your curiosity when you find them.

Things I’m into this week

🎧 The Future of Everything with Derek Thompson (The Bill Simmons Podcast) Every six months or so, Derek Thompson - host of my favorite podcast for curious people , Plain English (more on that below) - joins Bill Simmons for a wide ranging conversation about the most interesting developments they're seeing across Tech, Sports, Politics and Culture. It's always a great conversation that touches on a diverse set of topics - is leveraging AI the next "moneyball" advantage to be exploited in sports, the implications of streaming TV abundance on the kind of content that's being created, how late night TV talk shows and video podcasts are becoming more and more like each other and what does that mean for the future of both. It's a fun conversation offering lots of food for thought and a nice introduction to Thompson as someone who deftly unpack rich topics...

🎧 Plain History is an experiment Derek Thompson is doing this year on his podcast Plain English where he unpacks historical moments from the late 19th/early 20th century (known as The Gilded Age) as part of a "pod within a pod." Each episode is an accessible dive into a moment in history that is interesting on its own but also provides a valuable backdrop to what we're seeing unfold in the US right now. I really appreciate that Thompson doesn't use these episodes to deliberately draw connections between then and now but you can feel how the topics have been carefully chosen and thoughtfully presented in way that enables you to make those connections for yourself. I particularly enjoyed the episode on James Garfield, who I knew nothing about. What a fascinating person and story.

He's only 3 episodes in so if this feels like it could be your jam, its easy to catch up and then you can enjoy through the rest of the year.

• ⭐ Ep 1: Who Killed President James Garfield
• Ep 2: The Astonishingly Successful Presidency of James K. Polk
• Ep 3: The Gilded Age

I'm certain I'll write more about Plain English over time as the episodes are great catalysts for reflection but if you're into how Thompson gets into the topics above, I highly recommend you check out Plain English where he breaks down various timely topics. Some of my recent faves: How Gen Z Sees the World, The End of Reading, The 5 Types of Wealth and 'The Anti Social History': America's Epidemic of Solitude and How to Fix It.

☕ Espresso and lemonade? Yes please. "Pour lemonade into a glass over ice before topping with a double shot of chilled espresso. Mix, if you're into that kind of thing." This week I learned from this 2019 Esquire piece that mixing espresso and lemonade is called a Thunderbolt and I am definitely into that kind of thing. I am determined to find or make one of these myself this weekend.

Thanks for reading. Hope you learned something interesting. I welcome any feedback or suggestions as I settle into a good format for these.

If you want to get one of these in your Inbox next week, sign up below!

This reliance on social platforms also resulted in me not really having a place online that’s entirely my own and that over time would be something I could look back on and understand what was on my mind.

Sadly, all this wasn’t a new struggle for me. In fact, it was the motivation to get this site up in the first place a little over a year ago. While the immolation of Twitter made breaking my social media habit easy, I hadn’t found a suitable replacement to discover interesting stuff to read. I’ve also lacked the discipline to build a real habit around writing here beyond posting the occasional link or short post. 

With that in mind, I had two specific goals around the energy I put into consuming and creating content in 2025.

First, I wanted to be more thoughtful and deliberate about the people and sources I follow, fully extracting myself from the whims of the quick-twitch algorithms that shape everything we see.

I also wanted to create the space in my brain for thoughts to develop beyond the 240 character canvas that’s shaped the last nearly two decades years of my non-professional writing.

A few months in, I’ve made great progress on the consumption goal, having established a totally new media consumption habit. It started with much less time spent on Bluesky (my last connection to the social internet alongside LinkedIn), no more news/alerts coming via push notifications and much more time following the content creators I care about using good ol’ RSS.

This obviously works great for more traditional blogs but also works really well for people sending newsletters as most platforms let you follow their new content in an RSS reader vs. your inbox (pro tip: you can drop any Substack newsletter into an RSS reader using this url structure: https://[newsletter-name].substack.com/feed)

If you’re looking for a great RSS reader app, I’ve been using and liking Tapestry from the fine folks at Iconfactory (who also happen to make Tot , another great little app I’m very happy to pay for).

My favorite thing about it is that it keeps your place in the feed and loads the newest content “above” (vs loading in new content and moving your place to the top) which lets you not miss anything but also make progress “catching up” at your own speed. It’s a small UX decision that has a huge impact for me.

The Tapestry experience also feels familiar to a recovering Twitter addict but its better because its only got the things I put into it and I can work my way through it at my own pace. Feels a bit like methadone but for content…

In the spirit of my more deliberate creation goal, I’ve decided to start a weekly mini newsletter. This is first and foremost a chance for me to give my thoughts a little more room to breathe. I’ve also always enjoyed sharing the things I find most interesting with others so there’ll be some of that too. 

In the spirit of keeping it short and sweet, I’m going to start with a simple structure:

• A short reflection on something that’s been on my mind that week
• A photo of the week - some picture I took from the past week that made me think or feel something 
• 2-3 quick recommendations of something I read, watched, listened to, tried, etc. that may be of interest to others

I imagine it will evolve over time but that’s where I’m starting and my goal is to not be too precious about it. I’d like it to be something you could read in ~5 minutes, hopefully find something that piques your curiosity, and then get on with your life. 

And finally because I like to give things names, I’m going to call it The Finite Scroll. Welcome to issue 001, dear reader!

ps: the thing that has always kept me shackled to social networks and reticent about newsletters is the extra friction to engage with the writer. I know a lot of newsletter behavior is to hit and it and quit it but if you feel moved to leave a comment, please do! Registering is super quick 👇

Things I’m into this week

📺 Win or Lose (Disney+) - Pixar’s first animated series revolves around a championship little league softball game in a small community. Each episode is the story told from the perspective of one of eight characters in the lead up to the big game. In a vein reminiscent of Inside Out, it’s a sweet, funny and deceptively profound exploration of the emotions we all carry around with us every day. The first episode touches on anxiety in a wonderful (and funny) way. I’m only two episodes in and I’m loving it.  

Win or Lose | “Meet Sweaty” | Available February 19 on Disney+

“Everyone meet Sweaty! 😅 In one week, the two-episode premiere of #WinOrLose arrives on @DisneyPlus!”

Disney Video

🎧 The Gray Area with Sean Illing: A moment for silence I’ve never been a religious person. In fact I’ve always harbored some disillusionment with organized religious institutions. However I’ve always been interested in the questions that religions attempt to answer and more generally why people believe - so much so that I minored in Religion alongside my Philosophy degree, a fact that always seems to surprise people who know me.

It can be a tricky thing to explain and this exchange from a recent episode of The Gray Area summed up my feelings towards religion better than I’ve ever been able to.

“A word you use a lot is mystery. And I quite like that. I think like you, I've always enjoyed the questions more than the answers. And to the extent that spiritual and religious traditions are just trying to keep us in contact with the mysteries of existence, I find them very valuable. But I still think I'll always believe that the dogmas and the institutions, which are all too human, do more harm than good.”

The whole episode is a great discussion with Pico Iyer, a man who’s spent a lot of time over the past few decades living on and off as a visitor in a Catholic monastery, about the benefits of silence as a tool to navigate the overstimulated world in which we live. Lots of interesting ideas and suggestions to noodle on.

Iyer’s written a book called Aflame: Learning from Silence, which I’m excited to check out.

That’s a wrap on the first issue! Thanks for reading this far and if you want to get one of these in your Inbox next week, sign up below!

This mashup trailer for the doc is 💯

It premieres tonight on NBC at 8 p.m. ET on Monday, Jan. 27.

On the eve of the second Trump administration, I just finished reading Renée DiResta’s Invisible Rulers. It was an enjoyable and informative read and I think you’d be hard pressed to find a better account of the ways social media has completely changed the nature of public discourse, power and influence, and as a result our country and the world.

We don’t know what the next four years will bring. It’s very clear we wouldn’t be here without the dynamics DiResta details in the book and if you want to be an informed and empowered citizen within this new information ecosystem, I recommend checking it out. Oh - DiResta’s also an excellent follow on Bluesky.

One of my favorite 2024 listens is 99% Invisible’s Power Broker Breakdown - a podcast series that functions as a distributed book club celebrating the book’s 50th anniversary. Hosts Roman Mars and Elliott Kalan break the 1200+ page book into 12 episodes that they released each month throughout the year. The format was great and I wonder what other book-host combos would benefit from it. 

Each episode is about 2.5 hours long. While I don’t usually listen to podcasts that long, they broke it up well. The first 90 minutes is Mars and Kalan summarizing what happens in the book with genuine passion and humorous camaraderie. In the last ~hour of each episode they’re joined by a guest who’s either a Power Broker super fan or has a unique perspective on the chapter. The guests are awesome. I particularly enjoyed the Caro, Bouie, Zadrozny, Schur, Buttigieg and Jeffrey conversations. 

• Episode 1 - Robert Caro
• Episode 2 - Jamelle Bouie
• Episode 3 - David Sims
• Episode 4 - Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
• Episode 5 - Brandy Zadrozny
• Episode 6 - Mike Schur
• Episode 7 - Pete Buttigieg
• Episode 8 - Shiloh Frederick
• Episode 9 - Majora Carter
• Episode 10 - Clara Jeffrey
• Episode 11 - Brenna Lee Mulligan
• Episode 12 - Robert Caro

As a native New Yorker who’s heard Robert Moses referenced many times throughout my life, I’ve always been curious about The Power Broker but never had the courage to tackle it. While I envy those who actually read along with the podcast over the course of the year, listening helped me understand Moses and the author Robert Caro in a deeper way that enriched my perspective of the city I’ve lived in my whole life. 

If you can read the book, do it; if not, this podcast is a great way to learn about a man who impacted New York City and the country. It’s a fascinating look into how someone commandeered the levers of power for over 40 years and lost it due to a wildly unlikely situation.

This show was a wonderful escape from the relentless news cycle this year (that looks like it’s only going to get worse next year). If you’re looking for a great story about a man who shaped New York City, I highly recommend it and finally for all the Power Broker super nerds out there, they have an awesome merch shop from the show.

