start again today no. 90: tesseract
abstraction, monopolies, Broadway, Nerdwallet, the Camino, content marketing recession, joy, love songs
For the last 6 months, 8yo has fallen asleep with a book in his hand.
On the way home from school on Monday, he saw “Storytime” pop up on the car dashboard.
I miss story time with you.
Me too.
So after dinner we got cozy in his Marvel sheets and met Mrs. Who, Mrs. Whatsit, and later in the week, Mrs. Which.
I first read a Wrinkle in Time when I was a little older, probably late into the night with a flashlight and blanket under my bed, intrigued by the characters and the concept of a tesseract, folding the fabric of space and time.
Today, we can time travel on read only mode through smart devices and sensors. My Dad wears his Ray-Ban Meta glasses everywhere. We can step inside these memories, increasingly immersed through Apple’s Vision Pro, or bring history textbooks to life through OpenAI’s Sora. And both are just in v1.
Last night, we had dinner at our favorite French restaurant. Each table holds a memory. I am happy the moment I walk in. I get sad sometimes when I think too far into the future but am comforted by the possibility of retracing footsteps. There’s so much worry about tech taking us further away from reality, but what if it helps us lean further in?
I ddo nott thinkk I willl matterrialize commpletely. I ffindd itt verry ttirinngg, andd wee hhave mmuch ttoo ddoo. - Mrs. Which, A Wrinkle in Time
I close the book at chapter 3. 8yo snuggles closer, clutching my arm, closing his eyes. I look up at the universe projected on his ceiling.
What I read this week
🤖 the era of abstraction & new creative tensions - Scott Belsky, CPO, Adobe
Over the coming years, we will go to the sources of everything less and less as the perfect summary, answer, or solution is generated and surfaced for us by trusted AI tools. We will soon learn that the source of anything (news, products, services) is often more biased than the AI summarizing every source for us. We must remember that the new “trust, but verify” is “verify, then trust.”
📚 modern monopolies - Alex Moazed & Nicholas Johnson
In the old model, scale was a result of investing in and growing a business’s internal resources. But in a networked world, scale comes from cultivating an external network built on top of your business.
👼🏽 angel investing: a Broadway reprisal, not a Silicon Valley innovation - Ann Marie Guzzi, Spots
Investing in Broadway productions was about more than just being a patron of the arts. It was a real opportunity for financial gain. Life with Father raised $25,000 and returned over $9 million at the box-office. Arsenic with Lace raised $35,000 and grossed $8 million. Sounds an awful lot like the initial angel investments in tech giants like Google or Uber.
💡 the lost art of f*ck around and find out - Jake Gibson, This Week in Fintech
If you don’t build and ship, you don’t eat. That has a deeply clarifying impact on how to prioritize your efforts, when to double down on an idea, and when to cut bait.
🎨 my walk across Spain on the Camino Frances - Andrew Askins, CEO chartkit.io
Throughout my walk, I would occasionally think back to my friend Maria from the first day and wonder how her Camino was going. Because she was intentionally taking a slower pace at the start, we hadn’t seen each other in weeks.
Even with the hundreds of people walking and all of the decision points along the way, I always had this feeling that we would bump into each other again before the end.
📊 2023 review—a brutal year that was exactly what I needed - Jimmy Daly, CEO superpath.co
I didn't know how to fix Superpath because I had no idea what was happening to content marketing more broadly. We dubbed it the content recession.
🌊 joy - Molly Graham,
, AnimalzThat has become my sub-definition of Joy: work I look forward to every day. I always go back to that question: “Are you excited about the day?”
I never wrote or called in with a dedication. But if I had done, it’d probably have been for my parents. Maybe for their anniversary. I’d probably say I love them a lot and ask him to play my mum’s favourite song — What a wonderful world. (Does that even count as a love song?) And I’d probably start the message the same way as pretty much everyone else: “Hi Steve, love the show.”
I see you, I love you, here’s a little something for your workout playlist,
H
Thanks Haley! Love this. Story time is so sacred
love this: “trust, but verify” is “verify, then trust.”