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+---
+title: "Dispatch #26 (April 2025)"
+date: 2025-03-31T23:05:49-04:00
+draft: false
+tags:
+- dispatch
+references:
+- title: "Viget Rewind: A Reimagining of Spotify Wrapped | Viget"
+  url: https://www.viget.com/articles/viget-rewind-a-reimagining-of-spotify-wrapped/
+  date: 2025-04-01T03:26:23Z
+  file: www-viget-com-ab37cx.txt
+- title: "My LLM codegen workflow atm | Harper Reed's Blog"
+  url: https://harper.blog/2025/02/16/my-llm-codegen-workflow-atm/
+  date: 2025-03-02T05:57:54Z
+  file: harper-blog-l8lxlh.txt
+- title: "The API client that lives in your terminal - Posting"
+  url: https://posting.sh/
+  date: 2025-04-01T03:11:33Z
+  file: posting-sh-zsjk7n.txt
+- title: "Our interfaces have lost their senses"
+  url: https://wattenberger.com/thoughts/our-interfaces-have-lost-their-senses
+  date: 2025-04-01T03:11:36Z
+  file: wattenberger-com-zl39ri.txt
+- title: "Art-directing AI"
+  url: https://www.robinsloan.com/lab/art-directing-ai/
+  date: 2025-04-01T15:12:39Z
+  file: www-robinsloan-com-2lwtj1.txt
+- title: "If it is worth keeping, save it in Markdown"
+  url: https://p.migdal.pl/blog/2025/02/markdown-saves
+  date: 2025-04-01T03:11:40Z
+  file: p-migdal-pl-4of5up.txt
+- title: "The Imperfectionist: Reality is right here"
+  url: https://ckarchive.com/b/4zuvhehpp24m4t6ovveola6g9z777s5
+  date: 2025-04-01T03:11:46Z
+  file: ckarchive-com-xm6rqk.txt
+- title: "The Outsider Option: Why I Sold Half my Company to Tiny"
+  url: https://ryan.norbauer.com/journal/the-outsider-option-why-i-sold-half-my-company-to-tiny/
+  date: 2025-04-01T15:10:45Z
+  file: ryan-norbauer-com-wvwypu.
+- title: "The average college student today - by Hilarius Bookbinder"
+  url: https://hilariusbookbinder.substack.com/p/the-average-college-student-today
+  date: 2025-04-01T15:28:16Z
+  file: hilariusbookbinder-substack-com-ehgwjk.txt
+---
+
+Some thoughts here...
+
+<!--more-->
+
+{{<dither IMG_7708.jpeg "782x600" />}}
+{{<dither IMG_6952.jpeg "782x600" />}}
+
+* Nico on the move
+  * "new major release"
+* Nev big girl bed
+  * Difficulty of finding decent mix of price + quality
+* [Hasura][1]
+  * [Viget Rewind: A Reimagining of Spotify Wrapped][2]
+  * Haskell
+* Vegas
+* Goal/habit setting
+* Music
+  * [Tascam Model 12][3]
+  * [Conductive Labs MRCC][4]
+  * So many cables
+  * Piano → Reface CP → mixer → speakers
+* New book edition
+* Copenhagen
+
+[1]: https://hasura.io/
+[2]: https://www.viget.com/articles/viget-rewind-a-reimagining-of-spotify-wrapped/
+[3]: https://tascam.com/us/product/model_12/
+[4]: https://conductivelabs.com/mrcc/
+
+### This Month
+
+* Adventure: Lake, [kayak][5]
+* Project:
+* Skill:
+
+[5]: /journal/dispatch-2-april-2023/
+
+### Reading & Listening
+
+* Fiction: [_Sunbringer_][6], Hannah Kaner
+* Non-fiction: [_Co-Intelligence_][7], Ethan Mollick ([recommended here][8])
+* Music: [_Saudade_][9], Thievery Corporation
+
+[6]: https://bookshop.org/p/books/sunbringer-hannah-kaner/20297610
+[7]: https://bookshop.org/p/books/co-intelligence-living-and-working-with-ai-ethan-mollick/20812081
+[8]: https://harper.blog/2025/02/16/my-llm-codegen-workflow-atm/
+[9]: https://thieverycorporation.com/portfolio/saudade/
+
+### Links
+
+* [Posting – The API client that lives in your terminal][10]
+
+  > The API client that lives in your terminal. Posting is a beautiful open-source terminal app for developing and testing APIs.
+
+* [Our interfaces have lost their senses][11]
+
+  > We've been successfully removing all friction from our apps — think about how effortless it is to scroll through a social feed. But is that what we want? Compare the feeling of doomscrolling to kneading dough, playing an instrument, sketching... these take effort, but they're also deeply satisfying. When you strip away too much friction, meaning and satisfaction go with it.
+
+  I found this delightful; [Robin Sloan wasn't as impressed][12].
+
+* [If it is worth keeping, save it in Markdown][13]
+
+  > The most durable solution would be carving things in stone - it would last for millennia. But that's hardly practical, and it wouldn't make things easily searchable or shareable. The second best option is plaintext files with UTF-8 encoding and Markdown formatting3. As long as computers exist, we'll be able to read plaintext files with ease.
+
+* [The Imperfectionist: Reality is right here][14]
+
+  > But there’s one piece of advice I’m confident applies to basically everyone: as far as you can manage it, you should make sure your psychological centre of gravity is in your real and immediate world – the world of your family and friends and neighborhood, your work and your creative projects, as opposed to the world of presidencies and governments, social forces and global emergencies.
+
+* [The Outsider Option: Why I Sold Half my Company to Tiny][15]
+
+  > I very intentionally capitalized and bootstrapped Norbauer & Co. in such a way as to never need outside investors, and at no point (now or in the past) have we ever been in want of cash. Indeed, I have spent my entire entrepreneurial life resisting investor-oriented management. So, as I now find myself more tranquil and satisfied than I have ever been in all my working life, I’m reluctant to admit what made it all possible. I sold nearly half of my company to a publicly-traded investment fund run by a Canadian billionaire.
+
+* [The average college student today][16]
+
+  > All this might sound like an angry rant. I’m not sure. I’m not angry, though, not at all. I’m just sad. One thing all faculty have to learn is that the students are not us. We can’t expect them all to burn with the sacred fire we have for our disciplines, to see philosophy, psychology, math, physics, sociology or economics as the divine light of reason in a world of shadow. Our job is to kindle that flame, and we’re trying to get that spark to catch, but it is getting harder and harder and we don’t know what to do.
+
+[10]: https://posting.sh/
+[11]: https://wattenberger.com/thoughts/our-interfaces-have-lost-their-senses
+[12]: https://www.robinsloan.com/lab/art-directing-ai/
+[13]: https://p.migdal.pl/blog/2025/02/markdown-saves
+[14]: https://ckarchive.com/b/4zuvhehpp24m4t6ovveola6g9z777s5
+[15]: https://ryan.norbauer.com/journal/the-outsider-option-why-i-sold-half-my-company-to-tiny/
+[16]: https://hilariusbookbinder.substack.com/p/the-average-college-student-today
diff --git a/static/archive/ckarchive-com-xm6rqk.txt b/static/archive/ckarchive-com-xm6rqk.txt
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@@ -0,0 +1,2 @@
+The Imperfectionist: Reality is right here
+
diff --git a/static/archive/hilariusbookbinder-substack-com-ehgwjk.txt b/static/archive/hilariusbookbinder-substack-com-ehgwjk.txt
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@@ -0,0 +1,464 @@
+[1]
+Scriptorium Philosophia
+
+[2]Scriptorium Philosophia
+
+SubscribeSign in
+
+Share this post
+
+[8]
+[https]
+Scriptorium Philosophia
+Scriptorium Philosophia
+The average college student today
+Copy link
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+
+The average college student today
+
+How things have changed
+
+[9]
+[htt]
+[10]Hilarius Bookbinder
+Mar 25, 2025
+3,535
+
+Share this post
+
+[12]
+[https]
+Scriptorium Philosophia
+Scriptorium Philosophia
+The average college student today
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+653
+[14]
+Share
+
+I’m Gen X. I was pretty young when I earned my PhD, so I’ve been a professor
+for a long time—over 30 years. If you’re not in academia, or it’s been awhile
+since you were in college, you might not know this: the students are not what
+they used to be. The problem with even talking about this topic at all is the
+knee-jerk response of, “yeah, just another old man complaining about the kids
+today, the same way everyone has since Gilgamesh. Shake your fist at the
+clouds, dude.”[15]1 So yes, I’m ready to hear that. Go right ahead. Because
+people need to know.
+
+First, some context. I teach at a regional public university in the US. Our
+students are average on just about any dimension you care to name—aspirations,
+intellect, socio-economic status, physical fitness. They wear hoodies and yoga
+pants and like Buffalo wings. They listen to Zach Bryan and Taylor Swift.
+That’s in no way a put-down: I firmly believe that the average citizen deserves
+a shot at a good education and even more importantly a shot at a good life. All
+I mean is that our students are representative; they’re neither the bottom of
+the academic barrel nor the cream off the top.
+
+As with every college we get a range of students, and our best philosophy
+majors have gone on to earn PhDs or go to law school. We’re also an NCAA
+Division 2 school and I watched one of our graduates become an All-Pro lineman
+for the Saints. These are exceptions, and what I say here does not apply to
+every single student. But what I’m about to describe are the average students
+at Average State U.
+
+Scriptorium Philosophia is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts
+and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
+
+[26][                    ]
+Subscribe
+Reading
+
+Most of our students are functionally illiterate. This is not a joke. By
+“functionally illiterate” I mean “unable to read and comprehend adult novels by
+people like Barbara Kingsolver, Colson Whitehead, and Richard Powers.” I picked
+those three authors because they are all recent Pulitzer Prize winners, an
+objective standard of “serious adult novel.” Furthermore, I’ve read them all
+and can testify that they are brilliant, captivating writers; we’re not talking
+about Finnegans Wake here. But at the same time they aren’t YA, romantasy, or
+Harry Potter either.
+
+I’m not saying our students just prefer genre books or graphic novels or
+whatever. No, our average graduate literally could not read a serious adult
+novel cover-to-cover and understand what they read. They just couldn’t do it.
+They don’t have the desire to try, the vocabulary to grasp what they read,[29]2
+and most certainly not the attention span to finish. For them to sit down and
+try to read a book like The Overstory might as well be me attempting an Iron
+Man triathlon: much suffering with zero chance of success.
+
+Students are not absolutely illiterate in the sense of being unable to sound
+out any words whatsoever. Reading bores them, though. They are impatient to get
+through whatever burden of reading they have to, and move their eyes over the
+words just to get it done. They’re like me clicking through a mandatory online
+HR training. Students get exam questions wrong simply because they didn't even
+take the time to read the question properly. Reading anything more than a menu
+is a chore and to be avoided.
+
+[30]
+[https]
+The Buffalo wings look good
+
+They also lie about it. I wrote the textbook for a course I regularly teach.
+It’s a fairly popular textbook, so I’m assuming it is not terribly written. I
+did everything I could to make the writing lively and packed with my most
+engaging examples. The majority of students don’t read it. Oh, they will come
+to my office hours (occasionally) because they are bombing the course, and tell
+me that they have been doing the reading, but it’s obvious they are lying. The
+most charitable interpretation is that they looked at some of the words, didn’t
+understand anything, pretended that counted as reading, and returned to looking
+at TikTok.
+
+This [31]study says that 65% of college students reported that they skipped
+buying or renting a textbook because of cost. I believe they didn’t buy the
+books, but I’m skeptical that cost is the true reason, as opposed to just the
+excuse they offer. Yes, I know some texts, especially in the sciences, are
+expensive. However, the books I assign are low-priced. All texts combined for
+one of my courses is between $35-$100 and they still don’t buy them. Why buy
+what you aren’t going to read anyway? Just google it.
+
+Even in upper-division courses that students supposedly take out of genuine
+interest they won’t read. I’m teaching Existentialism this semester. It is
+entirely primary texts—Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Camus, Sartre. The
+reading ranges from accessible but challenging to extremely difficult but we’re
+making a go of it anyway (looking at you, Being and Nothingness). This is a
+close textual analysis course. My students come to class without the books,
+which they probably do not own and definitely did not read.
+
+Writing
+
+Their writing skills are at the 8th-grade level. Spelling is atrocious, grammar
+is random, and the correct use of apostrophes is cause for celebration. Worse
+is the resistance to original thought. What I mean is the reflexive submission
+of the cheapest cliché as novel insight.
+
+    Exam question: Describe the attitude of Dostoevsky’s Underground Man
+    towards acting in one’s own self-interest, and how this is connected to his
+    concerns about free will. Are his views self-contradictory?
+
+    Student: With the UGM its all about our journey in life, not the
+    destination. He beleives we need to take time to enjoy the little things
+    becuase life is short and you never gonna know what happens. Sometimes he
+    contradicts himself cause sometimes you say one thing but then you think
+    something else later. It’s all relative.
+
+You probably think that’s satire. Either that, or it looks like this:
+
+    Exam question: Describe the attitude of Dostoevsky’s Underground Man
+    towards acting in one’s own self-interest, and how this is connected to his
+    concerns about free will. Are his views self-contradictory?
+
+    Student: Dostoevsky’s Underground Man paradoxically rejects the idea that
+    people always act in their own self-interest, arguing instead that humans
+    often behave irrationally to assert their free will. He criticizes
+    rationalist philosophies like utilitarianism, which he sees as reducing
+    individuals to predictable mechanisms, and insists that people may choose
+    suffering just to prove their autonomy. However, his stance is
+    self-contradictory—while he champions free will, he is paralyzed by
+    inaction and self-loathing, trapped in a cycle of bitterness. Through this,
+    Dostoevsky explores the tension between reason, free will, and
+    self-interest, exposing the complexities of human motivation.
+
+That’s right, ChatGPT. The students cheat. I’ve written about cheating in “[33]
+Why AI is Destroying Academic Integrity,” so I won’t repeat it here, but the
+cheating tsunami has definitely changed what assignments I give. I can’t assign
+papers any more because I’ll just get AI back, and there’s nothing I can do to
+make it stop. Sadly, not writing exacerbates their illiteracy; writing is a
+muscle and dedicated writing is a workout for the mind as well as the pen.
+
+Arithmetic
+
+I’m less informed to speak out on this one, but my math prof friends tell me
+that their students are increasingly less capable and less willing to put in
+the effort. As a result they have had to make their tests easier with fewer
+hard problems. When I was a first semester freshman (at a private SLAC, yes,
+but it wasn’t CalTech) I took Calculus 1. Second semester I took Calculus 2. I
+don’t think pre-calculus was even a thing back then. Now apparently pre-calc
+counts as an advanced content course. My psych prof friends who teach
+statistics have similarly lamented having to water down the content over time.
+
+Symbolic Logic was a requirement when I was a grad student. The course was a
+cross-listed upper-division undergrad/grad class. Jaegwon Kim taught the
+course, and our sole textbook was W. V. Quine’s Methods of Logic, which we
+worked through in its entirety. I think we spent two weeks on propositional
+logic before moving on to the predicate calculus. We proved compactness,
+soundness, and completeness, and probably some other theorems I forget. There
+is no possible way our students, unless they were math or computer science
+majors, would survive that class.
+
+What’s changed?
+
+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 [36]describes modern students as checked-out,
+phone-addicted zombies. Troy Jollimore [37]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.” Faculty have seen a 
+[38]stunning level of disconnection.
+
+[49][                    ]
+Subscribe
+What has changed exactly?
+
+  • Chronic absenteeism. As a friend in Sociology put it, “Attendance is a HUGE
+    problem—many just treat class as optional.” Last semester across all
+    sections, my average student missed two weeks of class. Actually it was
+    more than that, since I’m not counting excused absences or students who
+    eventually withdrew. A friend in Mathematics told me, “Students are less
+    respectful of the university experience —attendance, lateness, e-mails to
+    me about nonsense, less sense of responsibility.”