Anne Applebaum, a staff writer for The Atlantic, is one of the voices I regularly turn to help make sense of it all. Her expertise has been helpful in putting this American moment in a broader context of democracy degradation. Spoiler alert: it’s not with soldiers marching in streets and what’s already happening in the US isn’t new. 

If you’re trying to make sense of this moment, I recommend her recent book, Autocracy, Inc., and the short 5-episode (30-minutes each) podcast, Autocracy in America, to understand what is in fact a pretty well worn playbook for how democracies can slip away. 

I expect that over the next 6-12 months, we’ll see many companies focus on the experience layer that sits between the user and the LLM. This is where users have a clear path to this new value without needing to know the what the model is doing behind the scenes. As product builders and experience designers, this is our moment to shine!

I’ve trying to explore how companies are leveraging LLMs in their products - some more coherently than others - to get a handle on what’s possible. When done well, it can create a magical experience.

That’s how I felt when I first used Granola, which pitches itself as “The AI notepad for people in back-to-back meetings” and promises to “take your raw meeting notes and make them awesome.” I used the product quite heavily over the summer and it delivered on that promise for me.

Getting started is easy - download their Mac app and connect it to your calendar. It uses the meeting’s audio to generate the transcription (vs. needing a bot to join the meeting) and works with the most popular meeting apps (Google, Teams, Slack, Zoom, etc.)

At the meeting’s start, the app creates a new note file where you can capture your own notes while it transcribes the meeting itself behind the scenes. Afterward, it generates a summary with section headers, speaker details, and your notes smartly woven in. You can of course review and edit everything.

The experience feels magical because you can let go of the urge to take copious notes and be more present in the conversation, only jotting down the most important things. The company offers many templates (1:1s, Customer Discovery, Stand-up, etc.) to inform how the AI will structure the notes.

I found a great use case not covered in their templates - transcribing and summarizing my conversations with my therapist. I’ve now got a summary of our past month’s discussions (and ongoing) to reflect on over time.

When I was in between jobs this summer, I could decide what meetings I wanted to use Granola for and it was fantastic. I also know that in corporate environments there is a lot more sensitivity around software like this so I wanted to learn how the company was positioning itself re: security and compliance and was directed to this FAQ (which has since been updated to reflect they’re working on an enterprise plan).

Granola isn’t the only company going after these space and the big entrenched enterprise players will clearly have an advantage. However, the Granola team have done an awesome job crafting a product that feels like magic focused on solving a very real problem for a lot of people and they recently raised $20 million to pursue that vision.

I'm a sucker for both animal and robot-with-feelings stories, so this film is right in my wheelhouse. This movie hit hard as a parent who regularly thinks about our kids (now 14 and 11) growing up and heading out on their own.

I hadn't read the book it's based on, but I'm happy to learn there are two more in the series as I'm keen to continue following Roz's story.

Watching it also reminded me of the original Megatron action figure that transformed into a pretty realistic looking handgun - which not only is less fun to play with than a car, plane, etc. but also seems totally nuts by today’s standards. I mean, look at this.

And judging by how lame the robot version of the toy was as a result of the shape of a gun, they must have really wanted him to be a gun. They eventually dropped the gun part and had him transform into a tank instead.

It all started with a great subscription newsletter and a subscriber-only Slack community. The subscription only costs $150 per year and if being a PM is your job, you should be able to expense it (Rachitsky even makes it easy to an expense request template you can share with your boss :)

Community growth must be strong because he's recently rolled out a couple of partnerships that are delivering meaningful value for his subscribers including two recent deals where subscribers get a year of Perplexity Pro for free and $1,395 in free credits to products like Superhuman, Linear, Sprig, Dovetail and Gamma when you take just one of the Maven product course he recommends.

For me, by far the most valuable piece of the ecosystem has been Lenny's Podcast (hat tip for that sweet sweet top of funnel) - a growing collection of over 200 podcasts (Apple | Spotify | YouTube) that are each an interview with a different person, usually only a little more than an hour and are packed with insights and anecdotes from their personal experiences. As for former product manager and startup founder, Lenny's a great, earnest, interviewer who balances questions that allow his guests to tell their stories with a desire to ensure that his audience gets clear, actionable, takeaways from each episode.

Almost all of the episodes offer something that any person who builds products would benefit from (even non-product managers). If you've never listened, some of my faves are:

• Crafting a compelling product vision | Ebi Atawodi (YouTube, Netflix, Uber)
• Vision, conviction, and hype: How to build 0 to 1 inside a company | Mihika Kapoor (Product at Figma)
• Building product at Stripe: craft, metrics, and customer obsession | Jeff Weinstein (Product lead)
• The original growth hacker reveals his secrets | Sean Ellis (author of “Hacking Growth”)
• Unorthodox PM wisdom: Automating user insights, unselling job candidates, logging every decision, more | Kevin Yien (Stripe, Square, Mutiny)
• Land your dream job in today’s market: negotiation tactics, job search councils, and more | Phyl Terry (Author, “Never Search Alone”)
• Lessons from scaling Stripe | Claire Hughes Johnson (former COO of Stripe)
• When enough is enough | Andy Johns (ex-FB, Twitter, Quora)

(side note: in going through the archive its really impressive to see how many wildly insightful top performers have come through Stripe)

Finally, over the summer Lenny announced he was going to try his hand at curating a one day conference Thursday October 24th in SF - the Lenny & Friends Summit - which I'm very excited to be headed to. As you can see below the speaker lineup is insane and if the other things he's built over the years are any indication, I expect a thoughtfully curated experience with a focus on providing value and a sense of community. (ps: they're still accepting applications)

While I do have a passing interest in tattoo art (here's a fun piece from The Atlantic that explores The Words People Write on their Skin), the reason this video made such an impression on me is the stunning animation and storytelling in service of learning.

I did a little digging and the creator, Kurzsgasadt, has other great looking videos covering Why We Need to Rethink Exercise, Optimistic Nihilism, What is Life? Is Death Real? and of course, the timely AI - Humanity’s Final Invention.

At the end of the tattoo video the narrator calls out that they regularly collaborate with the team at Brilliant.org (think: Duolingo for STEM subject matter) on their learning experiences.

This prompted me to download the Brilliant app (iOS | Android) and I'm super into it.

In just a few days I've gone through a course on How LLMs work (it just hits the basics and left me wanting more chapters), Statistics Fundamentals, Computer Science Fundamentals and am currently working through Programming with Python to knock some cobwebs off. I'm really enjoying the visual + interactive approach to learning and I'm also having the kids try it out to see whether its helpful for them as Brilliant has a bunch of materials on the concepts they're each learning in math.

The app has a distinctive, decidedly lo-fi cartoony comic book visual style. Like many step counters before it, Stompers does a good job of reflecting the amount you move every day. However, this is not intended to be a single-player game. Stompers is fun because you do it with your friends, and this is where its unique approach excels at driving behavior.

Every day, you and your Stompers friends start a new race, moving forward as you take steps in the real world. This daily competitive mechanic is pretty fun on its own, but where Stompers really shines is in how it brings virtual power-ups - like banana peels, baseball bats, and Wile E. Coyote-style rockets - into the daily race. This creates Mario Kart-like moments of surprise and frustration as you get sent back a bunch of steps because your friend hit you with a banana peel, or you triumphantly launch yourself forward into first place with a rocket you picked up less than an hour before the day's race came to a close.

While this means your step count at the end of the day often isn't an exact reflection of how much you moved, it's close enough, and I suspect the lighthearted combative mechanics will be a net positive over time in getting people to move more, which is the ultimate goal.

The app does a nice job of balancing short and long-term motivation mechanics - every day is a fresh start, so if you have a real stinker of a day, it has no impact on how successful you can be tomorrow. The app also shows you where you've finished over the past week, so there is some sense of history and how you're trending.

I've also found the app to be conducive to driving real-world social interactions (which is great!) - texting someone during a multi-day rivalry as we go back and forth attacking each other in our quest for first, or messaging someone after seeing them crush multiple days way out in front of the pack and finding out they're traveling in another country with their family.

Getting people to build - and stick with - habits is really, really hard, so it'll be interesting to see how long Stompers can hold people's attention but it's refreshing to see someone take a new and very opinionated approach to the whole experience. I also love seeing people have fun and get a little weird with their product.

Give it a shot and invite a few of your friends to compete and see what you think:

‎Stompers - Steps with Friends

‎YOU’VE BEEN INVITED TO THE APP OF THE SUMMER Welcome to Stompers, the social step-tracking app that turns every walk into a race with friends. Forget boring step counters; Stompers makes walking with friends fun. Race Your Friends: Invite your friends and family to see their step count in real-ti…

App StoreJoshua Rozin

The app was built by Soren Iverson, a fun social follow (Threads | Twitter | LinkedIn) who publishes daily mockups of totally bananas product design concepts, like this prompt to connect with a licensed therapist to go with Netflix's "are you still watching?" prompt:

Netflix "are you still watching" BetterHelp upsell pic.twitter.com/Ns6uILNdPq

— Soren Iverson (@soren_iverson) May 3, 2023

Iverson has deftly illustrated so many great, cringe-inducing designs that he's published a snazzy little book collection of them all called Can You Imagine? that would make a great stocking stuffer for all your product and design pals.

I never did it to build a giant audience or to make any money. It was just super fun to write about random stuff with my friends and share it with what was likely an audience of each other, maybe our moms and a few other bloggers. It didn't matter. I loved all of it - wrangling Moveable Type, designing (and redesigning) my templates, linking to other bloggers I loved, RSS feeds, etc.

In October 2006 I joined Twitter. It was a blast and pretty quickly became my favorite product + social network and remained that for over 15 years. As an introvert, I always found something about the Twitter experience that felt really good. I was able to meet and get to know so many interesting people that I'm certain I may have struggled to get to know IRL.

It also made it really easy to share your half-baked thoughts. You got most of the thrills of "publishing" with so much less work. Then came the likes, and the followers, and the big news moments and somewhere along the way it completely re-wired the way I consumed content (maybe someone posted a new tweet in the 2 seconds since I last pulled to refresh. I think I should pull again!) and well as how I approach creating content.

