Now
This is a now page. If you have your own site, you should make one too.
Advising founders
I’ve been helping founders through hard calls since my early days at Uber, and I still love it. Before the internet, you had a guy for your health, your money, your travel. Most of us don’t anymore, and founders might have it hardest: they’re surrounded by smart people, but almost everyone around them has a role to play and an outcome they want.
Right now I get to be that guy for a handful of founders, on the stuff that’s hard to take to a team or a board: exec hires, tough board conversations, reorgs, big pivots. I have room for a few more—if that’s you or someone you know, here’s how I work.
Building Bartleby
Bartleby is a keyboard-first iMessage inbox for the Mac. It treats your messages the way a good email client treats mail: decide, respond, clear it, move on. I built it because iMessage is where most of my actual life happens, and it’s also where things go and often get forgotten. It’s already become a tool I use every day and I’m really excited to share it with the world soon. You can join the waitlist, but if you don’t mind testing a very rough alpha product, email me and I’ll get you set up now.
Making vermouth
Still at it. Blending, tasting, measuring, re-blending, and slowly learning just how much I don’t know about botanicals (and alcohol regulations…). It’s a long project and I’m enjoying the pace. If you know anything about the beverage business (distribution, TTB, contract production, or just drinking a lot of vermouth), I’d love to talk.
A bunch of other ideas
I’ve never been good at doing one thing. A few I’m poking at right now, all early and all open to input:
- Salt drops. A salt lozenge for endurance athletes (and maybe when you’re sick?).
- Buy this room. Designing my office turned into a ~6-month-long crash course, and I keep wondering if you could photograph a finished room and sell it as a kit: the design, the materials list, trade pricing, the contractors you’ll need, and a few hours with a real designer when you get stuck. Call it AI as your general contractor.
- Vintage cycling jerseys. As far as we can tell, nobody is really curating vintage cycling apparel, even though vintage jerseys are having a moment. A couple buddies and I are exploring whether we can find enough great ones to make it a thing.
- Curation platforms. Tools for people with taste to share what they love (and maybe get paid for it?). This exists but not in a way that I enjoy… I think I could build something better.
- Stoop Town. Selling your stuff in a way that’s more fun than Facebook Marketplace or Craigslist, by finding it a good home in your own community. A friend’s idea that I’ve kind of run with, still kind of hacked together.
- A quieter baby monitor. A beautiful, privacy-first, audio-only monitor for little kiddos, in a category that’s racing toward cameras, sensors, and AI sleep scores. I really want this to exist.
- Window. A fasting tracker for iPhone: one button, one timer, and a log.
- Songshelf. An iOS app that turns the sheet-music books I own into a searchable shelf, so I can find the piece I want without flipping through a dozen books.
- shh. A terminal tool that silences your Mac app by app, with every notification setting on one screen (and undo).
- Kennel. One place to see and manage every background process on a Mac: launchd, PM2, Homebrew services, and cron.
If you know someone who’s even tangentially working in any of these areas, I’d appreciate any intros!
The office, almost
We’ve spent most of this year renovating my home office, and it’s nearly done. The shelves are up and full (see below). The rug and shades are still on their way, and once they’re in I’ll do a proper photo shoot—and maybe a little time lapse of the secret whiteboard and guest bed hiding behind the shelves.
Life lately
Our son turns five this month and had a big summer. He’s swimming (no floaties!), riding his bike (pedals!), and just went on his first field trip. Little man is growing up. Our daughter is putting big sentences together, tackling stairs all by herself, and insists on picking out her own dress every day (like every girl I’ve ever known, she’s obsessed with dresses that have pockets). She also has the most epic sweet tooth you’ve ever seen on a little kiddo.
Fall is finally showing up in Austin and it’s the best time of year to be here. Digs is still overprotective. I’m riding when I can.
Reading, watching, playing
- Reading: Making my slow, stubborn way through Infinite Jest. I’m 188 pages in, out of roughly 1,100 (endnotes included, obviously). In between, I’ve fallen hard for Robert Jackson Bennett. The Tainted Cup and A Drop of Corruption are two of the most fun books I’ve read in years: a fantasy detective series that’s sort of Sherlock Holmes meets
steambiopunk. - Watching: Just finished season three of Silo and all of Widow’s Bay and loved both. Now I’m deep in BoJack Horseman and equal parts appalled, traumatized, and in love with it.
- Playing: Revisiting GTA V (still slaps), dipping back into Cyberpunk 2077, and exploring the weird world of Control while I count down the days to GTA VI, which is certainly going to ruin my life for a week or two in the best possible way.
Free books
Setting up the new office meant sifting through a lot of books and deciding to say goodbye to more than a few. About 190 of them need new homes, and any of them are yours for free if you’ll cover shipping (or pick up locally in Austin).
Thinking
- My brain is roughly 99% AI and politics right now. The midterms are about a month out. How do you stay engaged with history while it’s happening without letting it eat your whole head? I want to know less and I want to pay more attention, both at once.
- AI is moving faster than I expected, and the idea of it improving itself feels a lot less like science fiction than it did a year ago. What does the world look like on the other side of that, and what should I be building (or teaching my kids) in the meantime?
- Our increasingly personalized media-consumption-via-algorithm makes it feel like there are fewer and fewer monoculture moments left (especially outside of sports and mega music stars). GTA VI will be an interesting one—maybe even one of the last things millions of people do at the same time? I’m weirdly excited to be part of that.
- The evergreen one: how do I make good money doing work I actually want to do, and what do I want to do with my life? I ask this every few months. I’ll let you know if I ever answer it (lol).
How you can help
If anything here overlaps with your world, I’d love to hear from you. I’m especially looking for:
- Founders in the middle of a hard call (or investors who know one)
- Mac users who live in iMessage and want to try Bartleby
- People in beverage, cycling, design, kids’ gear, or consumer software who’d be up for a coffee