+
+  • Disappearing students. Students routinely just vanish at some point during
+    the semester. They don’t officially drop or withdraw from the course, they
+    simply quit coming. No email, no notification to anyone in authority about
+    some problem. They just pull an Amelia Earhart. It’s gotten to the point
+    that on the first day of class, especially in lower-division, I tell the
+    students, “look to your right. Now look to your left. One of you will be
+    gone by the end of the semester. Don’t let it be you.”
+
+  • They can’t sit in a seat for 50 minutes. Students routinely get up during a
+    50 minute class, sometimes just 15 minutes in, and leave the classroom. I’m
+    supposed to believe that they suddenly, urgently need the toilet, but the
+    reality is that they are going to look at their phones. They know I’ll call
+    them out on it in class, so instead they walk out. I’ve even told them to
+    plan ahead and pee before class, like you tell a small child before a road
+    trip, but it has no effect. They can’t make it an hour without getting
+    their phone fix.
+
+  • They want me to do their work for them. During the Covid lockdown, faculty
+    bent over backwards in every way we knew how to accommodate students during
+    an unprecedented (in our lifetimes) health crisis. Now students expect that
+    as a matter of routine. I am frequently asked for my PowerPoint slides,
+    which basically function for me as lecture notes. It is unimaginable to me
+    that I would have ever asked one of my professors for their own lecture
+    notes. No, you can’t have my slides. Get the notes from a classmate. Read
+    the book. Come to office hours for a conversation if you are still confused
+    after the preceding steps. Last week I had an email from a student who
+    essentially asked me to recap an entire week’s worth of lecture material
+    for him prior to yesterday’s midterm. No, I’m not doing that. I’m not
+    writing you a 3000-word email. Try coming to class.
+
+  • Pretending to type notes in their laptops. I hate laptops in class, but if
+    I try to ban them the students will just run to Accommodative Services and
+    get them to tell me that the student must use a laptop or they will explode
+    into tiny pieces. But I know for a fact that note-taking is at best a small
+    part of what they are doing. Last semester I had a good student tell me,
+    “hey you know that kid who sits in front of me with the laptop? Yeah, I
+    thought you should know that all he does in class is gamble on his
+    computer.” Gambling, looking at the socials, whatever, they are not
+    listening to me or participating in discussion. They are staring at a
+    screen.
+
+  • Indifference. Like everyone else, I allow students to make up missed work
+    if they have an excused absence. No, you can’t make up the midterm because
+    you were hungover and slept through your alarm, but you can if you had
+    Covid. Then they just don’t show up. A missed quiz from a month ago might
+    as well have happened in the Stone Age; students can’t be bothered to make
+    it up or even talk to me about it because they just don’t care.
+
+  • [51]It’s the phones, stupid. They are absolutely addicted to their phones.
+    When I go work out at the Campus Rec Center, easily half of the students
+    there are just sitting on the machines scrolling on their phones. I was
+    talking with a retired faculty member at the Rec this morning who works out
+    all the time. He said he has done six sets waiting for a student to put
+    down their phone and get off the machine he wanted. The students can’t get
+    off their phones for an hour to do a voluntary activity they chose for fun.
+    Sometimes I’m amazed they ever leave their [52]goon caves at all.
+
+I don’t blame K-12 teachers. This is not an educational system problem, this is
+a societal problem. What am I supposed to do? Keep standards high and fail them
+all? That’s not an option for untenured faculty who would like to keep their
+jobs. I’m a tenured full professor. I could probably get away with that for a
+while, but sooner or later the Dean’s going to bring me in for a sit-down.
+Plus, if we flunk out half the student body and drive the university into
+bankruptcy, all we’re doing is depriving the good students of an education.
+
+We’re told to meet the students where they are, flip the classroom, use
+multimedia, just be more entertaining, get better. As if rearranging the deck
+chairs just the right way will stop the Titanic from going down. As if it is
+somehow the fault of the faculty. It’s not our fault. We’re doing the best we
+can with what we’ve been given.
+
+All this might sound like an angry rant. I’m not sure. I’m not angry, though,
+not at all. I’m just sad. One thing all faculty have to learn is that the
+students are not us. We can’t expect them all to burn with the sacred fire we
+have for our disciplines, to see philosophy, psychology, math, physics,
+sociology or economics as the divine light of reason in a world of shadow. Our
+job is to kindle that flame, and we’re trying to get that spark to catch, but
+it is getting harder and harder and we don’t know what to do.
+
+Thanks for reading Scriptorium Philosophia! This post is public so feel free to
+share it.
+
+[53]Share
+
+[54]1
+
+Careful about [55]bogus “ancient” quotations on this topic, though.
+
+[56]2
+
+Students often ask me the meaning of common words on exams, words like
+“caricature.”
+
+3,535
+
+Share this post
+
+[58]
+[https]
+Scriptorium Philosophia
+Scriptorium Philosophia
+The average college student today
+Copy link
+Facebook
+Email
+Notes
+More
+[59]
+786
+653
+[60]
+Share
+
+Discussion about this post
+
+CommentsRestacks
+[ht]
+[                    ]
+[                    ]
+[                    ]
+[                    ]
+[64]
+[ht]
+[65]Matthew Lewis
+[66]6d
+Liked by Hilarius Bookbinder
+
+I was a nontraditional student who went to law school at 33. It wasn't much
+better there.
+
+I ended up graduating in the top 5% of my class. During the three year ride,
+peers would ask how to get their GPA up. I only had a three step strategy: (1)
+do all of the reading for each class the day before class or earlier; (2) in
+class, take notes by hand without any devices nearby; and (3) outline the
+course material before the (usually comprehensive) final exam. No one ever
+mentioned following that advice but more than a few of the people I told that
+to would ask me for my outlines at the end of the semester.
+
+The scary thing for me was that I found myself explaining basic concepts we
+learned in 1L--such as the three categories of torts--to peers who would be
+graduating (two years later). They just could not retain the material. These
+are practicing attorneys who I still sometimes field basic questions from.
+
+I blame the K-12 system. Grade inflation and No Child Left Behind have resulted
+in grades from American public schools being essentially worthless as a
+representation of their academic ability. Parents know they can just throw a
+fit if their child is ever on the cusp of being held back or even getting a
+failing grade.
+
+There is a much bigger societal issue under the surface, for sure. We're all
+slaves to our addictions now. Work and school are things people do to
+facilitate their video games, cell phone scrolling, gambling, etc. I don't know
+how you teach discipline and restraint to people who have spent their entire
+lives in the crosshairs of a legion of software developers who want to
+weaponize our reward systems for a small increase in engagement.
+
+Expand full comment
+Reply
+Share
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+[71]Alexander j Pasha
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+Liked by Hilarius Bookbinder
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+This intellectual regression is politically very frightening, what happens to
+already eroding freedoms when illiterate addicts form a plurality of the
+public?
+
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+[1] https://hilariusbookbinder.substack.com/
+[2] https://hilariusbookbinder.substack.com/
+[8] https://substack.com/home/post/p-159700143?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
+[9] https://substack.com/@hilariusbookbinder
+[10] https://substack.com/@hilariusbookbinder
+[12] https://substack.com/home/post/p-159700143?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
+[13] https://hilariusbookbinder.substack.com/p/the-average-college-student-today/comments
+[14] javascript:void(0)
+[15] https://hilariusbookbinder.substack.com/p/the-average-college-student-today#footnote-1-159700143
+[29] https://hilariusbookbinder.substack.com/p/the-average-college-student-today#footnote-2-159700143
+[30] https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fb7bf2e1d-e9da-41fc-b39b-f39291ded07c_700x525.jpeg
+[31] https://pirg.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/Fixing-the-Broken-Textbook-Market-3e-February-2021.pdf
+[33] https://hilariusbookbinder.substack.com/p/why-ai-is-destroying-academic-integrity?r=epq8m
+[36] https://www.honest-broker.com/p/whats-happening-to-students
+[37] https://thewalrus.ca/i-used-to-teach-students-now-i-catch-chatgpt-cheats
+[38] https://www.chronicle.com/article/a-stunning-level-of-student-disconnection?
+[51] https://magdalene.substack.com/p/its-obviously-the-phones
+[52] https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=goon
+[53] https://hilariusbookbinder.substack.com/p/the-average-college-student-today?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email&utm_content=share&action=share
+[54] https://hilariusbookbinder.substack.com/p/the-average-college-student-today#footnote-anchor-1-159700143
+[55] https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/28169/what-is-the-oldest-authentic-example-of-people-complaining-about-modern-times-an
+[56] https://hilariusbookbinder.substack.com/p/the-average-college-student-today#footnote-anchor-2-159700143
+[58] https://substack.com/home/post/p-159700143?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
+[59] https://hilariusbookbinder.substack.com/p/the-average-college-student-today/comments
+[60] javascript:void(0)
+[64] https://substack.com/profile/212696350-matthew-lewis?utm_source=comment
+[65] https://substack.com/profile/212696350-matthew-lewis?utm_source=substack-feed-item
+[66] https://hilariusbookbinder.substack.com/p/the-average-college-student-today/comment/103628964
+[69] https://hilariusbookbinder.substack.com/p/the-average-college-student-today/comment/103628964
+[70] https://substack.com/profile/293244893-alexander-j-pasha?utm_source=comment
+[71] https://substack.com/profile/293244893-alexander-j-pasha?utm_source=substack-feed-item
+[72] https://hilariusbookbinder.substack.com/p/the-average-college-student-today/comment/103531090
+[75] https://hilariusbookbinder.substack.com/p/the-average-college-student-today/comment/103531090
+[76] https://hilariusbookbinder.substack.com/p/the-average-college-student-today/comments
+[93] https://substack.com/privacy
+[94] https://substack.com/tos
+[95] https://substack.com/ccpa#personal-data-collected
+[96] https://substack.com/signup?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=web&utm_content=footer
+[97] https://substack.com/app/app-store-redirect?utm_campaign=app-marketing&utm_content=web-footer-button
+[98] https://substack.com/
+[100] https://enable-javascript.com/
diff --git a/static/archive/p-migdal-pl-4of5up.txt b/static/archive/p-migdal-pl-4of5up.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..500536e
--- /dev/null
+++ b/static/archive/p-migdal-pl-4of5up.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,266 @@
+[1]Piotr Migdał[2]Blog[3]Projects[4]Publications[5]Resume
+
+If it is worth keeping, save it in Markdown
+
+17 Feb 2025 | by Piotr Migdał
+
+  • [6]r/DataHoarder thread
+  • [7]r/ObisdianMD thread
+  • [8]Hacker News front page
+
+One of Stanisław Lem's stories, [9]The Memoirs Found in a Bathtub, begins with
+a strange phenomenon that turns all written materials into dust. While this is
+science fiction, something similar happens in our digital world.
+
+[10]Digital memento mori
+
+If you publish something online, sooner or later, it will vanish.^[11]1
+
+In the best-case scenario, a link changes during website restructuring. More
+commonly, the content is lost. The only hope is that someone saved it from
+oblivion in the [12]Internet Archive Wayback Machine.
+
+Walled gardens requiring login are even worse - when they go down, everything
+within them vanishes forever. If you haven't saved it yourself, it's gone.
+Moreover, any service (free or paid) may restrict access to content at any time
+- either completely or practically, by making it impossible to find what you're
+looking for. The same content you posted on Twitter a few years ago, now is on
+X, and in a few years might be available after login, paid subscription, or -
+not at all .
+
+Even self-hosting isn't foolproof - your content can vanish when you forget to
+pay for hosting or after a server crash. And even if your data survives,
+accessing it can be tricky: WordPress blogs store posts in databases that
+server updates can break. I learned this lesson when my PHP photo gallery went
+down - thankfully, I had kept all photos as simple JPGs organized by date.
+
+The only reliable solution is to store content in formats that can be opened
+without specialized software - formats that will remain accessible for decades
+to come.
+
+[galadriel-]
+Galadriel in "the Lord of the Rings" opening scene ([13]video, [14]transcript).
+
+[15]Why things are worth saving
+
+There are many motivations for preserving content, ranging from a digital "non
+omnis moriar" through practical arguments, to archiving as a goal in itself^
+[16]2.
+
+For me, the key reasons are:
+
+  • I want to keep and own things I wrote - they are parts of me, my history,
+    my lived experience
+  • I want to have everything in one place and easily searchable
+  • I want to use it with AI tools (looking for similar notes, summarizing,
+    using as context)
+  • I want to be able to reuse or share things however I want (email, blog
+    post, ebook, anything)
+
+[17]Plaintext
+
+    As a data scientist, [18]I turn things into vectors.
+    As an unabashed archivist, I turn things into Markdown.
+
+The most durable solution would be carving things in stone - it would last for
+millennia. But that's hardly practical, and it wouldn't make things easily
+searchable or shareable.
+
+The second best option is plaintext files with UTF-8 encoding and Markdown
+formatting^[19]3. As long as computers exist, we'll be able to read plaintext
+files with ease.
+
+Markdown files are essentially plaintext with some extra syntax for common
+elements like sections, bullet points, and links. The format deliberately
+avoids precise control over display details like font selection^[20]4.
+Following [21]the rule of least power, I consider this limitation a feature.
+For contrast, consider PDF - a format so powerful that [22]it can run Doom.
+
+For personal notes, I use [23]Obsidian, a note-taking app I love and use daily.
+While it's a powerful tool with great plugins, what keeps me loyal is its
+simplicity - it stores everything in plain files. The lack of a proprietary
+format moat is precisely what makes it so compelling.
+
+For blogging, most [24]static site generators embrace Markdown. This very blog
+post is written in Markdown^[25]5. Using the same markup for note-taking and
+publishing makes sharing smooth.
+
+[26]How I do it
+
+I dream of automatically converting everything I write or encounter into
+Markdown. The reality is messier - there's a constant tension between my
+autistic urge to archive everything and my ADHD that makes maintaining such
+systems challenging.
+
+So I take a pragmatic approach - when I find content worth keeping, I copy it
+to a markdown file, adding frontmatter with its publication date, source, and
+relevant tags:
+
+[sauna-post]
+
+I particularly save things I post that might be useful later. Conference talk
+abstracts, sauna event descriptions, technical explanations - in the future,
+they're much easier to find and reuse.
+
+When I catch myself searching for old content (like a Facebook post I want to
+share or reread), I save it immediately. If I discover a blog post has
+vanished, I retrieve it from the Wayback Machine and preserve it. When
+forwarding an email with a detailed explanation - you guessed it, I save it.
+
+Content worth searching for once is content worth preserving forever.
+
+Worried about saving too much? Well, disk storage is cheap - and for text
+files, it's practically free.
+
+[27]Tools that help
+
+Sometimes manual copying suffices. For trickier formatting, AI tools are
+invaluable - being trained on Markdown, they excel at processing and extracting
+content. You can use them to convert online text or parse PDFs (like slides),
+as shown in [28]Ingesting Millions of PDFs and why Gemini 2.0 Changes
+Everything.
+
+For some sources, I've created semi-automated solutions. For instance, I wrote
+a [29]Python script to convert my Kindle highlights and notes into Markdown.
+
+Many tools exist to help with format conversion. The most versatile is [30]
+pandoc, which can convert between dozens of formats - from Word documents to
+LaTeX, and everything in between.
+
+The community has also created specialized tools for specific platforms. You
+can find tools for converting [31]Medium posts to Markdown (either from export
+or [32]directly by URL), [33]archiving Reddit threads, and many other use
+cases.
+
+Since we're dealing with lightweight text files, there are many for backing it
+up. Git is particularly well-suited for version-controlling and syncing this
+content.
+
+Additionally, in each service I own, I periodically download my data. Even if
+it's a mesh of JSON, XML, HTML, CSV and other formats, I have it. Even if at a
+given moment I have no time to process it into Markdown, at least the data is
+there.
+
+[34]Next steps
+
+I would love to have a comprehensive tool for exporting everything - especially
+from social media. Both the posts that resonated with many people and those
+that hold personal significance deserve preservation.
+
+While Facebook offers limited data export capabilities, they're incomplete.