As I recently severed my relationship with Twitter and set out to start doing some personal writing again in a place of my own, I've found I have forgotten how to just. start. writing. Everything in my head wants to be a tweet and anything longer feels like it doesn't deserve to be more than a tweet. It's a really unsettling feeling, especially considering I have no problem writing constantly at work. It makes me grateful that I'm even able to remember how my brain used to work so at least I have something to aspire to get back to. When I think of the generations of people who will only know bite-sized critical thinking and expression, I get worried but that's something that many people smarter than me have written extensively about.

So after 6 weeks going by with nothing to show for it, I told myself that I would just publish something today to get started and this is it. Going forward I expect to write about a broad swath of things and I expect most of it will be better than this first post but you gotta start somewhere and now I've started.

In the meantime, I've imported a bunch of old posts from Medium from 2017 and earlier.

The past year working at Nucleus has been an amazing experience for me. I joined the team in March of last year with the goal of having our product on store shelves the first week in August. After having worked at a hardware startup that sadly never made it to market, I was intimately aware of all the challenges that hardware companies face and I was determined to make sure we not only shipped but that the product experience was as simple and delightful as it could be.

At the time I joined, we had a functional technical prototype of the core product but none of the experience designed around it. What followed was a crazy 5 (!!!) months where we rebranded the company, focused the value proposition around rich family communication, designed the whole experience (packaging, device, mobile apps, website), worked closely with Amazon to integrate Alexa, ran a successful beta program and got the product shipped on time. Most importantly, we built a strong relationship with our initial customers thanks to a) solving a problem dear to their families and b) showing them, with our actions, that we care about customer experience above all else. This resulted in a consistent 4 star rating at Amazon and many more units sold through the holidays than we could have imagined.

All this was accomplished with a small team of great people who were always eager to contribute to aspects of the company far beyond their area of expertise because they believed so deeply in the mission. As lean as we were, being scrappy was the only way for us to make it all happen.

While I’m incredibly proud of what the team has accomplished and grateful for having had the chance to play a role in it, I’ve decided to move on as I was presented with an opportunity I couldn’t pass up — this week I’ve joined the Product team at The New York Times as Interim Product Lead for news products.

Those who follow the media space know The New York Times has an ambitious, inspiring vision and set of goals for the future. They’re delivering some of the best news reporting out there while also pushing so much incredible work across a variety of platforms (The Daily podcast, Beta, VR, Snapchat to name a few). When a chance to join the News team was offered, I was eager to jump in and do what I could to contribute. The role may change over time (hence the “interim” label) but for me — at this moment in history where uncovering the truth has never felt more important and to work alongside friends, former colleagues, classmates and people’s who’s work I admire — this was a once in a lifetime opportunity.

My mother worked at Time Magazine for 33 years so media and journalism have always been a big part of my life. Growing up, I spent a lot of time at her office in the Time-Life Building and experienced many world events through the eyes of the people who told the stories about them (the Berlin Wall coming down, the start of Desert Storm and many others).

I couldn’t be more excited to carry on the inspiration that drove my mother for so many years and contribute to the critical role the New York Times has always played in our society.

Can’t wait to get to work.

If Oprah can have a list of her favorite things, why can’t we all?

Over the holidays, as I was drinking wine and lamenting the dumpster fire of a year 2016 was, I thought it would be good to try and think about the products and experiences that stood out to me for being uniquely delightful in hopes that they may bring some happiness or inspiration to others as we head into 2017.

Hopefully something in here brings you joy, inspires you to create something new and amazing or just makes your life a little better.

1. “No Chewing Allowed” Chocolate Truffles

In my final hunt for Christmas gifts this year I wandered by a booth in the Union Square Holiday Market with a line 20+ deep. People were buzzing about the truffles these two guys were selling — “I heard they don’t even have a store! They just do markets!” On a whim, I decided to wait and pick up a box as a gift and they turned out to be one of the most unique + delicious sweets I’ve had in a long time. You’re not meant to chew them at all. Just er … hold it in your mouth and wait for it to dissolve. It tastes like the most delicious hot chocolate you’ve ever had. I gave one to everyone who came to our house over the holidays and everyone was blown away. You can order them from their site. We got the Original/Signature Tin but I have no reason to believe they won’t all be delicious. Order a box. Trust me.

2. Apple’s AirPods

Apple’s been in a bit of a product lull of late and when they announced that the AirPods would be delayed indefinitely without much context, potentially missing the holiday season, people started wildin’. Then one random morning I get into work and learn that Apple quietly made them available to order and they’d arrive before the holidays. What a pleasant surprise!

That unexpected delight perfectly characterizes the whole AirPods experience for me — from the magical pairing flow, to how effortless they feel to use, to the thoughtful touches that punctuate the experience (like how they’ll pause your audio when you take one out to talk to someone). While no v.1 of a product is perfect (they highlight Siri’s shortcomings, they could use some gestures for simple media controls like fwd/next and volume, they either fit your ears or they don’t, they’re pricey), the AirPods experience is one of the best new product experiences I’ve had in a while and remind us that Apple is still, in fact, quite capable of shipping products that “just work.” Now about that TouchBar...

3. The Snapchat Spectacles Launch

I can’t remember the last consumer product launch that impressed me more than what Snap pulled off with Spectacles last Fall. Snapchat has always been a product that feels light, playful and just impenetrable enough that once you (and your friends) get it, it feels like a special language/club all your own. All of those qualities have a very strong psychological impact on people’s relationship to the product/brand and the company managed to infuse it into the whole Spectacles launch.

From announcing their impending launch with a late Friday WSJ piece, to positioning the glasses as a ”toy”, to a pre-launch campaign that built excitement through mystery, to a launch that months later still maintained a feeling of pent up demand without incurring customer frustration. Heck — they even built a memorable retail experience in NYC.

Every single part of this launch (even the receipt!) was on brand: oozing with fun and whimsy — two things that feel like they’ve been missing from consumer products for a while.

Snapchat has long been doing the most innovative product work around when it comes to how we use technology to change the way people communicate. Seeing how they pulled off the Spectacles launch and their upcoming IPO, I’m eager to see where they take us next.

4. The Crown (Netflix)

I’ve never been one for period pieces so I was initially hesitant to watch this but I’m so grateful my wife convinced me to. The first season of The Crown follows the British royal family + government as Elizabeth becomes Queen. Not only is the acting, casting, music and stories top notch, but the show is uniquenly adept at weaving their narrative around historical events, many of which were new to me (like The London Fog of 1952). The whole experience was both entertaining and informative and I’m so excited that there’s talk of them doing many more seasons following the story through present day.

5. The Millennial Question

by Simon Sinek

While the segment is framed through the lens of “Millennials in the Workplace,” Sinek’s subsequent breakdown of the challenges they face are very much applicable to all of us as technology continues to play a bigger and bigger role in our lives. The clarity with which he lays out the challenges we’ve created for ourselves in various aspects of life — parenting, technology, professional environment, etc. — manages to both serve as a great reality check and be enlightening at the same time. Carve out 15 minutes and give this a focused watch.

6. Goodnight Stories for Rebel Girls

I backed this Kickstarter campaign a while back and the book showed up just in time for the holidays. It’s a collection of one page stories about amazing women throughout history with wildly different backgrounds. It does a great job of mixing many of the women you’d expect to see with a lot of ones you likely would have never come across. The book also happens to be exquisitely put together and filled with beautiful portraits of the women in different artistic styles. We’ve been reading them with our 6 year old daughter and she LOVES it (and keeps counting down the pages until we get to Hillary Clinton 😢). I can’t recommend it enough to parents of both young girls and boys. You can order it here.

7. Dutch Blitz

Get ready to get fired up about a card game that the Amish love! We were introduced to this card game over the holidays and we had a blast playing it. Think of it as a simple, fast-paced version of solitaire where you’re competing against the other people you’re playing with (up to 4 with the basic set, which can be added to with an expansion set). The games are fast and fun and go great with a few friends and a few bottles of wine. You can order it here.

8. Spotify’s Data-Powered Personalized Products

Discover Weekly, Release Radar, Your Daily Mixes

Using a music service over time should make it feel more and more like its yours but music recommendation products to date have felt… not as smart as they should be. Spotify weathered the early Streaming Music Streetfight long enough to get to a place where they’re able to start doing really interesting stuff with all that data. Now consumers are starting to reap the benefits. Discover Weekly — a personalized playlist based on your previous listening habits that drops at the beginning of each week (here’s a great piece diving into how the magic works) — was their first data-powered personalized product and they followed it up with Release Radar (new releases from artists they think you like) and Radio Mix (handful of genre-based stations based on your habits that change regularly).

Week after week, I continue to be impressed with how Spotify makes it clear that all the signals they’re gathering are shaping my unique music experience — delivering reliable hits as well as exposing me to many new artists I wouldn’t have otherwise discovered. I’m not sure software will ever replace that friend you have that knows your tastes and turns you on to great stuff but we may get pretty close. This kind of personalization makes me never want to abandon the service, even in the face of the hardware ecosystem benefits of Apple Music.

🌠 I highly recommend this IFTTT recipe that automatically adds the tracks from each week’s Discover Weekly playlist to a master archive playlist that, after a few months makes for a great personalized radio station.

9. Wallcat

Wallcat is a super simple app for your Mac Menu bar made by Dustin Senos ✌️ that will give you a different, beautiful, photo for your desktop background every day. Many of us spend a lot (too much) time in front of our computers and this app provides welcome variety and inspiration every day. You can download it here.

10. NPR One App

I only discovered this one towards the end of the year and it immediately jumped to a daily behavior/home screen status for me. You set it up with your local NPR station and as you listen to stories, you can indicate the ones you find interesting to help train future story prompts. Every morning on the walk to the train (or anytime I’ve been offline for a while) I fire it up and run through the top national and local news and usually an extra story or two. At a time where the daily inundation of stories is overwhelming (particularly around politics), this app + routine has turned out to be a much calmer way to stay informed and I haven’t even started to dip into all the NPR podcast functionality built in. Also, there are a lot nice experience design touches (like nicely done audio EDU as you explore new features). NPR One is available as an app as well as on the web.

