Realizing how incredibly autistic our early board meetings were for Spellbook: 1. I declared the meeting a “story free zone” because I was worried that stories were too psychologically persuasive, and that they would pull us away from hard data-driven reality 2. Meetings would largely consist of scrolling through like 40 slides of charts sifting for signal. I called this “soaking in the data” 3. In the search for PMF I wanted us to think like a hedge fund making many bets. While we knew the problem we were solving I didn’t want our team to get too tied to any single narrative because I thought it would reduce agility. 4. I never allowed us to think about us as “a company”, but instead as a SWAT team searching for a company to build 5. This approach enabled us to launch over 100 different landing pages with different angles on the way to PMF Honestly, I think it’s a really good approach pre-PMF. Too many companies get attached to a singular story too early and quit when it doesn’t work out. Startups are 3D chess. There is always a move. Slack was a game company. However, at Series B/Series C scale you really need stories to align both your team and customers, and you can think much more longterm after PMF. But I still believe stories are a dangerous dark magic. You can craft an incredibly persuasive story for almost any position. They’re more of a marketing/comms tool than a reasoning/understanding reality tool.

An old women’s dog rushed at my daughter who I was pushing in a pink plastic car stroller. She tried yelling at me. She was not prepared. Do not let these dog owners act this way. Film them and yell at them so they can’t make something up.

There is a queue at six in the morning outside a barbecue restaurant in Austin, Texas, that runs for five hours, and the people in it are waiting for a brisket with the fat left on, cooked for eighteen hours over oak by a man who has said the fat is the whole point. Aaron Franklin opened in a trailer in 2009 and has been named the best barbecue in America by everyone who hands out that title. The food is Texas, which means beef, and the beef is the brisket: the whole chest muscle of a steer, twelve to fifteen pounds, with a cap of white fat an inch thick across the top, which most of the country would trim off and throw away. Franklin trims it to a quarter inch and leaves it, and as the brisket sits in the smoke the fat renders down through the meat for most of a day, until the lean is soaked and the cap is a soft dark bark. He has written that the fat is what carries the smoke and the salt, and that a lean brisket is a waste of a cow. He went on television in a cap and a T-shirt and taught the technique to a nation that had been told for forty years to buy the lean cut, and the nation drove to Austin. People fly in. They bring chairs. They sell out by one in the afternoon, every day, and he has never once sold a turkey breast as a substitute. The thing on the chopping block, sliced thick, glistening, with the fat the colour of amber and the crust black, is the oldest food in Texas: a cheap tough cut of the animal, made glorious by heat and time and nothing else. There is white bread on the side and a pickle, and that is the meal. The leaflet says to trim the visible fat. Five hundred people a day stand in the Texas sun for the man who ignores it.

Besides THE WIRE, THE SOPRANOS and GAME OF THRONES, what’s one HBO series everyone needs to watch at least once? Looking for those underrated gems and all-time greats that deserve to be in the conversation.

I visited Wurster Hall at UC Berkeley today. It was designed by, and currently houses, the architecture faculty. The UC Berkeley website notes that "Wurster is often voted Berkeley's ugliest building." I visited because I was curious about whether it would in person seem as unattractive as it does in photos. And, in short: it does. It's gaunt, austere, and filmed in grime. On an elysian campus, it stands out for its bleak hostility. It reminds me of the German submarine base in Bordeaux. The UC Berkeley page agrees that it was never designed to be attractive, quoting the curator of their design archives: “Wurster and his handpicked architects didn’t want anything romantic, or sentimental — they hated the idea of ‘making pretty buildings. They wanted a serious building.” I guess we have to concede success relative to their stated goals, but it does make one wonder what it all says about architecture as a discipline.

The longer you build companies, the easier it gets to explain why an idea won’t work. Makes you wonder how many good ideas you’ve talked yourself out of along the way.

The Most Beautiful Words in Classic Literature

A map of which country’s weather is most similar to where you live in America.