+Most notably, there's no way to preserve entire discussion threads - often the
+most valuable part of a post.
+
+And you - what content do you find yourself searching for? What have you
+archived, and what do you wish you had saved?
+
+Discuss this post on [35]Hacker News, [36]Mastodon, [37]Reddit, or [38]LinkedIn
+.
+
+[39]Footnotes
+
+ 1. [40]Link rot can be addressed using services like [41]Perma.cc - though
+    they too could eventually disappear. Studies show that for legal documents,
+    half of links die within 5 years. My focus here is on preserving and
+    searching personal content. [42]↩
+ 2. But for practical reasons, and hoarding for its own sake, I gathered over
+    14k links in [43]Pinboard. Yes, downloaded data in JSON. [44]↩
+ 3. I don't claim Markdown is the only solution. There are valid reasons to use
+    other formats. My focus is on plaintext in UTF-8. If you prefer other
+    markup languages (like reStructuredText, AsciiDoc, Org-Mode) or just plain
+    text without formatting - the principles still apply. In some cases
+    original format works - e.g. if it is JSON or code. [45]↩
+ 4. Consider HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) as a counterexample. It was meant
+    to enrich text with semantics, but now serves primarily as a tool for
+    building UIs. While this evolution brought many benefits, typical end-user
+    HTML is no longer suitable for pure content storage. At the same time, if
+    you can use simple HTML with actual semantic <strong> and <em> tags, go for
+    it. But it's often a slippery slope - from "just add a few colors," through
+    "add tables," to creating a full-fledged app. [46]↩
+ 5. This blog uses [47]Nuxt 3 Content (source: [48]github.com/stared/
+    stared.github.io). It follows my previous versions in [49]Jekyll and [50]
+    Gridsome. Thanks to Markdown, migration between platforms has been seamless
+    - see [51]New blog - moving from Medium to Gridsome. For the latest
+    migration from Gridsome to Nuxt 3 Content, [52]Cursor IDE was a great help.
+    [53]Astro is another static site generator gaining significant traction. 
+    [54]↩
+
+See also cosine-similar posts
+
+  • 0.617[55]New blog - moving from Medium to Gridsome
+  • 0.604[56]How I learned to stop worrying and love the types & tests
+  • 0.598[57]AI won’t make artists redundant - thanks to information theory
+  • 0.591[58]ADHD tech stack: auto time tracking
+  • 0.589[59]The first post: why Jekyll?
+
+By [60]Piotr Migdał, a curious being, doctor of sorcery. See [61]my other blog
+posts.
+
+Keep in the loop with the [62]RSS feed or join the [63]newsletter.
+
+
+References:
+
+[1] https://p.migdal.pl/
+[2] https://p.migdal.pl/blog
+[3] https://p.migdal.pl/projects
+[4] https://p.migdal.pl/publications
+[5] https://p.migdal.pl/resume
+[6] https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/1is1wbn/if_it_is_worth_keeping_save_it_in_markdown/
+[7] https://www.reddit.com/r/ObsidianMD/comments/1is1snu/if_it_is_worth_keeping_save_it_in_markdown/
+[8] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43137616
+[9] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memoirs_Found_in_a_Bathtub
+[10] https://p.migdal.pl/blog/2025/02/markdown-saves/#digital-memento-mori
+[11] https://p.migdal.pl/blog/2025/02/markdown-saves#user-content-fn-link-rot
+[12] https://web.archive.org/
+[13] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qj139dE7tFI
+[14] https://www.tk421.net/lotr/film/fotr/01.html
+[15] https://p.migdal.pl/blog/2025/02/markdown-saves/#why-things-are-worth-saving
+[16] https://p.migdal.pl/blog/2025/02/markdown-saves#user-content-fn-pinboard
+[17] https://p.migdal.pl/blog/2025/02/markdown-saves/#plaintext
+[18] https://p.migdal.pl/blog/2025/01/dont-use-cosine-similarity
+[19] https://p.migdal.pl/blog/2025/02/markdown-saves#user-content-fn-plaintext
+[20] https://p.migdal.pl/blog/2025/02/markdown-saves#user-content-fn-html
+[21] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_least_power
+[22] https://www.reddit.com/r/itrunsdoom/comments/1i02c6b/doom_in_a_pdf_file/
+[23] https://obsidian.md/
+[24] https://jamstack.org/generators/
+[25] https://p.migdal.pl/blog/2025/02/markdown-saves#user-content-fn-blog
+[26] https://p.migdal.pl/blog/2025/02/markdown-saves/#how-i-do-it
+[27] https://p.migdal.pl/blog/2025/02/markdown-saves/#tools-that-help
+[28] https://www.sergey.fyi/articles/gemini-flash-2
+[29] https://gist.github.com/stared/ce732ef27d97d559b34d7e294481f1b0
+[30] https://github.com/jgm/pandoc
+[31] https://github.com/gautamdhameja/medium-2-md
+[32] https://medium2md.nabilmansour.com/
+[33] https://farnots.github.io/RedditToMarkdown/
+[34] https://p.migdal.pl/blog/2025/02/markdown-saves/#next-steps
+[35] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43137616
+[36] https://mathstodon.xyz/@pmigdal/114021315189570737
+[37] https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/1is1wbn/if_it_is_worth_keeping_save_it_in_markdown/
+[38] https://www.linkedin.com/posts/piotrmigdal_if-it-is-worth-keeping-save-it-in-markdown-activity-7299139148634841089-_Xe3
+[39] https://p.migdal.pl/blog/2025/02/markdown-saves/#footnote-label
+[40] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link_rot
+[41] https://perma.cc/
+[42] https://p.migdal.pl/blog/2025/02/markdown-saves#user-content-fnref-link-rot
+[43] https://pinboard.in/
+[44] https://p.migdal.pl/blog/2025/02/markdown-saves#user-content-fnref-pinboard
+[45] https://p.migdal.pl/blog/2025/02/markdown-saves#user-content-fnref-plaintext
+[46] https://p.migdal.pl/blog/2025/02/markdown-saves#user-content-fnref-html
+[47] https://content.nuxt.com/
+[48] https://github.com/stared/stared.github.io
+[49] https://jekyllrb.com/
+[50] https://gridsome.org/
+[51] https://p.migdal.pl/blog/2022/12/medium-to-markdown
+[52] https://www.cursor.com/
+[53] https://astro.build/
+[54] https://p.migdal.pl/blog/2025/02/markdown-saves#user-content-fnref-blog
+[55] https://p.migdal.pl/blog/2022/12/medium-to-markdown
+[56] https://p.migdal.pl/blog/2020/03/types-tests-typescript
+[57] https://p.migdal.pl/blog/2023/02/ai-artists-information-theory
+[58] https://p.migdal.pl/blog/2020/05/adhd-tech-stack-auto-time-tracking
+[59] https://p.migdal.pl/blog/2015/12/first-post
+[60] https://p.migdal.pl/
+[61] https://p.migdal.pl/blog
+[62] https://p.migdal.pl/feed.xml
+[63] https://eepurl.com/bVJlgL
diff --git a/static/archive/posting-sh-zsjk7n.txt b/static/archive/posting-sh-zsjk7n.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..6e4f4bb
--- /dev/null
+++ b/static/archive/posting-sh-zsjk7n.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,169 @@
+[1][ ] [2][ ]
+[3]
+Posting
+The API client that lives in your terminal
+[4][                    ]
+Initializing search
+
+[6]
+darrenburns/posting
+
+  • [7] Home
+  • [8] Guide
+  • [9] Roadmap
+  • [10] Changelog
+  • [11] FAQ
+
+Posting darrenburns@posting.local P OST ▼ https ://
+jsonplaceholder.typicode.com / posts ■ ■■■■■■ Send ╭─ Collection
+─────────────────╮╭──────────────────────────────────────────────────────
+Request ─╮ │ GET echo ││ Headers • Body • Query Auth Info Options │ │ GET
+get random user ││ ╸ ━━━━━━━━
+╺━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ │ │ POS echo post ││ ▐
+Content-Type application/json │ │ ▼ jsonplaceholder/ ││ ▐ Referer https://
+example.com/ │ │ ▼ posts/ ││ ▐ Accept-Encoding gzip │ │ GET get all ││ ▐
+Cache-Control no-cache │ │ GET get one ││ ▐ │ │ █ POS create ││ Name Value
+Add header │ │ DEL delete a post
+│╰────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────╯ │ ▼
+comments/ │ ╭─────────────────────────────────────── Response 201 Created ─╮ │
+GET get comments │ │ Body Headers Cookies Trace │ │ GET get comments (via │ │ ╸
+━━━━ ╺━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ │ │ PUT
+edit a comment │ │ 1 { │ │ ▼ todos/ ▆ │ │ 2 "title" : "foo" , │ │ GET get all │
+│ 3 "body" : "bar" , │ │ GET get one │ │ 4 "userId" : 1 , │ │ ▼ users/ │ │ 5
+"id" : 101 │ │──────────────────────────────│ │ 6 } │ │ Create a new post │ │
+1:1 read-only JSON ▼ Wrap ▐ X ▌ │ ╰───────── sample-collections ─╯
+╰─────────────────────────────────────────── 65.00 B in 524.34 ms ─╯ ^j Send ^t
+Method ^s Save ^n New ^p Commands ^o Jump f1 Help
+
+The API client that lives in your terminal.
+
+Posting is a beautiful open-source terminal app for developing and testing
+APIs.
+
+Fly through your API workflow with an approachable yet powerful
+keyboard-centric interface. Run it locally or over SSH on remote machines and
+containers. Save your requests in a readable and version-control friendly
+format.
+
+[12] Discover Features [13] Get Started
+
+Designed for efficient workflows
+
+Navigate intuitively and efficiently with the keyboard using jump mode.
+
+Access commands from anywhere using the built-in command palette.
+
+Build requests quickly with powerful autocompletion.
+
+Edit a request body in nvim or browse a JSON response in fx? No problem!
+
+Import curl commands into Posting by simply pasting into the URL bar. Export
+requests to curl in seconds.
+
+Colorful & customizable
+
+Use compact mode to fit more on screen.
+
+Create your own themes, or choose from a selection of built-in options.
+
+Gorgeous syntax highlighting powered by the popular tree-sitter library.
+
+Adjust the user interface to your liking through the configuration system or at
+runtime.
+
+Customize keybindings to your liking using the keymap system.
+
+Environments
+
+Share common data across requests and with others using environments.
+
+Load variables from one or more dotenv environment files, or allow access to 
+environment variables.
+
+Edit variables in your favorite editor, and Posting will hot reload them.
+
+Contextual help
+
+Feeling lost? Press f1 to learn keybindings and other useful information for
+the currently focused widget.
+
+Scripting
+
+Run Python code before and after requests to prepare headers, set variables,
+and more.
+
+Runs where you need it
+
+Run it on macOS, Windows, and Linux. Install it locally, on a remote server, in
+a Docker container, or even on a Raspberry Pi.
+
+Community
+
+Posting is a community-driven project with an [14]open roadmap.
+
+The roadmap is highly influenced by user feedback.
+
+Get involved on [15]GitHub by reporting bugs, suggesting features, [16]
+sponsoring development, or contributing code.
+
+[17] GitHub [18] Issues
+© 2025 Darren Burns
+[19] Posting
+[20]
+darrenburns/posting
+
+  • [21][ ] [22] Home
+  • [23][ ] Guide Guide
+      □ [24] Getting Started
+      □ [25] Navigation
+      □ [26] Collections
+      □ [27] Requests
+      □ [28] Configuration
+      □ [29] Environments
+      □ [30] Command Palette
+      □ [31] Themes
+      □ [32] External Tools
+      □ [33] Keymaps
+      □ [34] Importing
+      □ [35] Scripting
+      □ [36] Help System
+  • [37] Roadmap
+  • [38] Changelog
+  • [39] FAQ
+
+
+References:
+
+[3] https://posting.sh/
+[6] https://github.com/darrenburns/posting
+[7] https://posting.sh/
+[8] https://posting.sh/guide/
+[9] https://posting.sh/roadmap/
+[10] https://posting.sh/CHANGELOG/
+[11] https://posting.sh/faq/
+[12] https://posting.sh/#feature-title-1
+[13] https://posting.sh/guide
+[14] https://posting.sh/roadmap
+[15] https://github.com/darrenburns/posting
+[16] https://github.com/sponsors/darrenburns
+[17] https://github.com/darrenburns/posting
+[18] https://github.com/darrenburns/posting/issues
+[19] https://posting.sh/
+[20] https://github.com/darrenburns/posting
+[22] https://posting.sh/
+[24] https://posting.sh/guide/
+[25] https://posting.sh/guide/navigation/
+[26] https://posting.sh/guide/collections/
+[27] https://posting.sh/guide/requests/
+[28] https://posting.sh/guide/configuration/
+[29] https://posting.sh/guide/environments/
+[30] https://posting.sh/guide/command_palette/
+[31] https://posting.sh/guide/themes/
+[32] https://posting.sh/guide/external_tools/
+[33] https://posting.sh/guide/keymap/
+[34] https://posting.sh/guide/importing/
+[35] https://posting.sh/guide/scripting/
+[36] https://posting.sh/guide/help_system/
+[37] https://posting.sh/roadmap/
+[38] https://posting.sh/CHANGELOG/
+[39] https://posting.sh/faq/
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+[1] Ryan Norbauer [2] [mail_icon]
+a personal newsletter
+Los Angeles, California
+
+  • [3]Home
+  • [4]About
+  • [5]Reading List
+  • [6]Archive
+  • [7]Subscribe
+
+Keyboard Academy 2025-03-24
+
+The Outsider Option: Why I Sold Half my Company to Tiny
+
+by [8]Ryan Norbauer
+
+MY DESIGN WORK
+
+I create escapist [9]luxury computer keyboards at Norbauer & Co.
+
+Fairmont Empress Hotel in Victoria, BC near Tiny HQFairmont Empress Hotel in
+Victoria, BC near Tiny HQ
+
+I had the most curious sensation when I was working the other night: I was kind
+of happy.
+
+You know, not just in the I find this work satisfying kind of way, but in the
+and I don’t also want to walk out a window kind of way. This latter is, in my
+professional life at least, something of a novel experience.
+
+It is often said that founding a business is like “staring into the abyss and
+eating glass.” I concur with this analysis.
+
+But I would go one further. As someone with a chronic serial entrepreneurship
+problem, I can vouch that the life of a founder is actually also often quite
+painfully lonely—a feeling that somehow, paradoxically, gets worse the more
+employees and clients one has.
+
+'Twas ever thus, I used to think, and ever would be. It all just seemed like
+part of the entrepreneurial bargain, the cost of creative freedom. It’s a price
+I myself have been willing to pay at times, but at other times not so much.
+
+Just over a year ago, in fact, I very nearly shuttered my latest business,
+Norbauer & Co. (We make very fancy [10]luxury computer keyboards—yes, that is a
+thing; I’ll explain.) It wasn’t that we had any actual problems. Quite the
+contrary. We were enjoying a commercial success far exceeding anything I had
+ever hoped for or intended. It was just that this success required so very
+frequently dining on glass, as I bounced from one annoying-but-important
+logistical challenge to another.
+
+But let’s advance one year forward, to just last week. I found myself at the
+end of a long day grappling with a hard operational problem for the company
+(which indeed I did not shutter). It’s the sort of manufacturing setback that
+would previously have sent me down a vortex of despair, as I felt the latest
+shards shattering between my teeth. Yet in that moment the other night as I was
+wrapping up my work I caught myself smiling like an idiot, oddly untroubled.
+
+(Sometimes we get these rare glimmers of insight in life, when we briefly
+stumble off the hedonic treadmill. The perspective zooms outward, and we
+perceive that our past selves would be astonished and delighted by our
+situation in the present. It’s a beautiful thing.)
+
+I now have at my disposal an executive team of a caliber and competence I would
+never previously have thought within my grasp, leaving me never facing a
+problem alone. We have, moreover, just launched a product of enormous ambition
+and complexity that has been a lifelong creative dream of mine. Until these
+facts suddenly occurred to me at once the other night, they had somehow crept
+up on me over the past year without my quite noticing.