This was a really fun exercise to go through and hope if you’ve read this far you found at least one thing you might not have known about that brings you joy. Would love to hear any feedback on any of these if you try them.

Looking ahead to 2017, I’m going to do a better job of keeping track of as they happen so the list should be even better next year!

I hadn’t logged onto Facebook since December 2014. Back then, I decided the effort — and data, oh that sweet sweet data — I was putting into the service wasn’t coming close to being matched by the value I was getting out of it. This was in stark contrast to the two products I used the most — Twitter and Instagram — where that balance was much more rewarding.

Facebook also became a place where being yourself, and sharing/standing by what you believe in, would often cause more trouble than it was worth so I found myself “toning down” the things I cared about in a way I didn’t have to on Twitter. Of course all this isn’t a surprise as Facebook is like being at a party with everyone you’ve ever met through every (often very different) stage and facet of your life. It wasn’t worth it. Life is too short.

I was also doing just fine finding interesting things to read and discuss (thanks to Twitter) and keeping up with the people I cared about most (using Instagram like I used to use Facebook ages ago) that using another product that did those things less well, plus 100 other things that I mostly didn’t need, didn’t make sense anymore.

In January 2015, I decided to deactivate my account for 3 months to see if I’d miss it from my daily life. It was an experiment. The 3 months came and went. Once that unconscious, instinctual habit was broken, there was honestly never a time where I wanted to go back.

While I think Facebook has done some great work over the past few years around the core product (most recently, the addition of reactions beyond Likes was really interesting), the ship has sailed for me when it comes to using Facebook proper. That said, what’s happening with Messenger is fascinating and I’d love to be able to see how it evolves firsthand.

This past week I thought I’d try and log back in to facebook.com and I felt like the kid in Room when he first gets out into the world. So many different things, barely distinct from one another, vying for my attention!

I absolutely believe my brain has subtly re-wired itself during those 15 months away from Facebook and that feels like a really good thing. The apps I use the most now (Instagram, Twitter, Instagram, Foursquare, Day One, Spotify, Instapaper) feel almost serene in comparison. I do also love Slack but I often worry that it’s also trending towards a similar state of information overload. However, between Stewart’s leadership and the fact that they’re pulling together many of the smartest, most thoughtful, product people I know, gives me confidence that they’ll do the right thing(s) for the long run.

So with all that, I’m finally ready to close to book on the first era of Facebook for me and move onto the next one. On Monday, I stepped it up from deactivation to full deletion. Of course the process still takes 14 days but once the deletion is complete, I’m excited to pop on over to Messenger (and sign up with my phone number) and see how that product evolves.

After 9 great months working with many startups, I’m joining one.

Over the past nine months I’ve been working as an independent product consultant, collaborating with companies in a variety of capacities — product design, product & company strategy, process & org design and a little bit of coaching along the way.

Since June I’ve gotten to work closely with 10 companies and I’ve met with over 60. As I suspected, the variety that consulting offers has provided a great, rapid, learning experience and also happens to offer an amazing amount of flexibility and great compensation. It also allows both you and the companies a way to feel out whether a longer term relationship makes sense for both of you, which I honestly can’t recommend enough.

While I was lucky to work with a bunch of great companies, none provided the right fit for me based on the kinds of challenges and product I was looking for. This was totally fine though, as I was really enjoying my setup. When I met Jonathan, the founder of a company called Nucleus, and the rest of the incredibly sharp, capable and thoughtful team he’d built, the urge to focus solely on one thing started to creep in. We decided to work on a small project together and both found the fit to be great, both with the product and the team.

Nucleus is building a smart intercom that will serve as the foundation for people to communicate seamlessly with the ones they care about the most — whether they’re in another room in the same house, in a completely different location (Hi mom!) or on the move on their mobile devices. The quality is great and more importantly, very fast and reliable, thanks to an engineering team made up of some of the WebRTC experts who helped build Google hangouts and stream the Super Bowl online for the first time. With this foundation, and hardware, in place in people’s homes, there are so many interesting opportunities to build additional experiences (think: baby monitor, security, music, photos and more).

As someone who’s keenly aware (and guilty) of letting things like texting and posting to Instagram/Facebook/etc. become a proxy for staying in touch with people, I believe deeply in building something that will help bring people closer together in a more human way — to make it as easy as possible for people to talk face to face, see each other’s expressions, share moments that they previously might have lazily dashed off a text message about.

“If you only do what you can do, you will never be more than you are now.” — Kung Fu Panda 3 with some #realtalk

For me personally this is a great opportunity to do something I love again — build a product, a team and a culture and I have a lot of ideas I’m eager to explore for all three. Even better, while I get to leverage my previous experiences I also get to take on challenges that will be totally new to me.

While people say “hardware is hard” and I have firsthand experience of how true that is, it also presents challenges, for the user and the business, that continue to be very exciting for me. I’m also eager to see the stages of shipping hardware I missed out on my last go around — getting the product in customers’ hands and evolving it with them — as well as be a part of the growing community of great software + hardware companies here in New York City (Electric Objects, Jewelbots, Fifty Three, Little Bits, Canary, Ringly, Sols, Nrml to name a few).

With all that, I’m happy to say today is my first day at Nucleus as VP of Product and I’m overcome with excitement to be back building again. There’s a lot (like a LOT) to do before we ship late Summer and I’m actively building a Product & Design team to help us get there.

If you want to learn more about what we’re building and stay up to date with any developments, check out the site. If you’re interested in any aspect of creating an experience that exists at the core of people’s homes and families (experience with hardware a plus but not necessary), please drop me a note at alex@nucleuslife.com and let’s talk. Onward!

Big ups to Karen Bonna Rainert and Mike Singleton for giving this a looky-loo before posting.

As 2015 came to an end, I realized I’ve been working as a consultant since June and I thought it would be useful for me (and hopefully others) to reflect on how it’s gone, what I’ve learned, what I’ve changed, now that I have a decent amount of time and data to look back on.

Time is money. Plan accordingly.

Time is everyone’s most valuable resource and while most people could benefit greatly from a more rigorous approach to time management, for the independent consultant, this is a very literal thing. You can make good money consulting but any time not spent working on something that you can bill to a client is time not making money. No more getting paid every two weeks no matter what. Feel like shit and don’t want to work? No money. Want to take a week off and go to the beach? No problem. Also, no money. Once you really internalize this, it’s empowering and a really great motivator.

From the beginning I tried to ground my financial targets in reality. I built my financial models around 46 working weeks out of the year and roughly an 85% billability during those weeks.

There are many valid reasons to take a gig. Being mindful about them helps.

Anyone who has ever worked for themselves knows there are many reasons to take on a project — you absolutely love the team/product, you’ll learn something new, it suits your background/area of expertise, the timing lines up perfectly for you, it’s easy/good/great money. Everyone will have some version of this “Spectrum of Nobility” through which they evaluate potential work and I will never besmirch anyone the choices they make here but I’ve found it very useful to try and be mindful of them going into it so you can see how they end up matching your expectations.

Once I decide to work with a client and we’re getting ready to kick off, I’ve found it useful to write out some thoughts about what I think the relationship is going to be like — what will be rewarding, where I think I can add unique value, what will be difficult, what might be frustrating and what I hope to learn. This artifact is useful to reflect on and helps me tune my instinct when deciding which gigs I want to take in the future.

See a lot. Learn a lot.

7 months into it, I can safely say that the most rewarding thing for me is the variety — of people, problems, products, engagement types, company stages. While I know firsthand that the depth of experience you get going all in on one problem for 3–4 years is impossible to match, the speed and breadth of exposure I’ve gotten over the past 7 months has been incredible.

Spending one day working with a scrappy 3 person startup trying to find product/market fit and the next working with a multi-thousand person organization that’s trying to figure out how to evolve a core part of their business is a fascinating experience.

Seeing the inside of companies at drastically different stages helps you bring a valuable perspective to each one who may struggle to see beyond the horizon of their current predicament.

Overcoming my introverted tendencies.

Finally, something I’ve really come to appreciate on a more personal level is that, as a natural introvert, working for myself has been a great way for me to force myself to work out muscles that I may otherwise let atrophy. The act of meeting with potential partners to explore opportunities (according to my Trello board I’ve met with upwards of 50 so far) and working so closely with some of them has had a noticeable impact on how I approach these situations — what in the past may have caused me some anxiety, I now approach with total confidence.

I believe this comes from two main things: the sheer repetition of talking to so many different kinds of people, understanding their problems and conveying whether you feel like you can (or cannot) be helpful to them as well as having a body of work to look back on and feel incredibly proud of the value I’ve been able to bring to these drastically different situations.

Back in May, after a little over a year, the company I’d been working with, Sum, closed its doors.

The vision — to take wearables beyond data for data’s sake and empower people with the insight necessary to make meaningful improvements to their long term health — was a big swing in a space I cared deeply about. The opportunity to approach it as a designer was something I couldn’t pass up.

As with all big swings, I knew there was a high chance of failure but pulling out of a race before you even get to hear the starting gun, was crushing. Prior to joining the team, I’d had an outsider’s sense that hardware is hard and my curiosity about what exactly makes it hard was a big draw to the role. The experience was eye-opening, gives me a newfound respect the teams who pull off well-executed hardware launches, and has helped me develop a new set of product design tools in my arsenal.

While I’m disappointed to not bring our experience out into the world, I’m incredibly proud of the team and product we built. I’m also grateful for what I was able to learn about designing and building a hardware & software product in a space I’m deeply passionate about.

I believe strongly that a version of the product we were building is going to exist and wearables will finally show their long-term value to a wider audience. The question is who’ll bring us there? I don’t have a lot of faith in any of the hardware incumbents being able to pull off truly great software. More than likely, it’ll come from a 3rd party building on top of one of their platforms.

…another one opens.

Quickly going from leading a team to launch to being free as a bird left me at a place where I could entertain a variety of options for what would come next so I spent time really thinking about what I’ve enjoyed most in my professional life.

