You Fix What You can Reach

Elephants One consistent factor across the now numerous early-stage companies I’ve worked at for the last decade or so is the presence of proverbial “elephants in the room”. Everywhere I’ve been, there has always been something bigger and more fundamentally important than the things we were working on, that everyone senior-enough knew was more important, […]

Viva La Resolution

At the end of February, I left my job at Botify after an extremely eventful two years. I enjoyed my time there, and worked with a lot of cool people (from all over the world!) in a very weird, largely COVID-dominated environment that forced me to interact with everyone almost entirely via Zoom and Slack. […]

Everything Costs

I have been lucky enough to work — mostly — in places that are primarily motivated by accomplishing something. How interesting that something actually is can vary quite a bit, but compared to organizations that work simply to maintain the status quo, or divide up the spoils of some long entrenched operation, most of my […]

Angles, Superfruits, and Supply Chains

This is a weird angle, for a couple reasons. There’s a fairly exhaustive amount of reporting in this piece that has me absolutely believing this headline is true — that small children are climbing giant scary trees to harvest the açaí that I can only assume goes into the acai bowls we get on the […]

Engage

I saw this piece on Eric Clapton’s sudden turn to COVID politics in the Washington Post, and thought a lot about people in my life (many who are older) who have taken sudden political turns. “He’s the anti-Bono,” says Bill Oakes, who managed Clapton’s label throughout the 1970s. “He is the epitome of someone who […]

About Understanding

The Department of Why I have been working in something called “Product Marketing” for a long time now. What that something actually is has varied from job to job, sometimes to pretty wild degrees. When I look at (or write) job descriptions for product marketing, even inside of very similar companies, it tends to focus […]