+
+I very intentionally capitalized and bootstrapped Norbauer & Co. in such a way
+as to never need outside investors, and at no point (now or in the past) have
+we ever been in want of cash. Indeed, I have spent my entire entrepreneurial
+life resisting investor-oriented management. So, as I now find myself more
+tranquil and satisfied than I have ever been in all my working life, I’m
+reluctant to admit what made it all possible.
+
+I sold nearly half of my company to a publicly-traded investment fund run by a
+Canadian billionaire.
+
+History of a Great Deal, and a Great Deal of History
+
+This is the story of my accidental luxury brand and our eventual deal with the
+very unusual investment firm [11]Tiny.
+
+I tell it in detail here not only for keyboard enthusiasts who may care about
+the past and future of Norbauer & Co. (or fans of Tiny who may wish to peer
+behind the curtain of one of their deals) but for any entrepreneur who
+struggles with the desire to bring a singular creative vision into the
+world—and who worries, quite rightly, about the perils of working with
+investors to make it happen.
+
+Tiny counts in its portfolio well-known cool-kid brands like [12]Aeropress, 
+[13]Letterboxd, [14]Dribbble, [15]Serato, and more than a hundred others—many
+of them design-centric businesses that, like mine, are deeply rooted in
+communities of passionate nerd enthusiasm. They also own quite a few creative
+agencies (such as [16]Metalab and [17]Frosty), which do tasteful projects for
+luxury and luxury-adjacent brands such as Prada, Apple, Burberry, Calvin Klein,
+and many others. This all makes Tiny an improbably good spiritual fit for my
+company, but my reasons for the deal actually ran far deeper.
+
+Many founders, especially those in the VC sphere, tend to view outside
+investment as a path to an “exit” payday, allowing them to cash out and ride
+off into a tropical sunset. Tiny has, to be sure, facilitated numerous
+embarkations of this type. But in my case, the short-term financial aspects of
+the sale were, for both sides, actually something of an afterthought. Far from
+exiting anything, I continue to serve as CEO of Norbauer & Co., and, as
+majority voting shareholder, I retain absolute control—creative and
+otherwise—over the business.
+
+Even though we closed the deal a year ago, I intentionally waited until now to
+write about it publicly, because I wanted to proceed from actual experience
+rather than the blind fact-free optimism of an early-day press release. The
+result, happily, turns out to be something of a love letter to a very unusual
+investment fund and the singular philosophy (and integrity) of the people
+behind it.
+
+A Keyboard Snowball
+
+The Heavy-9 in titanium, a popular one of our aftermarket keyboard housings,
+which sells for $3800 (not including the keyboard that goes inside).The Heavy-9
+in titanium, a popular one of our aftermarket keyboard housings, which sells
+for $3800 (not including the keyboard that goes inside).
+
+In an article published a few weeks ago, [18]Hodinkee (a magazine quite
+influential in the luxury world) described Norbauer & Co. as the brand
+“defining the world of high-end analog keyboards,” which is very kind, and
+perhaps even true in a way, but is mainly just amusing to me given how much I
+dragged my feet in letting it even become a business in the first place—to say
+nothing of an industry-defining one.
+
+Norbauer & Co. is in fact an entirely adventitious business and the unintended
+byproduct of an aborted attempt on my part at retirement. In 2010, having sold
+the last of three tech companies I had founded, I resolved to take a little
+breather from crippling stress and life-destroying workaholism to throw myself
+instead into frivolous, low-stakes creative pursuits. The effects were so
+salutary that I quickly swore off ever starting a company ever again. But among
+those fun creative projects was one that would end up quickly undoing my
+resolve: figuring out how to make my own retro keyboards.
+
+On obscure forums like [19]GeekHack, I began organizing group buys for my
+designs among fellow hobbyist enthusiasts. These offerings were originally
+intended just as a way to help offset the cost of making a few units for
+myself. From my very first such sale almost a decade ago I kept swearing that
+it would also be the last, intent on keeping my resolution never to get sucked
+into running another business and letting the stress ruin my life again. And
+yet I found myself nudged along at every turn (albeit gently and kindly) by an
+eager crowd with whom my work seemed to be resonating. One offering led to
+another. And things just sort of snowballed from there.
+
+The Norbauer brand has since managed to accumulate a base of thoughtful and
+loyal clients all around the world (from South Korea to the UAE, South Africa
+to Mongolia), and I’ve somehow never quite been able to keep up with demand.
+Most of our offerings sell out within hours—sometimes minutes—of being posted.
+(Communities of collectors have even set up bots to track our inventory and
+broadcast availability to private channels on Discord.) For waitlist items, we
+have clients who preorder and patiently wait for models with production lead
+times sometimes exceeding a year—including bespoke orders running into the tens
+of thousands of dollars.
+
+At some point or another, with millions of dollars of keyboards sold—and
+without my quite meaning or realizing—it had turned into a real business.
+
+Retro-techno-futurism, and a Rationally Irrational Trade
+
+The Heavy Grail in Veracity Steel (mirror polished), one of our most
+sought-after offerings. Price $2000.The Heavy Grail in Veracity Steel (mirror
+polished), one of our most sought-after offerings. Price $2000.
+
+While I have been obsessed with keyboards my whole life, I chose a
+serendipitous moment (around 2014) to become interested in actually making
+them. Here is subscribership of the MechanicalKeyboards subreddit over the past
+decade:
+
+MechanicalKeyboards subreddit subscribers over time (via subredditstats.com)
+MechanicalKeyboards subreddit subscribers over time (via subredditstats.com)
+
+Plenty of other enthusiast-led keyboard brands sprang up at the beginning of
+this upward curve along with Norbauer. But the vast majority, including some of
+the most prominent and prestigious ones, have since either spectacularly
+imploded or faded into the internet mists.
+
+If any one thing has allowed us to enjoy a relative longevity, I believe it’s
+that our products are fundamentally sentimental—and thus slightly irrational.
+When other makers seemed to be climbing over each other to be the Lexus of
+keyboards (converging on a single technical paradigm and competing on
+checklists of “premium” features), I was far off in one isolated corner, making
+weird Ferraris.
+
+The thing with a Ferrari—as, like, a car—is that it really isn’t the most
+logical purchase. They’re loud, difficult to maintain, and not particularly
+comfortable. I’m happy to report that our keyboards don’t have those
+shortcomings, but my point is that the unique (and obviously very potent) thing
+a Ferrari offers is to be an object with a soul—the product of a very specific
+worldview and set of values. This makes it non-comparable and thus somewhat
+resistant to direct competition. (Despite, for example, a vibrant market of
+counterfeit Norbauer keyboards coming out of China—some of which even brazenly
+copy our packaging—clients still eagerly prefer to pay a multiple to get the
+genuine articles from us.)
+
+What is it, then, that gives Norbauer products their particular soul? It comes
+from a profound emotional attachment to the spirit of 20th century
+techno-optimism. Part of this is our retrofuturist design language, which
+explicitly evokes midcentury and 80s modernism. Another is the deep and clacky/
+thocky sound profile, which is intentionally redolent of keyboards from the 80s
+and 90s. But above all is a headlong dive into the sort of breathless
+over-the-top optimism that characterized that earlier era of computing—when
+everyone seemed to believe that personal computers and the Internet were going
+to break down international barriers and make for a wiser and more peaceful
+world. A time when we all believed in The Future, with a capital F.
+
+Computers were held to be objects of enormous promise back then—rarer and more
+valuable devices than they now are—so manufacturers were willing to invest far
+more into hardware that was both durable and satisfying to use. Norbauer & Co.
+simply pretends that the trend never stopped—taking finishes, materials, and
+engineering to extremes to build objects that feel at once worthy and symbolic
+of those hopes.
+
+But by the mid-2010s when I started making keyboards, the hopes that had been a
+part of cyber-culture in its early days (decentralization, anonymity, lack of
+concern with social status or authority, peaceful mutual understanding across
+cultures, free speech) were already fading away. The charmingly anarchic early
+Internet was being supplanted by various walled social-media gardens controlled
+by a few megacorporations, with ill effects that are by now all too
+familiar—and are largely the opposite of all those things we had hoped.
+
+I think it’s not a coincidence, then, that the upsurge of cultural interest in
+vintage-style keyboards happened right around this time. For those of us who
+came of age during the golden era of personal computing (or those who wish they
+did), vintage-style mechanical keyboards are a small act of defiance—a way to
+physically reconnect with a time when technology seemed to offer a tomorrow
+that would always be better than today.
+
+An image that captures our brand pretty nicely.An image that captures our brand
+pretty nicely.
+
+At some point I realized that this meant I was essentially building a luxury
+brand: one whose value proposition is emotional valence, technical
+perfectionism, artistic design, and artisanal knowhow rather than serving any
+obvious practical necessity. (Contrary to popular conception, I believe that a
+true luxury brand isn’t about monetizing social status but rather enabling
+low-volume manufacturing of weird and creatively interesting goods.)
+
+I admire many examples in this space—Leica, Teenage Engineering, Hermès—that
+flagrantly disregard economies of scale, mass appeal, and micro-efficiencies in
+favor of a quirky creative vision, sold to a tasteful and passionate few who
+are simply very excited about and believe in what the creators are doing.
+
+I knew that if I were going to continue operating a consumer electronics
+company, this would be the only kind that I would find interesting to build.
+
+The Withering Gaze of Uncle Scrooge
+
+The growing Norbauer & Co. Los Angeles team in 2021The growing Norbauer & Co.
+Los Angeles team in 2021
+
+By 2021 we had opened a [20]workshop in Downtown Los Angeles and I had hired a
+small team. We had just launched our most popular product, the Heavy Grail
+(shown in the video below), and our revenue was on an insane parabolic
+year-over-year upward trajectory.
+
+This was all quite gratifying in a way, but the feelings of avoidant stress
+from my early entrepreneurial days started to come back. I just wanted to focus
+on giving our clients what they wanted, doing it well, and making functional
+art that facilitated a bit of happy escapism. But with increasing success came
+a whole host of unwelcome burdens and concerns that I was disinclined to manage
+optimally. Shards of glass again.
+
+I keep a statue of Scrooge McDuck next to my desk as a reminder that making
+money is something a person running a business should endeavor to do. (Milton
+Friedman and Jack Donaghy action figures were unavailable.) It is a general
+entrepreneurial failing of mine that profit is not always foremost in my mind,
+but this has been more true for me in this “fun little retirement project” than
+with any other preceding venture.
+
+My museMy muse
+
+Having so many people throwing money at us made it easy to do what I was
+naturally inclined to do anyway: to focus on the product and client experience
+above all else, while avoiding hard decisions about capital allocation. (More
+money, more Parkinson’s Law problems.)
+
+Part of the premise and competitive advantage of a luxury brand like ours is
+being willing to spend way more money on quality and subjective artistic
+matters than a rational manager would seemingly ever do. But, critically, these
+expenditures should be focused only on things that affect the client
+experience. Through my general avoidance of the subject, our profligacy was
+often directed, utterly un-strategically, by random chaos instead.
+
+By the end of 2023, to cite one example, I had unwittingly flushed a quarter of
+a million dollars down the toilet in a self-imposed boondoggle project to
+rework our e-commerce infrastructure. It was a frog-boiling situation; the
+development team kept assuring me something shippable was just around the
+corner—probably actually believing this themselves—until I eventually paid some
+close attention, dug into the details, and realized (years in) that no such
+thing was forthcoming and had simply to kill the project.
+
+Around the same time, I had a suspicion that our warehouse and client support
+operations had become wildly inefficient, so I decided to take a look at what
+it was costing us (in labor alone) to ship an order. I discovered that we had
+gone from $8 per order in 2019 to $104 per order in 2023, an order of magnitude
+jump in costs with no appreciable improvement in the client experience.
+
+[image-7]
+
+These were just two rare examples where I diverted my attention briefly away
+from what felt like my most important responsibilities (design, engineering,
+and brand), and I immediately stumbled into raging cash incinerators. There was
+reason to believe that others were lurking around every corner. This was
+manifestly unsustainable, and I knew it would eventually start threatening our
+ability to allocate capital to important things that actually did matter to our
+clients.
+
+There are a million little trivial but non-optional tasks in running a physical
+goods business: complicated bookkeeping, logistics coordination, inventory
+tracking and valuation, customs clearances, regulatory compliance, endless tax
+filings, insurance, payroll processing, accounts payable, etc. Attending to
+tasks like these tends to drain my will and energy, leaving me with very little
+enthusiasm for more optional (but no less essential) management tasks like the
+ones where I discovered us pointlessly hemorrhaging cash.
+
+Spending more time being strategic about management seemed urgent. But I got
+into this business because I liked making fancy keyboards and connecting with
+our clients. Diverting my attention even further from those goals seemed
+horrible to me. This is why, on the day I made those charts and realized all
+this, I very nearly decided to fold up shop.
+
+The Seneca Moonshot
+
+[image]the Seneca
+
+If it were just a question of going on selling my existing product lines and
+optimizing the business for short-term profitability, I definitely would have
+put the company in the garbage right then. What we were making up to that point
+were essentially “aftermarket upgrades” for keyboard internals made by other
+companies. Although the community was still clamoring for those products and
+there was unquestionably money still to be made, I simply felt like I had
+solved all the interesting design problems in that domain. But I had something
+else in my back pocket.
+
+I’ve often said that Norbauer products are more than just backward-looking
+nostalgia. They’re actually meant to feel like they come from an alternate
+universe that split off from our own in something like the 1980s—an imaginary
+timeline where technological evolution continued in parallel to ours but where
+both the sensual quality of computing hardware and its broader social effects
+just kept getting better and better (rather than, say, what actually happened).
+This is why my long-term goal has always been not just to recreate
+vintage-feeling keyboards, but rather to make new keyboards in a
+retrofuturistic design language that are actually better than any that exist in
+our real universe, now or in the past.
+
+And so in the preceding years I had been quietly working on a crazy (and crazy
+expensive) multi-year moonshot project to develop our own in-house
+ready-to-type keyboard—something that a client who wants the best typing
+instrument obtainable in the world could acquire from us, plug in, and
+immediately enjoy. Every component would be custom, right down to the screws. I
+called this project [21]the Seneca, and by the time I was thinking seriously of
+shuttering Norbauer & Co., it was actually very near completion.
+
+This put me at a crisis: I didn’t want to go on running the business any
+longer, but I also didn’t want to give up on the creative vision either; I had
+become sentimentally attached to the idea of seeing the Seneca out into the
+world.
+
+This is where a normal entrepreneur would look to outside partners or
+investment. But I was so profoundly allergic to this prospect that I remained
+blind to it, probably for far longer than I should have. Then again, for a
+founder like me—whose priorities are creativity and the client experience—I
+think the hesitation was quite warranted.
+
+Effing the Ineffable (MBAs Ruin Everything)
+
+There is a natural tension between the pecuniary concerns of the investor and
+the creative urges of the builder-entrepreneur, and I am certainly
+temperamentally much more aligned with the latter. But my complaint about
+investors is not that they’re somehow too obsessed with making money; it’s
+that—in the long term at least—they’re just generally so bad at it. (And this
+coming from a guy who has to keep a Ducktales figurine by his desk as a
+reminder to think about profit occasionally.)
+
+The Swapping of Cerebrum for Spreadsheet
+
+Because the core premise of investing is “sit at computer, make number go up,”
+it seeks above all else things that can be easily measured and thus optimized.
+
+The folly generally takes one of three forms:
+
+  • Venture Capital. For VC firms, the target is meteoric growth, typically in
+    things like size of user base (profit unimportant) in order to hype the
+    share value for the next round of speculators. This can and often does doom
+    innovative companies that would have been great profitable businesses at
+    smaller scales.
+  • Private Equity. Here it’s the value of underlying assets to be carved up
+    for leverage and/or quick sale to the highest bidder, even if the source of
+    the company’s value generation is itself obliterated in the process.