Since 1998 my career been mostly a mix of consulting and building products/startups. I’ve learned a ton during that time working in a variety of creative environments, building teams and shipping products. I’m also acutely aware of the fact that, despite how much the NYC startup ecosystem has evolved since we built Dodgeball back in 2003, NYC still doesn’t have the network of experienced product people the Valley benefits from.

I’ve long wanted to see if I could unite all these parts of my background and leverage what I’ve learned to help tech companies in New York with all things Product. Practically speaking this involves helping to:

• Drive the entire product life cycle from concept to launch.
• Develop a roadmap that supports the company vision and business goals.
• Build or scale a design-driven and data-informed product org.
• Design a product processes that suit the company.
• Be a coach and operational mentor to team members.
• Ship great products.

The abrupt closure of Sum served as a great forcing function to go after this and since May I’ve been working with 3 different companies, each at very different stages, to do many of the things listed above. Two of them are startups with whom I’m spending a day a week on-site and the third is a 2–3 month project with a company I’ve long admired.

The variety of engagements, teams and problems is energizing. As someone who has enjoyed consulting and building/scaling startups, this is providing a great opportunity to exercise both those muscles and stay close to the kinds of product and team problems that I’m most passionate about solving.

Let’s talk

Things are fairly busy right now but I’m always on the lookout for great potential opportunities to collaborate. I find this setup is best suited to the following kinds of organizations:

• Early to mid stage startups looking to improve their product or build/scale their product teams.
• Venture Capital firms looking to offer a partner for their portfolio companies.
• Larger companies looking to move quickly.
• Creative agencies looking for an outside voice.

If you’d like to talk, shoot me an email at alex@alexrainert.com. Thanks!

I’d started gathering notes on my experience with the Watch on the weekend it was released (a little over a month ago) but quickly realized that the device fit into such a new place in my life that hot takes wouldn’t cut it. Below is the result of me capturing thoughts over the course of about a month and then going back and doing a little revising as some of my hottest takes ended up melting away as I got used to this new device in my life.

I wanted to capture these initial thoughts on the first version so I’d have something to go back to as I think the way in which the Watch as a platform evolves over the next few years will be fascinating. Hopefully they’ll also be helpful to those considering whether now is the time to pick one up.

Have any questions/tips to share, email me at hello@alexrainert.com.

Onboarding & Setup

• The pairing process starts off with the coolest QR code you’ve ever seen and its used to help you pair your watch to your device. Having the first experience you have with your Watch feel decidedly different/special/whimsical is a great way to imprint the user with the sense that this device is going to be something they’ve never seen before.
• I’m not a lefty but my whole life I’ve worn my watch on my right hand. I initially did the same with the Apple Watch as it was the most comfortable way to wear it for a watch but it broke down because active engagement and digital touch demand the dexterity of your dominant hand in a way a normal watch does not.
• Setting everything up on the watch — installing apps, picking glances, organizing app layout, etc. — is a pretty clear, though incredibly laborious process. Feels decidedly un-Apple, unless you’re talking about iOS notification management, in which case this feels right at home. #heyo
• Going through onboarding and seeing my height and weight already on the watch felt magical, then little creepy, but mostly magical again when I realized it was thanks to HealthKit.
• Pro tip: If you’re trying to decide between a few different apps that offer the same service (i.e. weather apps), adding those glances beside each other made it easy to quickly evaluate which I liked the most so then I could get rid of the others.
• App layout and organization is frustrating. While its nice that it’s on the phone and not the watch, it is still challenging to execute the system you might have in your head because the icons don’t always do what you want when you grab them and try and move them to a particular place. Also, if you’re even a little OCD you’re going to have to figure out a way to just deal with yourself. It isn’t going to be perfect.

General

• It’s a completely new interaction model that is near impossible to wrap your head around until you’ve lived with it for a bit, so its no surprise that most of the launch apps stink. Marco Arment does a great job highlighting the kinds of changes he made to his app after getting the Watch in his hands for a bit
• From navigating the honeycomb of apps, to customizing the watch faces, to engaging with the apps and glances, the experience is much more fiddly than anything Apple has ever made.
• It’s only been a month but so far Force Press, not the digital crown, feels like the most significant new interaction element for the Watch. I’ve found that if you find yourself on a screen and you’re not sure what you’re supposed to do, force press is usually a good bet.
• The Watch is slower than you’d want — very clearly relying on a remote brain to display stuff. A bit reminiscent of beach ball/waiting that was part and parcel with early iterations of OSX.
• I only have a few friends with Watches so my sample size is small but the Digital Touch scribbles and heartbeats seem to be a great demo of the platform but not really useful in any practical sense beyond the occasional joke.
• The bands are great and it’s clear they are going to be a huge 3rd party business. Personally, I loved the Space Gray Sport face from the moment I saw it. While the Sport band is really nice, I also wanted something less… sporty. Sadly Apple doesn’t yet offer any of the other bands for that face but luckily I came across Monowear and found a really slick gray nylon band to order.
• That said, the ease of glancing at an incoming phone call, email or text message and deciding whether you really want to interrupt what you’re doing to deal with it is really great. For those you do want to reply to, the canned responses and Siri are fantastic, low friction, ways to reply.
• The relationship between Settings on the watch, the Watch app, the Activity App needs to be much much simpler.
• The Apple Watch app continues to be strange in terms of overall architecture as well as design styling. Is the black and brown supposed to evoke some kind of leathery luxury? I’m not feeling it.
• I’ve had a hard time figuring out how Handoff fits into my Desktop <> Mobile life. I tried Handoff on the Watch with a New York Times story going from Watch <> Phone and was kinda neat but I’m instinctively disappointed when I try and do something on the Watch and it tells me I need my phone to do it. Maybe Handoff is something I’ll get more comfortable with over time but right now I wouldn’t count on it.
• I left my phone on my nightstand and went to another room in the house that may have been the bathroom. I lost my bluetooth connection and with it , a bunch of Watch functionality that could have been useful in the moment. Feels like the watch should be able to do its thing when both devices are on the same Wifi network.
• I’ll often find the Watch has put itself into silent mode on its own. No idea how it happens but it’s really annoying. (My suspicion is that it might happen when I cross my arms and my right arm fully covers the screen, triggering the forced “Do Not Disturb” mode.)
• The native Twitter app is a joke. Engaging with Twitter content in general isn’t really something you’ll want to do on your wrist but if you do, Twitteriffic did a great job featuring the things you’d actually want on a device like that (mentions, likes, etc)
• You get 20 slots for Glances and people with lots of apps will fill that up quickly and frankly, more than 10 is already a challenge to manage efficiently. Also, navigating between all of them is pretty slow. You’ll become best friends with the loading spinner.
• I’ve used Siri more in the past month than I think I had since it launched. It’s better than I expected but using it is still a ways away from feeling normal, especially when anyone else is within earshot.
• I wish both “Activate on Wrist Raise” and the “Hey Siri” trigger were slightly more sensitive. I often find myself having to exaggerate the motion/command a couple times to trigger the desired action. Having to trigger the screen makes it nearly impossible to subtly glance at your watch when you know a meeting is running long without it seeming rude.
• Curious about the future the Today screen in iOS (I don’t get the sense those widgets are wildly popular) will relate to Glances/Apps on the Watch?
• As the Watch is a new device in Apple’s ecosystem, the benefit of using native apps increases as those tend to have the opportunity to be best integrated across those devices (i.e. VIP contacts across services and devices). Unfortunately many of Apple’s native apps still stink (will iOS 9 be the one where we get functional email search?) but some have gotten much better (having access to all my digital photos, thanks to iCloud Photo Library, from every device including the watch, is pretty amazing).

Health & Fitness

• The talk leading up to the launch seemed to vary in terms of how polished the fitness aspects of the Watch would actually be. I think they ended up pretty great with some obvious improvements that could easily be made with software updates.
• I’ve been pleasantly surprised with the simple 3 dial visual system, paired with reminders to track daily Movement, Exercise and Standing and motivate towards your goal for each. For many users I’ve spoken to over the past year, that’s all they really want from their FitBits, Jawbones, etc. In this regard, FitBit trying to get that IPO out the door ASAP makes a whole lot of sense as the basic functionality in the Watch will work well enough for most and now they’ll have to compete with Apple and their fleet of medical specialists on building clinical value on top of that simple mechanic.
• UX nitpick: The dial system well to get you to the daily goal but totally breaks down as a way to quickly understand how much you’ve exceeded your goal as the circles overlap on themselves.
• It is almost impossible to read the screen in the bright sun when you’re running outdoors.
• Swiping between screens while running is easy in the native Activity app but if you want to glance at your live stats in a 3rd party app you need to either 1) raise your wrist to get the watch face and then swipe to the app’s glance which is tedious or 2) turn on the global setting that lets you return to the last used app on on wrist raise which you’ll only want to do while working out. Neither one is something you’ll want 100% of the time. Apple needs to be smarter here.
• The taps you get at every mile during a run is great but I found them to be too soft so I end up missing most of them.
• Feels wrong that I have to start 3 apps when I go for a run (Nike Running, Apple Activity and Spotify). There has to be a better way.
• Multiple times I’ve checked the Activity app (phone) after a workout and it had yet to update. Feels strange to have the Watch “know more” than the phone for too long.
• Having to think about my daily goals in terms of calories is really weird for me. I never think “I want to run 800 calories this afternoon!” There is no frame of reference (a la 10K steps a day) to serve as an obvious goal. Pro tip: After giving it a few days and seeing what I burned on workout and non-workout days I was able to back into a calorie goal that was tough to reach without some explicit activity (currently set at 1000 cals/day).
• In the Activity app, I struggle with the difference between Move and Exercise time as they end up looking much more similar than I’d expect. Related: the bar for something to count as “exercise” seems way too low which makes me lose a bit of trust in the whole system. Also, a few times I got an alert that I hit my activity goal while I was driving which seems very… fishy.
• I’ve appreciated the Stand alerts most of the time but there are going to be inevitable edge cases that bug you. For example, this weekend while my son was napping, I thought I’d grab a rare quick nap for myself and drifted off into a snooze only to be woken by my Stand alert. Frankly, there’s not much you can do about that and if you’re someone who’s going to actively toggle a switch that says “Remind me to stand every hour” you can’t really complain about this.
• While not directly Watch-related, I’ve been incredibly frustrated with the Apple Health app and how it handles some of the data generated by the Watch. For Heart Rate and Steps, if I try and “show all data” I get a neverending spinner. For a service that the company touts as customer-first, privacy, “your data”, etc. this is a huge fail which reinforces my doubt that Apple can execute data-heavy services at scale.
• With all the talk about poor battery life, I wore the watch for 24 hours straight (including a 4 mile run in the morning) and woke up the next day with 25% battery left. Not bad at all and I imagine that’ll only get better. Also, only Apple can mindfreak people into feeling like the product exceeded expectations with a battery life of a day and change.
• On that note, I expect (and am excited that) we’ll see sleep tracking apps in the not too distant future and for the folks out there building them, please figure out how to disable the wrist raise action at night as it currently results in somewhat of a lighthouse effect in the middle of the night that is sure to annoy anyone you’re sleeping with.
• All in all, as someone who’s worked in health and fitness for the past year, I’m incredibly impressed with what Apple has put out in a v. 1 product. While it may be playing a bit role to start, you can clearly see the groundwork they’re laying for health to be a major part of what Apple does for a long time to come.