+  • Public markets. Here the focus is typically juicing quarterly accounting
+    numbers and massaging narratives for modest ticker jumps at the next
+    earnings call.
+
+There seem to be no good options.
+
+The startup trajectory is typically as follows: a company starts out doing
+something good, which catches on and becomes profitable. A core community of
+enthusiastic and happy customers grows up around the brand. Success attracts
+investment and a concomitant push to scale. Loath to rise from their computers,
+the investors seek numbers that can be upwardly coaxed on the screen, and their
+armies of MBAs are deployed to find them. Things that are easy to measure and
+control like costs and revenue growth get over-optimized, focusing on easy
+paper-based wins 📈 over the gestalt of the business and its reputation. Quality
+degrades, and customer loyalty with it. The brand undertakes a slow march
+toward mediocrity and eventual death, its pricing power ebbing away, all while
+the MBA managers and consultants (and often the investors themselves) have long
+since gotten their payouts and moved on.
+
+This is an unseen homogenizing force in the world of commerce, draining every
+last wisp of human dignity and aesthetic joy from some of the world’s greatest
+brands and institutions—eventually, and ironically, also destroying their
+economic value in the process. And it leads to the opposite of the very reason
+I ever wanted to start companies to begin with, which is to make the world look
+a little less boring.
+
+MBAs are why we can’t have nice things.
+
+Sure, I may be slow to undertake performance analysis and optimization when
+running a business, but I’d far rather have that problem than these.
+
+Oops
+
+    …many managers attempt to reach their targets simply by cutting costs. This
+    can be fatal. Any fool can cut costs anywhere at any time. For one shining
+    moment it will look as if he or she is a genius at increasing the bottom
+    line. Then the moment will pass … and quality will collapse.
+
+    —Felix Dennis, [22]How to Get Rich
+
+Although excessive cost-cutting is among the most common, it’s just one example
+of the investor-driven impulse to focus on metrics— and how this can
+insidiously erode the foundations of a business over time.
+
+“When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure,” as
+Goodhart’s Law states, although that formulation actually puts it a little too
+modestly. I prefer the [23]Strong Version of Goodhart’s Law, as expressed by
+machine learning researcher Jascha Sohl-Dickstein: “as you over-optimize, the
+goal you care about won't just stop improving, but will instead grow much worse
+than if you had done nothing at all.”
+
+This applies across many domains of human endeavor (standardized testing making
+students dumber being the most obvious one) but let’s consider a few examples
+from the world of business.
+
+  • Facebook seeks to improve the world by fostering human connection, choosing
+    engagement with the platform as the proxy metric to guide its algorithms;
+    the result is that people’s “social” feeds fill up with attention-grabbing
+    viral content and virtually no posts from actual humans or friends.
+  • An e-commerce brand seeks to increase cashflow and chooses average order
+    value (AOV) as its proxy metric; managers make offerings like free shipping
+    at certain order total thresholds, causing customers to order things they
+    don’t really want, leading to decreased customer satisfaction and increased
+    returns (with a net negative effect on cashflow relative to baseline).
+  • A streaming service seeks to optimize customer enjoyment and chooses time
+    spent watching video as its proxy metric; the result is that managers focus
+    resources on building auto-play, infinite scroll, and low-value ambient
+    content that spikes the numbers while actually just pissing customers off.
+
+I could go on. Jerry Muller’s [24]The Tyranny of Metrics is an entire volume
+dedicated to this phenomenon, as is much of Nassim Taleb’s brilliant [25]
+Incerto series, a nearly 2,000-page screed against what he rightly calls naïve
+rationalism and the frequent backfiring of over-reliance on quantitative models
+and targets.
+
+The Hard-nosed Economics of Emotional Attachment
+
+So, yeah, metric optimization is dumb. But it is even more often the case that
+the most important things can’t even be measured at all.
+
+Despite much quantitative window-dressing to the contrary, business is actually
+an inherently social and thus profoundly subjective, psychological, and
+qualitative phenomenon. The real earning potential of a company emerges not
+primarily from its book assets but its brand and reputation, for it is only by
+that reputation that it is able favorably to undertake the transactions that
+make those assets worth anything. The goods and services of an untrustworthy
+(or, worse, hated) transaction partner will trade at a significant discount to
+what they would be from a favored one. As Danny Meyer (founder of Shake Shack)
+is often quoted, “business, like life, is all about how you make people feel.
+It’s that simple, and it’s that hard.”
+
+Social and emotional matters are thus of paramount importance in business, yet
+they cannot meaningfully be quantified, and, as we’ve seen, attempting to use
+proxy metrics to optimize them can easily have the opposite of the intended
+effect. Customer enjoyment and loyalty are slippery things. A company must
+always be obsessively imagining and empathizing with the totality of the
+customer experience, which is a matter of great nuance and subtlety, hard to
+characterize and dynamically changing across time and multiple dimensions of
+interaction. A constant attention to this kind of empathy must be embedded deep
+in a company’s culture—and no amount of net-promoter-score surveys will do the
+trick.
+
+The Founder’s No (Protecting the Extraneous Essential)
+
+    We only want to make great products and when you don’t focus only on making
+    money and have reached a certain level, everything becomes about quality.
+    Right now, there is a certain cultural fascination with fast growth, IPOs
+    and so on, but I want to go slow, really slow and think long-term. It takes
+    time to do good things. You see, this cultural phenomenon of speed and
+    growth at all costs is displayed in every startup, they all look the same….
+
+    —Jesper Kouthoofd, founder of [26]Teenage Engineering
+
+Measuring things isn’t always inherently bad; trying to optimize naïve proxy
+metrics almost always is. Cost-cutting is often inherently good; doing it in a
+way that degrades the customer experience (the ultimate generating function of
+profit) is almost always bad. The incentives to stray into short-sightedness
+are many. Somebody has to be empowered to say no.
+
+Founders typically have a deep intuitive sense of the ineffable factors that
+make people love their brand, along with a well-honed sense of the company’s
+core value proposition and competitive advantage—the things that led it to
+flourish in the first place, which they by nature tend to foster and protect.
+
+    Founder-led operations often keep an edge ... because when there’s someone
+    at the top who actually gives a damn about cars, watches, bags, software,
+    or whatever the hell the company makes, it shows up in a million value
+    judgments that can’t be quantified neatly on a spreadsheet.
+
+    —[27]David Heinemeier Hansson (dhh) of 37signals
+
+Indeed, the finest case studies in holding the line against the depredations of
+MBAification typically involve the stubborn will of a founder. To build a
+company for the very long term requires an enormous amount of discipline,
+vision, and patience—and some large measure of real control. Among the greats
+in this pantheon: Walt Disney, Steve Jobs, Yvon Chouinard (Patagonia), George
+Lucas, James Dyson, and the Dumas family (Hermès). While more than half of
+those enforced control against investors through private ownership, the others
+took great pains to insulate their companies from the pressures of Wall Street
+myopia. All of them were at one time or another dismissed with eye-rolling
+contempt by managerial-minded executives in their industries. Yet they built
+some of history’s greatest companies, which were not only creatively and
+culturally successful but also financially so.
+
+Steve Jobs insisted that even hidden internal faces of Apple products be
+beautiful. One of Jobs’ heroes, Walt Disney, pursued a kind of otherworldly
+perfection at Disneyland to such an extent that I’m hard pressed to pick which
+examples to mention here. Perhaps the midcentury science fiction author (and
+friend of Walt) Ray Bradbury put it best. Describing a totally unnecessary
+fanciful architectural flourish added to the castle at Disneyland some time
+after it was built: “It cost $100,000 to build a spire you didn't need. The
+secret of Disney is doing things you don't need—and doing them well—and then
+you realize you needed them all along.” My favorite example is the Sisyphean 
+[28]polishing of every brass drinking fountain in Disneyland every single
+night. These things are hard to justify on paper, but Walt correctly [29]
+observed: “people can feel perfection.”
+
+Brass fountains at Disneyland. One afternoon on the left, next morning on the
+right.Brass fountains at Disneyland. One afternoon on the left, next morning on
+the right.
+
+Cost control is important in any business, but it is the job of the founder to
+understand and protect the extraneous essential. Creating a feeling of
+perfection in the eyes of your clients is a vastly under-appreciated moat.
+
+This is why I believe, especially in the early decades of a company’s
+existence, founders must seek always to keep their brands free from the
+excessive influence of investors and their short-sighted MBA emissaries. One
+should work only with investors who think for the very long term—and plan to
+hold the company for just as long. Such investors are much more likely to defer
+to the brand-protective vision of a founder, because they’ll have more to lose
+by destroying what made the business successful merely for short-term wins.
+This requires some large measure of control, if you can manage it, but just as
+importantly an even greater degree of personal trust in the values and
+judgement of the investor.
+
+The trouble for me at my crisis point with Norbauer & Co. was that not only was
+I not aware of any such investors but that, as far as I knew, the things I
+needed and cared about just seemed antithetical to the very premise of
+investing itself.
+
+On one of those dark days in 2023 when I was wallowing in despair, ready to
+walk away from Norbauer & Co, I pointed all of this out to my husband Alan, who
+said something along the lines of “Wait a minute. Wasn’t Andrew Wilkinson one
+of your all-time favorite human beings? And didn’t I read recently that he runs
+some kind of investment thing now?”
+
+Palm Pilot
+
+Way back in 2007, I was in Chicago for [30]the SEED conference, an event hosted
+by my longtime tech and business idols, David Heinemeier Hanson and Jason Fried
+of 37signals (another duo of unconventional founders who managed to maintain
+control over a very profitable long-term company).
+
+I was stepping off the L train after the conference, returning to my hotel
+several miles away in a city where I knew no one, so I was startled to hear my
+name. I turned to find a lanky kid, whom I remember looking like an unlikely
+hybrid of awkward geek and hipster aesthete. He had recognized my name from the
+conference badge still dangling from my neck (Tiny’s empire, incidentally, now
+includes [31]a conference badge company) and asked if I was the Ryan Norbauer
+who at the time wrote a [32]guest column for 43folders—a now mostly forgotten
+website about productivity that was widely read in those days of a much smaller
+and nerdier Internet. I reported that, regrettably, I was indeed the personage
+in question. After a brief friendly chat, we swapped email addresses and went
+on our way. That skinny kid was Andrew Wilkinson (who would go on to co-found
+Tiny), and over the following weeks and years, we struck up a long
+correspondence. I still fondly remember his beguiling habit of vicious
+self-deprecation—and of calling businesspeople who took themselves too
+seriously “wieners.”
+
+We were two insecure, upstart kids in our twenties, running two non-competing
+Web 2.0 agency businesses. Mine was doing back-end development, just as his was
+doing front-end—the now-famous Metalab that, among many other impressive
+projects, was pivotal in the design of Slack. (The full history of Metalab is
+excellently detailed in Andrew’s memoir, [33]Never Enough: From Barista to
+Billionaire). This led to an obvious and easy bond—and a lot of commiseration.
+
+Hipster Andrew from back in our agency days.Hipster Andrew from back in our
+agency days.
+
+Being fellow 37signals acolytes also made us feel like members of a furtive
+club of contrarian outsiders, a new guard of folks in the tech world who were
+questioning the orthodoxies of Silicon Valley, venture capital investing, and
+“enterprise software” with a kind of [34]scorched-earth sarcastic rationalism.
+Andrew and I both have always been deeply skeptical of consensus narratives
+about how one is supposed to live a happy and successful life (a trait I find
+common among serial entrepreneurs). This line from Andrew’s memoir is one I
+could very easily have written about myself:
+
+    To this day, if anyone tells me what to do—no matter how reasonable—I will
+    dig my heels in and resist, flashing back to being a kid.
+
+In our teens, we had also both turned to computers and entrepreneurship as ways
+of answering and escaping uncomfortable aspects of our youth. We had come of
+age at that brief time when being part of internet culture made one feel
+special and weird—like humanity was on the cusp of something wonderful, and we
+were early to the party—in a way that I think shaped both our young identities.
+(That same spirit of the early web that is still a central feature of my own
+aesthetic life all these years later.) Another quote from his memoir:
+
+    My [tech] obsession was so severe that my unfortunate nickname in school
+    was “Palm Pilot” because I walked around taking notes on a little
+    black-and-white PalmPilot personal organizer, an early precursor to the
+    iPhone. As you can imagine, the girls at school found this irresistible.
+
+Not only did I excitedly carry one of these very same devices around at my own
+school but occasionally complemented it with a chirping Star Trek combadge on
+my shirt. We were clearly both cut from the same ridiculous cloth.
+
+Knowing someone who shared so many of my values, goals, and neuroses simply
+made me feel less alone during a very stressful period of company-building, and
+our conversations became a kind of animating force for me in those days of
+drudgery and stress. Andrew was, as Alan would remind me nearly twenty years
+later, one of my favorite humans.
+
+Mini-Buffett
+
+Although I spoke with Andrew less often as the years passed, I was peripherally
+aware that he had become a professional investor, which—not knowing any of the
+details—is a fact I would of course normally have been disposed to meet with
+mild scorn. But knowing Andrew, I figured he must have found some charmingly
+idiosyncratic and benign take on it; I just never troubled to find out what it
+was.
+
+It was only after my husband’s suggestion about reaching out to Tiny that I
+looked seriously into what Andrew had been doing with his fund these past
+years.
+
+The first encouraging sign was the company’s unpretentious name. As Andrew
+explains:
+
+    We felt that all these private equity and investment firms had ridiculous,
+    self-important (or borderline evil-sounding) names like BlackRock,
+    Greywolf, and Maverick. We liked Tiny because it felt down to earth and
+    friendly and, frankly, kind of ironic and funny.
+
+Trying to learn as much as I could about how they operated, I started listening
+to [35]Andrew’s many popular interviews on the My First Million podcast and
+elsewhere, where it became clear that he had indeed found his way into a
+characteristically nerdy and, to my mind, surprisingly inoffensive way of
+thinking about investing.
+
+I was particularly pleased to observe that deep thinking, rationality, and
+reading all seemed to be explicitly baked into Tiny’s culture. Andrew,
+incidentally, has my all-time favorite [36]Tweet on business or investing:
+
+[DraggedImage-8]
+
+The many books I heard him mention in interviews sent me down a long reading
+journey that introduced me to the mental framework behind his particular weird
+corner of the investing world, which I found in itself to be a rewarding
+brainiac adventure. There was the douchey-sounding but actually quite excellent
+[37]How to Get Rich by Felix Dennis (in which the affluent author undertakes to
+convince his reader that pursuing the goal mentioned in the title is a bad
+idea). There was [38]Invention: A Life of Learning Through Failure, by James
+Dyson (of cyclonic vacuum fame), a magnificent portrait of a founder who
+doggedly pursued a quixotic creative vision in a way that no naively rational
+manager or investor would ever abide. There was [39]The Outsiders: Eight
+Unconventional CEOs and Their Radically Rational Blueprint for Success, a
+masterpiece on business strategy and capital allocation, showing how managing
+companies in certain unorthodox ways actually leads to better results for
+shareholders. But surely the most instructive of these was [40]The Snowball:
+Warren Buffett and the Business of Life, an incredibly dense and exhaustive
+biography of the man who inspired Andrew’s second professional life as an
+investor.
+
+Tiny is often called “the Berkshire Hathaway of the Internet” due to their
+modeling their philosophy on that of Buffett and his business partner the late
+Charlie Munger. So earnest is their admiration that they run a little side
+business selling a $2,598 set of [41]bronze busts of the duo. (Not quite as
+cool as Mr. McDuck, but not bad.)
+
+Munger and Buffett busts from Berkshire NerdsMunger and Buffett busts from
+Berkshire Nerds
+
+The Berkshire approach focuses on acquiring profitable entities with a strong
+brand moat and loyal customer base, keeping out of the way of what originally
+made the company successful, supporting operations with ethical and experienced
+executives, and holding the purchased shares indefinitely. (Insanely, but
+tellingly, this is somehow considered a eccentric and contrarian take in the
+world of institutional investing—and an approach that, despite its prominent
+success, has rarely been copied.) Andrew and his co-founder at Tiny, Chris
+Sparling, have extended Buffett’s model to the world of technology and
+design—areas that they know well but in which Berkshire has historically been
+reluctant to operate. (It is outside their “circle of competence,” as Munger
+would have put it.)