Summary

It is a completely different type of device that will play a variety of new of roles in your daily life, many of which we have yet to discover. That said, the main role is that of a watch, albeit one with special powers, not “an iPhone for your wrist” the way the iPad was clearly a “big iPhone.”

The interface is fantastic for a small set of interactions and content types, average for some and really bad for most. It’s most definitely not meant to be a lean-in experience. Smart, easily consumable content, pushed to you at relevant times and places is where it really shines.

Unfortunately, because its the “hot new platform”, we’ll inevitably see companies make apps for the Watch that have no business being there. I’m looking at you, #Brands.

The device really shines once you’ve put in the work to figure out what kind of stuff you want pushed to your wrist and more importantly, what you want to just leave on your phone. The biggest problem is managing notifications is a lot of work. Notifications Settings in iOS was one of the first indications of the death of iOS’s simplicity and they seem to have brought the same kitchen sink UX style to Watch notification management. Now that Apple has added the watch to the ecosystem, notifications should be treated as a system-wide element managed in one place, and smartly sent to different devices. Let’s hope there’s some major streamlining of Notifications at an ecosystem-level coming in ios9.

Conclusion

Would I unequivocally recommend the Watch to everyone? No. Due to the fact that the Watch needs an iPhone to function, literally no one needs this watch. You can certainly wait until the next version and Lauren Goode does a great job summarizing why.

However, if you like wearing a watch, are bought into the iOS ecosystem and are intrigued by what kind of special powers it will be granted over time, I’d definitely go for it. It makes a lot of little things easier and for many, those collective benefits will add up to a significant enough value to justify the purchase. Between that and being personally and professionally curious about where this new era of personal computing and health tracking is going, it was a no brainer for me.

This is a really solid v.1 product that is unlike anything Apple has made before. The hardware is beautiful and I suspect many of the gripes I mention above can and will be fixed with software. During that time, developers will continue to build more thoughtful apps and, as the hardware, platform and ecosystem mature, I’m confident it will become an integral part of how we interact with the rest of our devices and the world around us.

With any luck, some of that strategy and possibility should become a bit clearer this Monday at WWDC.

Favorite apps: Nike Running (though I want Heart Rate!), Activity, Uber, Foursquare, Fresh Air, Citymapper, Dark Sky, Coach.me, Twitteriffic, Omnifocus, Sky Guide.

Most disappointing apps: Twitter, ESPN, Instagram.

App wishlist: Some kind of Sonos controller.

This past weekend I ran my best half marathon ever by ~3 minutes and I owe most of it to the Garmin running watch above that I borrowed from my wife.

Over the years, I’ve been a heavy user of the Nike Running and Runkeeper apps and while the audio updates they provide on pace and distance are certainly better than nothing, they’re too infrequent to really have a material impact on my runs. I’m also not someone who’s interested in pulling out my phone every few minutes to check on my numbers so I’ve been limited to what I can get through my earbuds (and to be honest, having more audio updates would start to really disrupt my music/podcast game).

Like many of the health and fitness products to date, Nike and Runkeeper have gotten much better at generating and collecting data for me (which I love) but they stop short of giving me a real window in the why behind my runs to help me understand, in real-time and over time, what’s working and not working for me.

During the race this past Sunday, being able to glance at my wrist for Current Pace/Average Pace/Distance whenever I wanted was fantastic (Note: I’ve found both the Garmin and the apps to have varying degrees of accuracy for distance covered). Seeing my live Heart Rate and Heart Rate Zones (coming via chest strap) also helped me know how hard I was exerting myself and when there might be a little more for me to give, even if I felt totally gassed. Finally, the fast & slow pace alerts were a total gamechanger as they provided actionable, contextual information in real-time, allowing me to make adjustments that saved seconds in the moment and crucial minutes over the course of the race.

“Personalized, contextual information in real-time.”

This weekend’s great race experience got me really excited about a clear use case and benefit of the upcoming Apple Watch — something that many have astutely pointed outaren’t totally obvious. While its a big drag that you’ll still need to bring your phone on runs with the Apple Watch (which you don’t for the Garmin), if developers can mimic this glanceable information and personalized alerts, runners will love it.

The biggest question that still strangely remains open even after two launch events are the details around what kind of control developers will have over leveraging Taptic feedback and Heart Rate data. The latter was strangely limited to a passing screenshot at the last keynote, the latter not even getting a mention during the Christy Turlington Burns training montage.

Based on what we know it seems like itshouldbe possible for, say, a Nike or Runkeeper to offer a quickly glanceable view of the pace and distance numbers that are already available in their apps. Providing an option to then set slow/fast pace thresholds to get buzzed for seems obvious.

During the second keynote we got a whole video about alumi-n-i-um, but not a word about what all the engineering and design that went into the sexy back of these devices will enable for user (or developers, for that matter). With all the work that went into crafting the back of the watches, presumably you can see *some* kind of Heart Rate + HR Zones info, even if it’s only at certain intervals. However, how coarse these intervals are will directly impact how genuinely useful they are, though, and we know how much of a hot topic battery life is for the watch…

While Heath & Fitness is repeatedly touted as one of the three pillars of the Apple Watch, there’s a lot we still don’t know about what’s going to be possible to serve that vertical outside of the core Apple apps. As someone who’s already excited about the Apple Watch for a few reasons, my recent experience with the Garmin watch has gotten me even more excited about the running-specific use case, assuming the above is possible. If that doesn’t come to pass, I know which watch I’ll be leaving at home when I run my next half in Brooklyn this May.

My overwhelming use case (>80 %) for Pinterest is to save something, usually an image/screenshot from my desktop or camera roll or via an extension (both iOS and Chrome). The other 20% is to find something I know I’ve previously saved to one of my boards.

Every time I open the Pinterest app, I’m reminded of how small a segment of the Pinterest audience my behavior must represent because I’m surprised at how many steps it is to do either — this is particularly true for the former. As a user, I’m frustrated but as a designer, I’m impressed.

The Pinterest app didn’t start out this way though — the Add Pin action was demoted to the Profile screen with the launch of Pinterest 4.0 (Nov. 2014). That means the Product teams at Pinterest clearly saw things in the data to support what I imagine were controversial decisions for them. They clearly chose to really optimize the mobile apps for on-the-go behaviors (never a bad idea) —browsing, searching and potentially re-pinning — at the expense of adding new pins, which I suspect happens predominantly from a computer/web browser.

All Product people like to tout the importance of focus but few can actually be decisive when it comes time to edit, especially when it stings. I applaud them for doing something that many Product teams struggle to do — genuinely optimize for *one* core use case (in this case, discovery) and avoid the temptation to serve multiple masters (“…but some users really like feature so what’s the harm of add a little link to it here?”)

Deep down designers know what changes they’d make and what features they’d cut from their product if they were going to make the best experience for their primary use case. The biggest challenge is often just having the confidence to speak up and make what will often initially be an unpopular case. It’s not easy to challenge conventional wisdom (“Pinterest only works if people pin stuff! How can you not support that action at the top level!”) but trust that once you speak up and make that case, the team will respect it and the product will end up in a better place.

I’ve been longing for something “between Twitter and Medium” and in some respects today’s Medium changes look to be just that. That said, I’m honestly still a little mindfreaked by them and am struggling to get my thoughts in order. Here’s a quick stab:

• A few months ago I switched my Twitter bio url to my Medium posts in the hopes that, over time, the product would evolve to replace the blogs many of us used to call home in the late 90s- 2000s. Today’s changes make me happy I made that bet.
• At least for me, Medium used to be a place that I ended up after seeing a link shared to Twitter or from an email. The new homepage suggests it should be a place where I start, like Twitter. Feels like a personalized magazine that I consume and contribute to in the same place. Neat.
• If the above is true, it makes me immediately more conscious of who I’m following — something I realized I’d never before considered on Medium beyond following new authors of pieces I’d stumble upon. I was surprised to see my Following count be 600+ but I guess they just grabbed most of those from Twitter? I now want to curate that list much more actively.
• Also, if it is a place to start, where will it fit into a media diet I already feel is forcing me to add a notch to my belt.
• The fact that the team at Medium executed a design that made all content feel premium was quite a feat. I wonder if there’s going to be some cognitive dissonance as a result of seeing more lower quality content in that same premium-feeling interface.
• It’s only been one afternoon but I love the input box at the top of the Home screen. In fact, this post happened as a result of “just starting to type…” so bravo. What is not clear to me is what the actions are on one of those posts — I don’t see the Share to Twitter, etc. buttons. (ps: gonna let this post fly and see if they show up after hitting Publish)
• I’ve always wondered what the future holds for Twitter, Medium and the relationship between them. It feels like Twitter wants to be more Medium-y and Medium wants to be more Twitter-y. Today’s moves somehow makes that future clearer and more murky at the same time.