+
+Two really important and relevant recurring themes of The Snowball are
+Buffett’s very long time horizon when it comes to investing (“buy and hold
+forever”) and the paramount importance of reputation in business. Note that
+these are both explicit counterpoints to the things that I said I dislike most
+about the typical investor mentality (namely, short-termism and an indifference
+to brand erosion).
+
+As Buffett famously once said in a briefing to employees, “Lose money for the
+firm, and I will be understanding. Lose a shred of reputation for the firm, and
+I will be ruthless.” There are countless other examples in his biography of an
+obsession with reputation. He stresses that, even when misbehavior in any one
+transaction could be financially advantageous, it is not worth the potentially
+catastrophic damage to one’s brand—personal or otherwise.
+
+This has often accrued to very real business benefits for Berkshire. Buffett
+drafts up very short and simple (1-2 page) offer letters to potential
+acquisitions, predicated on good faith rather than legal constraints.
+Berkshire’s goal is, by cultivating a reputation for fair-dealing, integrity,
+and zero bullshit, to be a preferred buyer and thus to avoid getting into
+bidding wars. Founders proactively want to sell to Berkshire, because they want
+to see their good names endure and their companies flourish over the long haul,
+and they can trust Buffett to keep his promise to do just that.
+
+My Tim Cook
+
+In my study of both the Berkshire and Tiny approaches (to which, I must
+confess, I dedicated some months of reading and rumination) there was one other
+critical idea I encountered. Buffett rarely gets too deep into the operational
+weeds of the companies in which he invests. He buys firms that he believes have
+strong market positions and then stays largely out of the way, collecting
+dividends while waiting patiently for the next good opportunity to come along.
+“Lethargy bordering on sloth remains the cornerstone of our investment style,”
+as he wrote in a shareholder letter.
+
+As a first order of business on an acquisition where the founders wish to
+change or diminish their role, Tiny seeks to bring in an executive. This was a
+lesson Andrew learned by chance before he even became aware of Buffett’s
+philosophy. He asked his old friend Mark to look after Metalab while he was
+away on vacation and discovered, upon his return, that things were actually
+operating more smoothly than when he was micro-managing the company before his
+departure. It’s a lesson I wish I had been forced to learn much earlier in my
+own entrepreneurial career, and it’s frankly one I still have trouble
+internalizing to this day.
+
+    In hindsight, it made all the sense in the world to do this, but at the
+    time it was an anomalous thought that I almost felt guilty about. It’s a
+    decision that many entrepreneurs fear making. I was embracing what I came
+    to call Lazy Leadership: the idea that a CEO’s job is not to do all the
+    work, but more importantly to design the machine and systems.
+
+In all the stories of visionary founders I’ve read over the years, there was a
+subtle theme present for every one whom I admire: each had a trusted executive
+who handled the financial and operational side of things while the founder
+focused on the equally essential matters of brand and customer experience. Walt
+Disney had his brother Roy, who fronted for him with banks, struck legal deals,
+and made sure all of his little brother’s grand dreams were actually
+financially feasible. Gene Roddenberry notoriously had his rapacious attorney
+Leonard Maizlish strike the business deal with the studio that gave him
+ironclad creative control over Star Trek: The Next Generation (the only way a
+wonderfully crazy show like that could ever have been made) along with an
+usually strong financial stake in any resulting revenues. I once heard an
+interview with billionaire luxury shoe designer Christian Louboutin about how
+he rarely looks at financial statements and trusts his business partners to
+handle everything other than the creative work; he just thinks about shoes all
+day. George Lucas had a similar arrangement at Lucasfilm. Dyson has a CEO
+running things in Singapore so he can tinker around with wacky R&D projects in
+England. And, of course, Steve Jobs had Tim Cook.
+
+I heard Andrew tell many stories of companies either that he had run or that
+Tiny had acquired where the founder was essentially holding the company back by
+not delegating to a trusted executive. Tiny’s strategy, immediately on buying a
+business (if not before), is typically to find someone who has run a similar
+company but at approximately double the size of the current business—the idea
+being that they’ll know from direct experience how to take the business to the
+next level. For example, when they bought Aeropress (and the founder wanted to
+step out of the picture), Tiny hired the former President of SodaStream to run
+it. That CEO massively grew the business in a few short years, leaving Andrew
+able to luxuriate in the results idly from afar. Something similar happened
+with Dribbble, where its founders had grown a huge base of happy users but
+weren't sure where to take the business next on their own. Under Tiny’s new
+CEO, the community saw explosive growth, while still allowing the founders to
+hang around and keep doing the bits they enjoyed.
+
+I started to get excited imagining what it might look like for me to be off in
+my keyboard playground all day like Dyson or Louboutin—focusing only on making
+amazing product and building the brand. I would have been quite happy to get
+out of the way so that someone who actually knew what they were doing could
+keep an eye out for those cash incinerators, tax filings, bank nonsense, and
+all the little logistical minutiae that gobbled up my creative energy (and, for
+that matter, my will to carry on in the business at all).
+
+I can’t stress enough how transformative this simple shift in thinking was to
+me. While I had often sought, here and there, to outsource simple tasks as
+cheaply as possible in the past (such as hiring a warehouse crew to put things
+in boxes), the thought had never occurred to me to find someone actually to run
+my company for me. I think I had also somehow implicitly felt a (stupidly)
+moralizing obligation to do all those things myself in order to be a worthy
+founder. But, of course, there is no virtue in soldiering on through something
+at which your skills are only middling at best, especially when you could be
+focusing instead on areas where you actually have some unique value to add.
+
+Here is how Andrew puts it in his book:
+
+    …there is always somebody else who loves the job you hate. You might find
+    accounting boring, for example, but I promise you there is somebody whose
+    idea of a great night is eight hours of pivot tables in Excel. You might
+    find coding to be the most laborious and painstaking job on Earth; someone
+    out there can’t believe you’re going to pay them to write code. And you
+    might hate running a company, which was someone’s dream job.
+
+It’s basically the idea of comparative advantage from economics: a non-zero-sum
+game where all parties win by contributing what they do best. Presumably there
+was a spreadsheet jockey out there who needed someone like me to create the
+artistic product that generated numbers to populate his or her pivot tables. I
+realized I needed my Tim Cook.
+
+And so I decided to approach my old buddy Palm Pilot to see if he might have
+any interest in partnering up with the world’s nerdiest luxury business to make
+exactly that happen.
+
+Money that I didn’t need
+
+    The business world has many people playing zero sum games and a few playing
+    positive sum games searching for each other in the crowd. —Naval Ravikant
+
+Getting an offer from Tiny was, oddly, much easier than getting a quote from
+many manufacturers I’ve worked with. I simply gave them a little writeup on the
+history of my business (way shorter, in fact, than the one you’re currently
+reading) along with a login to our Shopify so they could check some basic
+financials. Tiny only ends up investing in far less than 1% of the
+opportunities that come across their desk, but apparently the analysts whom
+Andrew put on the task of evaluating Norbauer were compelled by what they
+found.
+
+The offer was extremely short and simple, in classic Berkshire style. They
+would make an investment into the business that would leave me fully
+financially de-risked (even if the company went to zero), and they would bring
+in a talented executive to function as a kind of COO. (At some point we just
+took to calling this role “Norbauer’s Tim Cook.”) In exchange, they would get a
+49% minority share in the business and a commensurate portion of any future
+profits.
+
+Incidentally, if it were merely a matter of a share in future profits, I would
+readily have taken less than 51%, but I felt that retaining control was
+important to assure the keyboard community that I wasn’t ceding the business to
+the money people. This also gave me the power to ensure that no cost
+efficiencies would ever get in the way of the client experience: my Founder’s
+No.
+
+Our shared long-term strategic vision was to launch the ready-to-type line I
+had been building for years, starting first with the Seneca, and in doing this,
+to give us a shot at building a great luxury brand that could endure for
+decades.
+
+I knew it was a good idea to accept the offer when, on sharing the details with
+all my friends in the VC world, every single one of them told me I shouldn’t
+take it. Many suggested that I should get competing offers from private equity
+firms (not something I would ever in a million years consider). But some did
+raise one reasonable objection. The funny thing is that Norbauer has always
+been actually perfectly well capitalized. So, as they pointed out, I could
+actually in theory just have figured out how to hire an executive entirely on
+my own using cash in the bank.
+
+But that sounded really hard, and I frankly just didn’t know how to do it. I’ve
+historically been awful at hiring and extracting the best performance out of
+employees—and especially letting people go when it’s obvious that things aren’t
+working out. (I’m simply too polite—another area where I could do to be a bit
+more like my desk-side mentor.) This failing of mine is costly and problematic
+enough when it’s a low-paying menial job, but with something as high-stakes as
+a well-paid executive there just seemed like so many things that could have
+gone wrong, and I didn’t trust myself to get it right on the first try. Tiny,
+by contrast, does this kind of strategic hiring all day long; it's their
+superpower, and their secret sauce.
+
+Anti-goals
+
+I likely could have negotiated for more money than Tiny offered, but I didn’t
+really care. I figured if these guys know what they’re doing, the company will
+do well and we’ll probably make some money eventually together. I was looking
+for long-term incentive alignment with smart people rather than a quick payday,
+and my goals were primarily subjective and psychological.
+
+Andrew, borrowing from Munger, stresses the importance of anti-goals in
+business. Taleb calls this the via negativa: the fact that it’s often easier to
+arrive at what you want by eliminating bad things rather than adding new
+theoretically good ones. I’m a big via negativa kind of guy.
+
+Here was my anti-goals list for a potential Tiny deal:
+
+  • Ever touching a spreadsheet The main thing I needed was someone to do the
+    important business analysis for me, attending to the low-hanging fruit but
+    without optimizing the client experience into the ground.
+  • Drowning in “little tasks” While productivity and hard work have (to a
+    fault) never been scarce commodities for me, I’m really only effective when
+    I can serially hyper-focus on things. The only things I’m any good for
+    require me to go off into the wilderness, as it were, for weeks at a time
+    so I can think clearly and deeply on problems. I needed to get the endless
+    little administrative to-dos off my desk so I could actually effectively do
+    that.
+  • Feeling alone This last is perhaps the most important. I was just sick of
+    not having anyone to validate or sanity-check my strategic choices and
+    plans—to encourage me in the things I was doing right, and to help me
+    realize when I was putting my attention on the wrong things. As a solo
+    entrepreneur I’ve always been prone to anxious freak-outs when little
+    hiccups arise in a business, because I know if I’m not taking them
+    seriously there is nobody else to do so. I had increasingly come to realize
+    that facing problems like this entirely on my own simply feels bad. Maybe
+    it’s a kind of weakness and I should be embarrassed, but in any case I had
+    at least reached the level of maturity to acknowledge that, at this point
+    in my life, I wanted something else.
+
+Optionality
+
+In addition to anti-goals, another really important thing for me is
+optionality. I reached out to Andrew to clarify some edge-case scenarios before
+agreeing to the deal, and he gave me the following (astonishing) assurances:
+
+  • If the business failed, no big deal. It happens, he said; we share the risk
+    and just suck it up together and move on if so, no hard feelings.
+  • I could walk away whenever I wanted. I really am a contrarian bitch; it’s
+    deep in my veins. I basically find it impossible to do something if I have
+    to do it, and even if I can whack up the ginger under those circumstances
+    the work becomes slow and painful. (At the very least, I have to be tricked
+    into believing it was my idea.) Andrew told me early on that I wouldn’t be
+    shackled to the business, and if I ever wanted to walk away they would just
+    find someone to replace me. That’s not going to happen, but only because I
+    know it could if I wanted it to.
+  • The big red FUCK OFF button on my desk Knowing how I bristle at being
+    constrained, Andrew volunteered another point of optionality. He recounted
+    the story of another company in which Tiny had made a majority
+    (controlling) investment. The founder had stayed on running the business
+    and Tiny occasionally made managerial recommendations. That founder
+    eventually got annoyed, telling Tiny to fuck off and stop telling him what
+    to do. And they actually did as instructed, trusting that he knew his
+    company better than anyone. The founder sold the company for some healthy
+    multiple just a few years later, creating a huge payday for Tiny. Andrew
+    said he considered this a fantastic outcome and wouldn’t have done anything
+    different. He offered this as an example that I could tell his team to get
+    out of my hair at any time as well.
+
+Yes
+
+As we were nearing finalizing things, the Partner at Tiny who was putting the
+deal together reached out to me to make one last clarifying point. He said he
+just wanted to check in with me to make sure I didn’t have revenue growth
+expectations that were too high for the first few years.
+
+Yes, you read that right; this was a potential investor who was checking with
+me, a creative founder, that I wasn’t going to expect them to MBA the shit out
+of my company right off the bat, because if so they weren’t sure they could
+deliver.
+
+I happily signed on the dotted line.
+
+Caleb and Year Zero
+
+    Do not seek a replica of yourself to delegate to, or to promote. Watch out
+    for this, it is a common error with people setting out to build a company.
+    You have strengths and you have weaknesses in your own character. It makes
+    no sense to increase those strengths your organization already possesses
+    and not address the weaknesses.
+    —Felix Dennis, [42]How to Get Rich
+
+The executive whom Tiny proposed to be my Tim Cook was Caleb Bernabe, who is
+now our Executive in Residence (a position he shares among a few portfolio
+companies that don’t yet require a full-time executive). He acts essentially as
+our COO, but his job description is basically doing all the things that I
+hate—a skillset at which he inexplicably but admirably excels.
+
+Like me (and Andrew), Caleb is a fellow refugee from both startups and
+university education, a founder who sold his company and ended up where he is
+now through a series of accidents during a listless period of existential
+crisis—essentially as a solution to boredom.
+
+When it comes to being a hipster aesthete, though, Caleb puts even Andrew to
+shame. He’s into 90s hip hop, vintage Porsches, and Leica cameras (film only,
+of course). Purely for fun, he runs a fashionable [43]natural wine bar in
+Victoria, BC.
+
+Tourist Wine Bar (exterior)Tourist Wine Bar (exterior)Tourist Wine Bar
+(interior)Tourist Wine Bar (interior)
+
+But my favorite fact about him is that, when he came to Utah to offer moral
+support at a conference talk I gave, he showed up in a streetwear hoodie and
+newly bleached-blond hair, looking like he had just rolled out of a Santa
+Monica skate park. Yet I knew that the very next day he was on his way to New
+York to negotiate on Tiny’s behalf in a high-stakes bidding war against one of
+the richest men on earth and an army of slick-haired suit-wearing MBA
+consultants. (He showed up in the hoodie.)
+
+He’s exactly the sort of person I’d expect Andrew to pick as an analytical and
+operational wizard.
+
+Caleb personally co-invested in Norbauer & Co. as part of the Tiny deal,
+following the general ethos of maximum skin-in-the-game incentive alignment. He
+makes sure the lights stay on, projects stay on track, bills get paid, papers
+filed, and that I never have to monitor things like cashflow or other
+accounting details. Whenever financial modeling is required, he dives into
+those pivot tables with abandon but otherwise just leaves me alone to make the
+keyboards nice—with some welcome cheerleading from the sidelines when required.
+
+Caleb is without question one of the smartest and most competent people I’ve
+ever had the pleasure to work with. There is approximately zero chance I would
+ever have hired so well if I had opted to go it alone.
+
+It’s part of a broader trend I’ve noted: everyone at Tiny is just so
+ridiculously smart, competent, and rational. One presumes that such people
+exist in the world, but I’ve rarely had occasion to interact with them in my
+professional life. It’s all the rarer to find so many all in one place, and
+seemingly happy no less. (I vividly remember my first video call with Aman, the
+Partner assigned to evaluate a potential deal with Norbauer. I saw a bunch of
+insanely obscure books on his shelf that I thought nobody on earth had ever
+read other than me, so we spent half the call excitedly geeking out about that,
+rather than troubling too much about any details of the deal.)
+
+The best part of my collaboration with Caleb in this past year is that we are
+so consistently on the same page about strategy, cost/quality tradeoffs, and
+vision for the brand. Of course, I was very careful when weighing the deal (and
+Caleb as an executive) to ensure that this would be the case. But he quickly
+put me at ease on that front. To also demonstrate my point about the articulate
+intelligence of the people at Tiny, I might as well quote at length from his
+pitch email to me:
+
+    As a frequent participant in hobbies and interests centred around extreme
+    devotion to detail and artistry, I resonate with your approach to building.
+    What’s even more striking to me, however, is your philosophy around luxury
+    and brand. My existential issue with fashion, cars, even art and dining to
+    some extent, is the misplaced idea of status that many casual participants
+    (conspicuous consumers) attach to items and experiences. I often lament the
+    mass adoption of status symbols, and search intently for those with a
+    legitimate devotion to craft. You called this approach an antidote to late
+    stage capitalism, as opposed to a result of it. I love that.
+    I’ve long wondered what would result if I were able to apply my ability and
+    passion for building businesses towards an opportunity that exists more in
+    this realm, rather than that of spreadsheets and sales optimizations (as
+    much as I genuinely love those things, too). Usually, I end up thinking
+    that this seems like too big of an ask for the universe, having my cake and
+    eating it too. I feel genuinely, however, that working with Norbauer may be
+    an opportunity to do just that.
+
+What more need I say.
+
+I can also report that Tiny as a whole has been ridiculously respectful of my
+role as founder and guardian of the brand. Well into the partnership, I asked
+Aman for his perspective on a video script I was working on, and here is the
+beautiful message he wrote me:
+
+    I want to be careful about giving too much of my take. Norbauer is an
+    extension of you. And I’d be careful of questioning your instinct too much
+    especially when it comes to the less tangible things about the business. It
+    could compromise authenticity. Ideally, people listening hear your voice.
+
+Caleb also once pointed out that various folks at the fund have been very
+interested in and curious about Norbauer since the acquisition—enthusiastically
+following along with the more subjective accomplishments we’ve been
+accumulating in the past year—but nobody at the head office has ever quizzed
+him on how many keyboards we’ve sold yet. Everyone remains far more interested
+in the long-term prospects for the brand and just diligently doing what we need
+to make it happen.
+
+Psychological effects
+
+While my motive for seeking a deal with Tiny was fundamentally psychological
+(i.e., wanting to walk out the window a little less), there have been a number
+of other unexpected—but very welcome—changes in my emotional relationship to
+the business.
+
+It turns out that completely financially de-risking for a founder is pretty
+transformative. Even though I had always been fully prepared to lose every
+dollar I had put into the business, I think some part of me always worried that
+if things went to zero and I couldn’t return our personal capital I’d be
+letting my family down, which probably made me overly cautious. Now that I’m
+playing with the house’s money, as it were, I have a kind of emotional distance
+that makes it easier to reason dispassionately about risks.
+
+In fact, I would say that the emotional voltage around decision-making in
+general is much lower for me. When you’re a sole founder who is making all
+executive decisions, each one carries a massive emotional weight. It’s not just
+a question of the financial consequences, but for me at least it has often been
+intimately bound up with a sense of self-worth and identity. If anything goes
+wrong, there is nobody else to blame but me. Something about stepping back and
+becoming a partner with others in the business helps me think about the company
+more like an investor (the good kind), thinking about the business at a
+slightly higher level of abstraction. Together, we all just try to do our best
+and approach things rationally.
+
+Interestingly, I’ve also noticed an increased cadence and cost-consciousness
+has coalesced in my daily engagement with the business. There is something
+about having other people whom I like and respect who have a reason to care
+that helps me feel motivated to pay attention to those things that actually
+serve the business. Before, when it was just me, I had nobody to harm other
+than myself—which somehow made it much easier for me to indolently inflict that
+harm.
+
+Since the deal, the business has already been more profitable than it ever has.
+Or so I’m told. (Louboutin-style, I usually don’t even look at the financial
+reports Caleb sends.)
+
+Production on the Seneca proceeded beautifully, as I had hoped, through 2024.
+And we sold out our private “Edition Zero” offering almost instantly. We were
+awarded two patents for head-turning advancements in keyboard tech, with others
+in the pipeline. I have my Tim Cook, and my anti-goals have been kept far at
+bay.
+
+Things in Year 0 have played out exactly as Andrew puts it in his book:
+
+    I realized that [Tiny] appealed to founders who didn’t relish the idea of
+    selling their beloved company to some private equity firm run by people who
+    viewed their business as a spreadsheet and would chop it up for parts then
+    flip it to the highest bidder. Founders like us. We could come in, give the
+    founders a huge payday, and do our best to solve all of their problems.
+    Problems we’d learned to solve the hard way. It didn’t mean they had to
+    leave, either. We could offer deals where the founders stayed on and kept
+    running the business, taking some chips off the table. Or, if a founder
+    wanted, they could just advise the business and leave the day-to-day to us.
+
+Year 1, and Straight on to the Retrofuture
+
+Now it’s 2025 and I’m moving into my second year with Tiny’s help.
+
+We just brought on a new member of our executive team to head up Client
+Experience, Taeha Kim, who is also now an incentive-aligned investor in the
+business. Taeha has long been the leading tastemaker and influencer in our
+industry and, as part of our deal, [44]his half-million-subscriber YouTube
+channel came to Norbauer & Co. with him. There is probably no single person on
+this planet better poised to do this critical job for us, and I’m certain that
+this deal would never have happened without Tiny’s involvement (I would simply
+not have had the ambition or risk tolerance even to explore it.)
+
+The Seneca is now a real thing in the physical world, and it has been [45]
+generating enormous [46]buzz, both within the keyboard world and beyond, as we
+moved towards our more public [47]First Edition launch this week.
+
+The product and brand are stronger than ever. I have an amazing crew to dream
+alongside me. We’re doing cool shit together and having a great time.
+
+And not once have I even had to turn the key to open up the little protective
+acrylic cover over the big red FUCK OFF button on my desk. But it has brought
+me great comfort to know it was always there.
+
+I used to think that building something great required carrying all the
+significant burdens on my own. That the price of creative freedom was solitude.
+And that those shards of glass were just a necessary part of the meal.
+
+At least with respect to one rather exceptional investment firm, I was wrong.
+
+I just had to find investors who think for the long term—and who respect the
+art of business at least as much as the business of business. People who could
+run the spreadsheets for me, but also see beyond them. And find them I did.
+
+For the first time in my life as a founder, I’m not staring alone into an
+abyss.
+
+I’m looking into The Future.
+
+And I’m smiling like an idiot.
+
+Get my future dispatches delivered directly to your inbox.
+
+[48][                    ] SUBSCRIBE [three-dots]
+Now check your email and confirm your subscription.
+
+Further reading
+
+[50]
+Keyboard Academy
+
+The Outsider Option: Why I Sold Half my Company to Tiny
+
+[51]
+The Berm
+
+Death and Underachievement: A Guide to Happiness in Work
+
+[52]
+The Berm
+
+A Forgotten Future
+
+© 2010-2025 Ryan Norbauer
+[53]Visit my luxury keyboard design studio.
+
+References:
+
+[1] https://ryan.norbauer.com/
+[2] https://ryan.norbauer.com/journal/the-outsider-option-why-i-sold-half-my-company-to-tiny/#/portal
+[3] https://ryan.norbauer.com/
+[4] https://ryan.norbauer.com/biography/
+[5] https://ryan.norbauer.com/reading-list/
+[6] https://ryan.norbauer.com/journal/
+[7] https://ryan.norbauer.com/journal/the-outsider-option-why-i-sold-half-my-company-to-tiny/#/portal
+[8] https://ryan.norbauer.com/biography
+[9] https://norbauer.co/
+[10] https://www.norbauer.co/?ref=ryan.norbauer.com
+[11] https://www.tiny.com/?ref=ryan.norbauer.com
+[12] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AeroPress?ref=ryan.norbauer.com
+[13] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letterboxd?ref=ryan.norbauer.com
+[14] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dribbble?ref=ryan.norbauer.com
+[15] https://serato.com/?ref=ryan.norbauer.com
+[16] https://www.metalab.com/?ref=ryan.norbauer.com
+[17] https://frosty.inc/?ref=ryan.norbauer.com
+[18] https://www.hodinkee.com/magazine?ref=ryan.norbauer.com
+[19] https://geekhack.org/?ref=ryan.norbauer.com
+[20] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDDBU8kkJZw&t=69s&ref=ryan.norbauer.com
+[21] https://www.norbauer.co/pages/the-seneca?ref=ryan.norbauer.com
+[22] https://amzn.to/3CpskYQ?ref=ryan.norbauer.com
+[23] https://sohl-dickstein.github.io/2022/11/06/strong-Goodhart.html?ref=ryan.norbauer.com
+[24] https://amzn.to/4g32Gag?ref=ryan.norbauer.com
+[25] https://amzn.to/40lJC1a?ref=ryan.norbauer.com
+[26] https://teenage.engineering/?ref=ryan.norbauer.com
+[27] https://world.hey.com/dhh/beans-and-vibes-in-even-measure-8eff819c?ref=ryan.norbauer.com
+[28] https://youtu.be/wG1BrdzirnU?si=oDYY_1cyZVsbdf4O&t=106&ref=ryan.norbauer.com
+[29] https://www.forbes.com/sites/disneyinstitute/2020/02/04/what-do-tiki-birds-have-in-common-with-customer-experience-learn-why-intentionality-matters/?ref=ryan.norbauer.com
+[30] https://signalvnoise.com/posts/610-announcing-the-seed-conference-featuring-jim-coudal-jason-fried-and-carlos-segura?ref=ryan.norbauer.com
+[31] https://www.conferencebadge.com/?ref=ryan.norbauer.com
+[32] https://ryan.norbauer.com/journal/death-and-underachievement-a-guide-to-happiness-in-work/
+[33] https://amzn.to/4gbRLed?ref=ryan.norbauer.com
+[34] https://signalvnoise.com/posts/347-youre-not-on-a-fucking-plane-and-if-you-are-it-doesnt-matter?ref=ryan.norbauer.com
+[35] https://www.youtube.com/@MyFirstMillionPod/search?query=andrew+wilkinson&ref=ryan.norbauer.com
+[36] https://x.com/awilkinson/status/1646990916408995840?ref=ryan.norbauer.com
+[37] https://amzn.to/40BYWa4?ref=ryan.norbauer.com
+[38] https://amzn.to/4gj4FXZ?ref=ryan.norbauer.com
+[39] https://amzn.to/3WBS6QD?ref=ryan.norbauer.com
+[40] https://amzn.to/4jFDg5g?ref=ryan.norbauer.com
+[41] https://www.berkshirenerds.store/?ref=ryan.norbauer.com
+[42] https://amzn.to/3CpskYQ?ref=ryan.norbauer.com
+[43] https://touristwinebar.com/?ref=ryan.norbauer.com
+[44] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u11-pBP9GA0&ref=ryan.norbauer.com
+[45] https://daringfireball.net/linked/2025/03/20/the-seneca?ref=ryan.norbauer.com
+[46] https://www.theverge.com/keyboards/633344/norbauer-seneca-3600-keyboard-peek?ref=ryan.norbauer.com
+[47] https://www.norbauer.co/products/the-seneca?ref=ryan.norbauer.com
+[50] https://ryan.norbauer.com/journal/the-outsider-option-why-i-sold-half-my-company-to-tiny/
+[51] https://ryan.norbauer.com/journal/death-and-underachievement-a-guide-to-happiness-in-work/
+[52] https://ryan.norbauer.com/journal/a-forgotten-future/
+[53] https://norbauer.co/
diff --git a/static/archive/wattenberger-com-zl39ri.txt b/static/archive/wattenberger-com-zl39ri.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..a86340c
--- /dev/null
+++ b/static/archive/wattenberger-com-zl39ri.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,303 @@
+[1]
+
+Our interfaces have
+lost their senses
+
+Think about how you experience the world—
+
+you touch, you hear, you move.
+
+[dance1] [dance1] [dance1] [dance1]
+[dance-grou]
+
+But our digital world has been getting flatter, more muted.
+
+Reduced to text under glass screens.
+
+This shift made interfaces simpler.
+But was that really the goal?
+
+An interface is the bridge between
+the human
+&
+the machine.
+[human]
+[human] [machine]
+It's how we tell computers what we want,
+[arrow-righ]
+and it's how computers communicate back to us.
+[arrow-left]
+The shape should fit how we work,
+for ergonomics and ease of use
+and it should fit how the computer works.
+for simplicity and a good mental model
+Recently, we've been too focused on fitting to the computer's shape, and not
+enough to our own bodies.
+[machine]
+
+The Great Flattening
+
+Computers used to be physical beasts.
+
+We programmed them by punching cards, plugging in wires, and flipping switches.
+Programmers walked among banks of switches and cables, physically
+choreographing their logic. Being on a computer used to be a full-body
+experience.
+
+[tech0]
+[tech1]
+[transition]
+
+Then came terminals and command lines. Physical knobs turned into typed
+commands—more powerful, but our digital world became less embodied. Then came
+terminals and command lines. Physical knobs turned into typed commands—more
+powerful, but our digital world became less embodied. Then came terminals and
+command lines. Physical knobs turned into typed commands—more powerful, but our
+digital world became less embodied. Then came terminals and command lines.
+Physical knobs turned into typed commands—more powerful, but our digital world
+became less embodied. Then came terminals and command lines. Physical knobs
+turned into typed commands—more powerful, but our digital world became less
+embodied. Then came terminals and command lines. Physical knobs turned into
+typed commands—more powerful, but our digital world became less embodied.
+
+[tech2]
+[transition]
+
+We brought back some of the tactile controls with GUIs—graphical user
+interfaces. We skeumorphed the heck out of our screens, with digital switches,
+flat sliders, and folder icons. But we kept some of the the functionality in
+the physical world, with slots to stick disks into and big ol' power buttons. 
+We brought back some of the tactile controls with GUIs—graphical user
+interfaces. We skeumorphed the heck out of our screens, with digital switches,
+flat sliders, and folder icons. But we kept some of the the functionality in
+the physical world, with slots to stick disks into and big ol' power buttons. 
+We brought back some of the tactile controls with GUIs—graphical user
+interfaces. We skeumorphed the heck out of our screens, with digital switches,
+flat sliders, and folder icons. But we kept some of the the functionality in
+the physical world, with slots to stick disks into and big ol' power buttons. 
+We brought back some of the tactile controls with GUIs—graphical user
+interfaces. We skeumorphed the heck out of our screens, with digital switches,
+flat sliders, and folder icons. But we kept some of the the functionality in
+the physical world, with slots to stick disks into and big ol' power buttons. 
+We brought back some of the tactile controls with GUIs—graphical user
+interfaces. We skeumorphed the heck out of our screens, with digital switches,
+flat sliders, and folder icons. But we kept some of the the functionality in
+the physical world, with slots to stick disks into and big ol' power buttons. 
+We brought back some of the tactile controls with GUIs—graphical user
+interfaces. We skeumorphed the heck out of our screens, with digital switches,
+flat sliders, and folder icons. But we kept some of the the functionality in
+the physical world, with slots to stick disks into and big ol' power buttons.
+
+[tech3]
+[transition]
+
+Then came touchscreens.
+What a beautiful thing! We get to [2]poke things directly!
+But now we live in an flat land, with everything behind a glass display case. 
+Then came touchscreens.
+What a beautiful thing! We get to [3]poke things directly!
+But now we live in an flat land, with everything behind a glass display case. 
+Then came touchscreens.
+What a beautiful thing! We get to [4]poke things directly!
+But now we live in an flat land, with everything behind a glass display case. 
+Then came touchscreens.
+What a beautiful thing! We get to [5]poke things directly!