Anyway, there’s clearly still a lot left to process with these changes but as a light user now, I suspect they might lead to heavier usage both on the consumption and creation side, which is exciting.

Finally, kudos to the team at Medium for making really big change in the service of what seems like a strong vision. I’m excited to see what else they’ve got cooking (especially native iOS publishing tools).

A look back at 2014 and forward to 2015

Most years as December winds down, I resolve to change 5–10 things that fall roughly into the categories you’d expect: lose some weight, be more active, sleep better, read more, etc.

Before articulating what I’m planning to work on this year, I wanted to look back at what I set out to do last year and see how I fared. I threw down some quick grades on the goals I’d laid out, OKR-style:

• Sleep better (0.8) — Gone are the days of regularly going to bed after midnight. While I’m not perfect about it, I’ve gotten much better about getting into bed around 10, reading for a bit, and then getting to sleep. This has mostly come at the expense of watching shitty TV or just reading minutiae on the Internet so no big loss. As I suspected, this was somewhat of a keystone habit for me that facilitated other habits — more well rested/alert, more energy to work out early, more reading time, etc.
• Be in better shape (0.7) — The first half of the year involved a couple of experiments — 3 months of primarily rowing followed by 3 months of primarily working with a personal trainer. I eventually settled into a consistent running habit in June/July that carried through the end of the year (September + December were highs with 70+ miles run). In order to maintain the focus, I sign up for a race every few months to ensure I have a goal (next up: NYC Half in March) so I expect this pace to continue.
• Lose Weight (0.4) — I was at 230lbs in January and I’ve gotten down to 223lbs (not great) without much focus on my diet at all. I’ve still got a ways to go (want to get below 210) and will focus more directly on diet this year starting with The Whole Life Challenge on January 13th (wanna do it too? let me know!).
• Read more books (0.5) — The good news is I was able to establish a consistent book reading habit that didn’t exist before 2014. I was also successful at broadening the kinds of books I read, including reading fiction for the first time in 15+ years. The bad news is that I only got halfway to my goal of 20 books. Favorite fiction: The Martian (Runner up: Gone Girl). Favorite non-fiction: Creativity Inc. (Runner-up: All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenting)
• Go deep in a couple of new areas of interest (0.9) After having spent 7 of the last 10 years deep in mobile, local and social, I wanted to really immerse myself in a new space space and a new set of design challenges. In February I joined Project Florida as Head of Design and have been working hard to build a team and a product in a space — health/fitness/data — I previously only knew from the outside as a consumer. Now that I’m almost a year in, I’m blown away by how much progress we’ve made and how much I’ve learned. I love our team and am so excited about what we’re building. (ps: if you’re a Product Designer looking for something new and share our passion for improving health and empowering behavior change, drop me a note)
• Write more regularly (0.1) — I barely wrote at all this year so this one was a total fail.
• Be more ruthless about how I spend my time (0.7) — I got better at saying “no” so my calendar got closer to actually reflecting my priorities. I cut all of the social media distractions from my life by closing all but the handful of accounts I get genuine value from. The one exception is that I still have my Facebook account but that’s close to getting the axe too as Instagram has become a much better version of what Facebook used to be as well as the most accurate representation of my social graph (well played, Zuck). All this helped to generally be more present in whatever I was doing but there’s always room to improve.

Overall, last year was one of the healthiest I’d had in some time. I’m happy with the changes I was able to make and feel like I ended the year with some good momentum in many of the areas I was looking to improve.

As I look forward to 2015, I want to continue to build on those changes. In addition, I’m going to focus on making one change that should serve as another keystone habit: Get up an hour earlier (6am) every day of the week.

This past year I’d get up at 6 the days I’d go running, sleep in until 7 the days my wife would go running and sleep until the kids got up on the weekends. My plan is to set my alarm (Jawbone quiet alarm, which I’ve grown to love) for 6am every day as an experiment. My hypothesis is that it will allow me to:

• Have some personal time to focus — some days it’ll be going for a run, other days it’ll be reading, and hopefully some days (like today) it’ll be writing again. I’d also like to give meditation a go.
• Set a calmer tone for the day—as anyone with kids will tell you, getting everyone (including yourself) ready for the day and out of the house on time is a chaotic daily ballet that can’t be a healthy way to start the day. Giving myself a little more time in the morning will not only make that process more pleasant but will also hopefully set the stage for a calmer entry to the work day and the challenges it brings.
• Benefit from a more consistent body clock — I’ve never had trouble falling asleep but I often struggle with falling back to sleep when I wake up in the middle on the night. My hope is that establishing a more consistent sleep and wake schedule can only help my internal clock (science).

Obviously this will occasionally get undermined by life — late night working, party time, sick kids, etc. — but I’m excited about the potential benefits of this extra time to reflect or create as well as some consistency to my schedule.

Lots to look forward to this year. Giddy up!

Over the past year, I’ve found myself discovering more and more new, great music thanks to The Hype Machine. You can do a whole lot more on the service but I tend to stick to a pretty simple workflow that yields a lot of value with minimal effort (always a big product win) that hopefully others can benefit from.

That workflow is as follows:

1. I go to the Popular tab, hit Play

2. When I hear something I like, I give it a heart/fave

3. Over time, my Favorites list becomes a great playlist of music I often can’t find anywhere else

Extra Credit: the Hype Machine iOS app (iTunes link) is nicely designed and really smart about syncing the favorites you listen to the most. One day I opened up my app on the subway and noticed that while the rest of the app wouldn’t work without a connection, I was still able to play my Favorites, even though I’d never actively synced them. I don’t know the details of the witchcraft they use to choose which tracks to sync and then sync them in the background but it felt a little magical to have my music with me without having to go through some heavy handed syncing process. An example of something truly “just working” the way you’d want it to.

Two minor nitpicks:

1. I wish they made My Favorites a top level nav item rather than nested in the Profile menu where people might never find it.

2. I would love more clarity on how I can influence the music I see. They recently added a callout for a Blog Recommender based on the music you favorite but it didn’t seem to work for me right now.

I recommend you head over the site and give it a go. If you fancy yourself more of a desktop app kind of person, I recently discovered a simple + elegant Hype Machine client called Plug, that you can get at http://www.plugformac.com/. Enjoy!

Note: This post originally aired in February 2014 on Tumblr but was moved to Medium in October 2014.

Over the past few months I’ve gotten to slow down a bit, spend some more time with my kids and enjoy a lot of coffees with a wide variety of people here in the city. The range of interesting new people I got to meet and projects I got to learn about was inspiring, particularly as lifelong New Yorker who cares deeply about continuing to grow the consumer product presence and community here in New York City.

While I really enjoyed taking a bit of a break, I knew that soon enough I’d find something that got me super excited and I’d be itching to dive back into making things and building a team again.

About 2 months ago, I was lucky enough to be introduced to an incredibly talented, experienced, team working on solving big problems that sit at the nexus of a few of my personal passions — mobile technology, health and the power of insights derived from data.

Over the years, the product work I’ve done has always mirrored needs that I’ve personally had. In 2002, I was 26 and spent a lot of time going out so building software that helped me know where my friends were hanging out made sense — hence, dodgeball. In 2009, I was 33 and about to have my first child. I was no longer going out 5 nights a week but I had started to care more about the quality of experiences I had when I did go out for a meal or a drink — hence, foursquare. Today, I’m 37 with a 4 year old and an 8 month old and something I carry with me every single day is: how can I be around and healthy as long as possible to see as much as possible of the lives my children create for themselves — hence, Project Florida.

Over the past 5 years, I’ve owned every major wearable on the market, through multiple generations for each. I’ve used smart scales and smart apps. I’m intimately familiar with where all of these succeed and where they fall short. Before we had wearables to record our actions, I built an Excel doc to help me manually track my weight, diet and fitness. That document helped me understand what my habits were and how different variations produced different results over time. It also helped me go from 252lbs down to 209lbs before my wedding (details here). That understanding and change in my core habits also had a material impact on the critical numbers reflected in my blood work (quantitative results here).

I believe deeply in the power of really understanding your health, developing and reinforcing habits that help you become the better version of yourself. The combination of the technology many of us are lucky enough to carry around with us and our ability to turn heaps of data into accessible, personalized, and empowering insights is finally at a place where we can push the space forward past data for data’s sake to a place of profound impact and I’m really excited to get to work with this team to make that happen.

As of 3 weeks ago, I joined the Project Florida team as Head of Design. We’re a small team with a big mission to help people better understand their habits and live healthier lives. In order to tackle our mission, we’ve built an incredible team and are actively growing it (Hello Drew Conway!)

I’m personally looking to meet Senior Product Designers who share our passion and want to build something great here in NYC. If you’re interested in joining our Design team, drop me an email at alex@projectfla.com or if you want to learn more about all of the roles we’re hiring for, email weare@projectfla.com.

Giddy up!

Good post outlining some of the hurdles Twitter faces and touches on something I’ve felt for a long time. While there are certainly services that benefit from pure network effects (where more connections directly translate to a better experience), I’d argue that many of the most popular feed-based products (i.e. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram) walk a thin line between “enough varied content to be interesting and something you want to check regularly” and “so much content that you have a difficult time extracting the signal from the noise. ” The stream is a consumption vessel with clear limitations and I worry that Twitter’s approach is encouraging pure volume over better signal, especially for lightweight users who they need to stick around.

I know it’s a personal thing but I don’t understand how people follow thousands (I’m genuinely fascinated by it and would love to read any blogposts people have of their consumption workflow with 1000–2000 followees). I know I’m always on the hunt to prune my feeds across services in an effort to keep it to content I care about (and can reasonably keep up with) and people I engage with. Attention is time and time is a finite resource so there’s no time for hurt feelings if people get unfollowed. If I unfollow you it’s because the content you’re sharing isn’t for me, it isn’t because I think you’re a shitty person.

Pro tip alert! I visit a site called Manage Flitter every month or so to help me keep the people I follow to what I’ve learned is a manageable number for me which is ~450 (YMMV). The free version of Manage Flitter gives you tools to help you slice and dice the people you follow by different criteria (Not Following Back, Inactive, Talkative/Quiet, etc.) and then easily unfollow folks right from their site. I suggest everyone give it a try at least once and see what you learn about the people you follow. It’s fantastic.

While a service like Manage Flitter can give you coarse ways to manage the people you follow based on aggregate data, I’d love to see Twitter (and other services in a similar predicament) leverage what they know about me to help me follow the people that will give me the best/most informative/most engaging Twitter experience. If Twitter made sure I was following the right people (and unfollowing the ones that were just generating noise in my feed), I suspect it would become an overall stickier experience for everyone, even if it meant following fewer people.

People who are negative tend to want to demean people’s ideas. They say what they don’t like, but they don’t really say what they want to do. And it’s very hard to have ideas. It’s very hard to put yourself out there. It’s very hard to be vulnerable. But those people are the dreamers and the thinkers and the creators. They’re the magic people of the world. So strive to be one of those.

Today I learned that Amy Poehler has a YouTube series called Smart Girls(described as ”a place for funny, thoughtful and deceivingly educational programming.”) Who knew?

In this segment on Negativity (where the quote above is from), she eloquently sums up something I’ve long found to be incredibly frustrating — people who are quick to criticize someone else’s ideas but offer nothing in the form of alternative solution.

It sounds obvious but sadly this is a quality that is very much not limited to teenagers. When debating ideas, make the extra effort to try and push those ideas to a better place instead of just trying to cut them down.

The importance of defining your company’s values early on

“If there’s one piece of advice I can give early stage founders, it is to take the time to write down who you are, and who you want to be.”

This quote is from a good post from Reece Pacheco (Shelby.tv) on “Surviving the [startup] climb.” One part that resonated with me is the importance of defining your company’s culture and values early on. Shelby’s can be found here. Some good examples from some other companies here: Amazon, Google, Whole Foods, and most famously, Zappos.

Going through a process like this can feel frivolous and counterintuitive to many young companies as you can count on everyone who’s there early to just get It (and early on, they will, which is why they’re the best equipped to help you codify what It is for your company). No one is saying you should shut everything down for weeks but taking some focused time to uncover and articulate what you all feel is most important will pay back tenfold down the road.

While any time not spent building the product might feel wrong at that stage, exercises like this are not about what they give you now but about building a strong foundation for your company to be successful as it grows, evolves and inevitably goes through both good and bad times. Most of the time you’ll find that your culture just is but the times you’ll find yourself most aware of it will be when times are either really great or really bad.

If there’s a company-wide shared understanding of the things that are most important, you create an environment where the team is better equipped to just know what the right call is in a given situation — whether that’s a strategic/product/design decision or determining whether an employee’s behavior is what you want as part of your team — both are things you’ll absolutely benefit from as your organization scales.

FWIW, this process is exactly what parents go through when raising children (the parallels between raising kids and building companies could fill a book, btw). They’re going to have to thrive on their own and you can’t predict the situations they’ll be faced with, nor can you always be there yourself, so you try to best equip them with the values and tools to do the right thing in any situation. You can tell the parents who feel completely confident in the values they’ve instilled in their children and I’ve seen that same confidence in CEOs with regards to their companies.

Articulating one’s values is only one part of what goes into shaping a company’s culture but it’s a big one. Even though it might not feel like you need to articulate them right now, trust that you don’t want to wait until you wish that you had back then. Once you hire your first employees you are officially building a company, not just a product, and you should plan accordingly.

Finally, thinking about all this stuff reminded me of a great old post from Ted Rheingold on the role a strong culture played for him and his team at Dogster when they went through tough times.

How I’ve learned to rely on (and love) Waze

During the month of December my wife and I made our regular trips to and from family members’ houses to celebrate the various holidays. Over the past year (especially since we moved outside of the city) Waze has become a part of all our trips, even when we know exactly where we’re going because you never know when there might be an even better way to get there, but Waze does.

Thanks to all the Waze users out there, Waze (now Google) operates from this panopticon-like vantage point, knowing where all the cars are and how fast they’re moving (sidebar: in my more cynical moments, I’ve imagined how they can use this information to control the traffic, and not just respond to it but I digress…). This means that it has the information to help you get from point A to point B in the most efficient way possible based on the unpredictable real time conditions on the road, making a standard GPS (that felt pretty special only a few years ago), feel dumb.

In fact, Waze solves that core problem so well that it didn’t matter that the design has long been a hot mess of chunky lines, more buttons than you know what to do with and costumed, fleshy pink dumplings. To be fair the redesign this Fall offered some nice refinements. All that aside, the reason people love using the product (and as a result, Google loved buying the product) is because it takes a bunch of genuine pain points that everyone who’s driven a car (giant addressable audience) has experienced and makes them go away.

I’d like to call out examples of my two personal favorite features: avoiding traffic (obvs!) and sharing your trip:

Back to our travel adventures… Last month we were headed to the in-laws for Christmas, we hit bumper to bumper traffic before the Throgs Neck Bridge and Waze suggested a crazy, borderline non-sensical, looking maneuver .

Since the product has earned my trust I just went with it and found that the unorthodox move — pulling off the highway and getting right back onbefore the bridge — helped us avoid a huge chunk of stagnant traffic. We had two similar experiences that same week. Not only does the product help you get to where you’re going faster but it makes you feel like you’rein the knowalong the way — using Waze can feel nothing short of magical, almost like you’re cheating the system. That emotion is a powerful one and over time builds a really strong bond with the product. We’ve always felt that Foursquare Tips (especiallynow that you get them serendipitously) often offer that same kind of unexpected magic that makes users feel like they’re getting more out of the world around them thanks to the product.

My second most-used feature is sharing my drive. It’s a dead-simple way to, once you’ve set off on a trip, share that trip with someone else. The best part is that when they click on the link, they’ll get a map in a mobile web view with 1) a little dumpling moving its way across the map and 2) an accurate estimated ETA based on how far away they are and the traffic between them and their destination. All of this replaces the age old “What’s your ETA?” use case for all parties involved and you’ll be surprised at how nice it is to know exactly where a loved one is on a long trip to/from you as you see that plump little dumpling inch its way across the screen.

There are a bunch of other things Waze does a good job of (and many that feel superfluous ) but they’ve done an amazing job in ensuring that their core features solve real problems and in the process make their users feel more powerful — that is ultimately what building a great product is all about.

How is your product helping your users become a better version of themselves?

If you’re someone who drives, I highly recommend you give it a shot.

2013 was as eventful a year as I can remember. We sold our apartment in Brooklyn and bought a house in Westchester. We added a new member to our family, Oliver, in June and moved the whole family up north 3 weeks later to the first house I’ve ever lived in. In November, I left Foursquare after 4 years and spent the last month and a half of the year hanging with the kids and having a wide variety of conversations with people exploring different possibilities for what may lie ahead.

Reviewing 2013's goals.

Last year I wrote out my goals and they broadly fell under the umbrella of Living Better — physically, intellectually, creatively and emotionally. Overall I did just ok (ps: scores below map to Google’s OKR — Objectives and Key Results — grading process which you can, and should, learn more about here.
- Physically (0.1) Unfortunately this was the one I was least successful at and it’s absolutely the most important one. It was an incredibly hectic year and while I successfully curbed my alcohol consumption, I slipped into lazy habits when it came to eating and exercising and my weight and overall fitness (both physical and mental) reflect that. For myself and my family this is my #1 priority heading into 2014.
- Intellectually (0.6) My broad goal was to cut down on my time spent consuming negligibly valuable information via the multitude of never-ending streams out there with the hope that it would clear the way for a different kind of “slow” consumption. Frank Bruni does a good job of articulating why I value wanting to make this tradeoff. I feel pretty good about where I ended up.
- Creatively (0.5) I wanted to start writing more and taking more photos with my “real” camera. Writing was just something that I seldom felt like I had the mental space for after everything else so I fell way short here. Taking photos with my camera, on the other hand, became a regular activity for me and I expect that to only get stronger this coming year as I’m starting to find my groove with the new Fuji X100S I picked up this Fall. Giddy-up!
- Emotionally (0.6) This one was just about being present and more deliberate about how I spend my time. I definitely made some improvements here over the course of the past year and I plan on taking the little break I’ve got now as an opportunity to reset and establish new habits across the board, with focus and presence being a big part of them.

Setting some goals for 2014

Overall, I only feel like I did OK on the goals I laid out for myself in 2013 but do feel like I was able to establish some new micro habits that I plan to build on going forward.

As I look to 2014, the things I want to do to live the way that will make me happy haven’t changed a ton. I’ll just be in a better position to execute on them:

- Sleep better. It’s never going to be easy with 2 kids but I can do much better here and I firmly believe that getting adequate sleep is the lynchpin to making a dent in *all my goals* (Goal: get in bed at 10:30 5 nights a week)
- Be in better shape. Work out at least 4 days a week — run, row, lift weights, whatever. (Goal: 200 workouts)
- Lose Weight. Currently 230lbs (blergh). Get under 210lbs (and stay there). This will obviously be a combination of diet and exercise. (Goal: lose 20 lbs)
- Read more books. Continue to refine the amount of people I follow and content I consume online and chip away at that long list of books I want to read. (Goal: 20 books)
- Go deep in a couple of new areas of interest. After spending 7 of the last 10 years deep in mobile, local and social, I’d like to get intimate with a few new areas/spaces. Right now BluetoothLE/iBeacon, the next generation of health + fitness tech, apps for kids are the leading contenders for me.
- Write more regularly. Write at least 1 blog post a week. (Goal: 60 posts)
- Be more ruthless about how I spend my time. As the only truly limited resource I have, I plan on being much more selective about how I spend my time, which will mean saying no a lot more and not feeling bad about it.

I plan on tracking all these using a combination of the following: Day One, RunKeeper, Lift, Tumblr, and my trusty WiThings Scale.

Having the first break in my life in as long as I can remember, I don’t have a clear picture of what the year ahead will hold and that’s what makes it so exciting. Let’s go!