+But now we live in an flat land, with everything behind a glass display case. 
+Then came touchscreens.
+What a beautiful thing! We get to [6]poke things directly!
+But now we live in an flat land, with everything behind a glass display case. 
+Then came touchscreens.
+What a beautiful thing! We get to [7]poke things directly!
+But now we live in an flat land, with everything behind a glass display case.
+
+[tech4]
+[transition]
+
+With increasing amounts of AI chatbots, we're losing even more: texture, color,
+shape.
+Instead of interactive controls, we have a text input.
+Want to edit an image? Type a command.
+Adjust a setting? Type into a text box.
+Learn something? Read another block of text. With increasing amounts of AI
+chatbots, we're losing even more: texture, color, shape.
+Instead of interactive controls, we have a text input.
+Want to edit an image? Type a command.
+Adjust a setting? Type into a text box.
+Learn something? Read another block of text. With increasing amounts of AI
+chatbots, we're losing even more: texture, color, shape.
+Instead of interactive controls, we have a text input.
+Want to edit an image? Type a command.
+Adjust a setting? Type into a text box.
+Learn something? Read another block of text. With increasing amounts of AI
+chatbots, we're losing even more: texture, color, shape.
+Instead of interactive controls, we have a text input.
+Want to edit an image? Type a command.
+Adjust a setting? Type into a text box.
+Learn something? Read another block of text. With increasing amounts of AI
+chatbots, we're losing even more: texture, color, shape.
+Instead of interactive controls, we have a text input.
+Want to edit an image? Type a command.
+Adjust a setting? Type into a text box.
+Learn something? Read another block of text. With increasing amounts of AI
+chatbots, we're losing even more: texture, color, shape.
+Instead of interactive controls, we have a text input.
+Want to edit an image? Type a command.
+Adjust a setting? Type into a text box.
+Learn something? Read another block of text.
+
+[tech5]
+[tech6]
+
+The Joy of Doing
+
+We've been successfully removing all friction from our apps — think about how
+effortless it is to scroll through a social feed. But is that what we want?
+Compare the feeling of doomscrolling to kneading dough, playing an instrument,
+sketching... these take effort, but they're also deeply satisfying. When you
+strip away too much friction, meaning and satisfaction go with it.
+
+Think about how you use physical tools. Drawing isn't just moving your
+hand—it's the feel of the pencil against paper, the tiny adjustments of
+pressure, the sound of graphite scratching. You shift your body to reach the
+other side of the canvas. You erase with your other hand. You step back to see
+the whole picture.
+
+We made painting feel like typing,
+
+[typing]
+[art-transi]
+
+but we should have made typing feel like painting.
+
+[artist]
+
+Putting the you back in UI
+
+So how might our interfaces look if we shaped them to fit us?
+
+We think in movement, [movement]
+in space, [space]
+in sound,
+[sound]
+in patterns.
+[patterns]
+
+We use our hands to sculpt, our eyes to scan, our ears to catch patterns.
+
+Our computers can communicate to us in many different formats, each with their
+own strengths:
+
+Text
+Great for depth, detail, and precision.
+[images]
+But it doesn't always have to be in full paragraphs. How about showing key
+points first, then letting users expand?
+Visualizations
+Ideal for spatial relationships, trends, and quick insights.
+[vision]
+Can we show more content spatially? Or encode it in charts or colors?
+Sound
+Perfect for alerts and background awareness. Also, patterns.
+[hearing]
+Why are most web UIs silent? Can we use subtle chimes or sonification to
+highlight patterns?
+Haptics
+Provides passive feedback (vibrations, force).
+[touch]
+Here's one I always forget about! We can vibrate phones to alert or convey
+patterns.
+
+And what about the reverse! We can communicate to our computers in many
+different ways, each with their own strengths:
+
+Typing
+Precise, detailed, and familiar
+[typing2]
+Good for composing long-form thoughts, keyboard shortcuts, and rough direction.
+Clicking & Dragging
+Direct, fine-grained control.
+[clicking]
+Great for spatial tasks (design, organization) and pointing at
+things-on-a-screen.
+Tapping, Swiping, Pinching
+Intuitive for direct manipulation.
+[tapping]
+Great for mobile, but do we have to limit guestures to mimicking mouse
+interactions?
+Gesturing
+Hands-free, fluid, and expressive.
+[guesturing]
+Could be powerful for accessibility, quick actions, and complex fine
+control—reliable detection feels very possible at this time.
+Speaking
+Easy for loose thoughts.
+[speaking]
+LLMs have made speech more viable—can we let users think out loud or navigate
+roughly with their voice?
+
+And the real magic happens when we combine different modalities. You can't read
+and listen and speak at the same time—try reading this excerpt while talking
+about your day:
+
+If it had not rained on a certain May morning Valancy Stirling’s whole life
+would have been entirely different. She would have gone, with the rest of her
+clan, to Aunt Wellington’s engagement picnic and Dr. Trent would have gone to
+Montreal. But it did rain and you shall hear what happened to her because of
+it.
+
+~ [8]The Blue Castle
+But you can talk while clicking,
+[click]
+listen while reading,
+[listen]
+look at an image while spinning a knob,
+[look]
+guesture while talking.
+[guesture]
+
+Let's build interfaces that let us multitask across senses.
+
+Rebuilding the bridge
+
+So, what might a richer interface look like? I have strong conviction that our
+future interfaces should:
+
+  • let us collaborate on tangible artifacts, not just ephemeral chat logs.
+  • support multiple concurrent modalities—voice, gestures, visuals, spatial
+    components.
+  • respond to ambient signals—detecting context, organizing information,
+    helping us think better.
+
+Last year, I did a rough exploration of what this could look like for a thought
+organizing tool. One that listened as you talked or typed, and organized your
+rambling thoughts into cards.
+
+This interface is very rough, but felt like a different way of working with
+technology. Especially how it let me bumble through rough ideas one second,
+then responded to commands like "re-group my cards" or "add 3 cards about this"
+the next.
+
+I would love to see more explorations like this!
+
+Our interfaces have lost their senses
+
+All day, we poke, swipe, and scroll through flat, silent screens. But we're
+more than just eyes and a pointer finger. We think with our hands, our ears,
+our bodies.
+
+The future of computing is being designed right now. Can we build something
+richer—something that moves with us, speaks our language, and molds to our
+bodies?
+
+[footer]
+
+References:
+
+[1] https://wattenberger.com/
+[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RyBEUyEtxQo
+[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RyBEUyEtxQo
+[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RyBEUyEtxQo
+[5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RyBEUyEtxQo
+[6] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RyBEUyEtxQo
+[7] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RyBEUyEtxQo
+[8] https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/67979
diff --git a/static/archive/www-robinsloan-com-2lwtj1.txt b/static/archive/www-robinsloan-com-2lwtj1.txt
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+[1]Blog [2]About [3]Moonbound [4]Shop
+
+This is a post from [5]Robin Sloan’s lab blog & notebook. You can [6]visit the
+blog’s homepage, or [7]learn more about me.
+
+[8]Art-directing AI
+
+March 27, 2025
+
+I want to draw your eye to the images in [9]this recent post from Amelia
+Wattenberger, which seem to me an example of someone trying hard to art-direct
+AI image generation in a recognizably editorial way.
+
+Clearly, Amelia was going for a particular look. There is a clear idea at work
+here, exactly the kind you’d specify to an artist (or pitch to an art
+director). However, the fundamental fuzziness of the AI approach is apparent;
+while the images do all have the same “texture”, they don’t seem to have come
+from the same source, or indeed to have been made by the same “person”.
+
+Anyone who has worked with AI tools will recognize the feeling of “close
+enough”-ness. If you squint, you can see all the images Amelia rejected — a
+pile of crumpled-up drawings just beyond the frame of the browser. The images
+published with the post were, for sure, the best options, even if together they
+don’t quite form a coherent package.
+
+Anyway, it’s interesting and useful to encounter this strategy for illustration
+“fully expressed”, rather than just imagined. I don’t think it succeeds, but/
+and I’m glad to have the example to consider.
+
+[10]To the blog home page
+
+I'm [11]Robin Sloan, a fiction writer. The main thing to do here is sign up for
+my newsletter:
+
+[12][                    ] [13][Subscribe]
+This website doesn’t collect any information about you or your reading.
+It aspires to the speed and privacy of the printed page.
+
+Don’t miss [14]the colophon. Hony soyt qui mal pence
+
+
+References:
+
+[1] https://www.robinsloan.com/lab/
+[2] https://www.robinsloan.com/about/
+[3] https://www.robinsloan.com/moonbound/
+[4] https://www.robinsloan.com/shop/
+[5] https://www.robinsloan.com/
+[6] https://www.robinsloan.com/lab/
+[7] https://www.robinsloan.com/about/
+[8] https://www.robinsloan.com/lab/art-directing-ai/
+[9] https://wattenberger.com/thoughts/our-interfaces-have-lost-their-senses?utm_source=Robin_Sloan_sent_me
+[10] https://www.robinsloan.com/lab/
+[11] https://www.robinsloan.com/about?utm_source=Robin_Sloan_sent_me
+[14] https://www.robinsloan.com/colophon/
diff --git a/static/archive/www-viget-com-ab37cx.txt b/static/archive/www-viget-com-ab37cx.txt
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+[1] Skip to Main Content
+[2] Viget
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+Surf’s Up: Designing a New Product for the Open Social Web
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+[23]
+Read the Article: Viget Rewind: A Reimagining of Spotify Wrapped
+
+Article
+
+Viget Rewind: A Reimagining of Spotify Wrapped
+
+Viget Rewind: A Reimagining of Spotify Wrapped
+
+[eyJidWNrZXQiOiJ2Z3QtdmlnZXRjb20tYW]
+
+  • [24]Home
+  • [25]Articles
+  • [26]Viget Rewind: A Reimagining of Spotify Wrapped
+
+[27] Subscribe (opens in a new window)
+Share
+
+  • [29] Share this page
+  • [30] Share this page
+  • [31] Post this page
+
+[32] Megan Raden
+
+[33]Megan Raden, Quantitative UX Researcher
+
+Article Categories: [34] #News & Culture, [35] #Data & Analytics, [36] #Product
+
+Posted on March 26, 2025
+
+  • [37]
+    Share
+  • [38]
+    Share
+  • [39]
+    Post
+
+We wanted to take the unique aspects of Spotify Wrapped—its personalized touch
+and sense of community—and see what we could do with our Harvest time-tracking
+data.
+
+W e w a n t e d t o t a k e t h e u n i q u e a s p e c t s o f S p o t i f y W
+r a p p e d — i t s p e r s o n a l i z e d t o u c h a n d s e n s e o f c o m
+m u n i t y — a n d s e e w h a t w e c o u l d d o w i t h o u r H a r v e s t
+t i m e - t r a c k i n g d a t a .
+
+A Raccoon Sticky Note
+
+As a data nerd and someone who listens to a lot of music, I always look forward
+to Spotify Wrapped. Back in November of 2024, I was eagerly Googling the
+estimated release date for Spotify Wrapped when I had the idea of extending the
+concept of yearly personalized data to other parts of my life.  
+
+Because Viget is an agency that works with clients, it's really important for
+us to track our time. We need to know how much time we are spending on any
+given day, for any one of our clients. And because we already track our time
+for clients, we also track our time for internal projects and tasks. So every
+year, we have a wealth of data on what anyone was working on throughout the
+year.
+
+We track our time in a tool called Harvest, and I thought, "What if we could
+have a Harvest Wrapped?" We invest so much time into all of our client work and
+various internal projects, how cool would it be to be reminded of what you
+contributed to over the course of 12 months? So I wrote my idea down on a
+raccoon sticky note to ensure I wouldn't forget to share it when it came time
+to pitch ideas for our annual Pointless Palooza.
+
+[eyJidWNrZXQiOiJ2Z3QtdmlnZXRjb20tYWxsLWFzc2V]
+My raccoon shaped sticky note that I kept as a reminder for my Pointless
+Palooza idea.
+
+Pointless Palooza is our annual hackathon-style event where we try to build
+something useful and/or fun in a limited amount of time. In mid-February, I
+pitched my idea for Harvest Wrapped, and last week, in a 12-hour sprint across
+2-ish days, our team got together to bring this to life. 
+
+Repackage and Rewind
+
+Compared to other kinds of data reports, Spotify Wrapped is unique. Most data
+reports we produce or consume are focused on conveying information that is
+immediately applicable or actionable. What makes Spotify Wrapped different is
+that you can look at data simply because it’s fun, and get results specific to
+you. While we do get a glimpse into our behaviors and preferences in a way that
+is personal, Spotify Wrapped also creates a shared experience with other
+Spotify users. 
+
+We wanted to take these unique aspects of Spotify Wrapped—its personal touch
+and sense of community—and see what we could do with our Harvest data.
+Repackage the more technical and dry time-tracking data to let us rewind on
+what our year looked like. 
+
+Unlimited Ideas but Limited Time
+
+Unlimited Ideas
+
+At kickoff, we allowed our imaginations to run wild. We didn’t want to limit
+ourselves too early, even though we knew that scope would be a major factor due
+to the limited time available. We also anticipated that wrangling the Harvest
+data might be challenging, but we decided to ignore that concern for the time
+being and brainstormed a variety of interesting ideas. These included both the
+visual elements—like animations—and the story we wanted the data to tell.
+
+[eyJidWNrZXQiOiJ2Z3QtdmlnZXRjb20tYWxsLWFzc2V]
+Our brainstorming Whimsical board that included ideas around visuals and
+function.
+
+We considered questions such as:
+
+  • What kinds of metrics could we pull in?
+  • What would the overall narrative of these metrics be?
+  • What other metrics could we bring in?
+  • How can we create a sense of community or shared experience?
+  • How do we account for large differences in the data across individuals and
+    roles?
+
+Every employee at Viget does an annual review using data from Harvest so it was
+important for us to create something separate from the annual review—something
+more fun, with a stronger narrative structure. It should also provide insights
+that wouldn't typically be included in an annual review.
+
+Limited Time
+
+After brainstorming, we started to narrow in on ideas that felt both within
+scope and still captured some of the fun and narrative elements we envisioned.
+We decided to create a narrative centered around seasonality. The plan was to:
+
+  • Look at the different clients and projects an employee worked on each
+    quarter and calculate the number of hours spent
+  • Add seasonal, company-wide events to give a stronger sense of community and
+    shared experience
+  • Include individual highlights, such as an employee’s "Vigeversary" - the
+    year they started at Viget
+
+Once we settled on this approach, we divided into two groups:
+
+ 1. One group focused on implementation - how to structure and analyze the
+    data, and build the application.
+ 2. The other group focused on design, copy, and narrative, working in Figma to
+    bring those ideas to life.
+
+UX & Branding: Meaningful metrics and seasonal lava lamp vibes
+
+Now that we had an overall concept, it was time to think about the details! 
+
+First was the visuals and branding for the concept. We explored how to create
+seasonality without being too literal. Ambient gradients gave us enough
+flexibility to create the right vibe quickly without taking the extra time for
+custom illustrations, and we knew it would make for some fun potential
+animations. Luckily our team developer already had a lava lamp orb animation in
+his back pocket - kismet! We also quickly realized we wanted to move away from
+words like “Harvest” and “Wrapped” - in the future, we could actually have data
+beyond Harvest feeding into the experience. After a quick Slack brainstorm, we
+settled on “Viget Rewind” instead to name our reflective experience. 
+
+[eyJidWNrZXQiOiJ2Z3QtdmlnZXRjb20tYWxsLWFzc2V]
+Backgrounds used in our prototype.
+
+In parallel, we began to mock up a few rough wireframes with an actual team
+member’s data and copy, before we could access the raw data itself. It didn’t
+take long to gain some quick learnings about meaningful Harvest data:
+
+  • There’s ample opportunity to provide “color” in copy alone to the
+    prototype. We toyed with seasonal writing to suggest timing. 
+  • The project name data didn’t always provide the right context. “2019-2026
+    Support” isn’t a title that evokes lots of memory, so we needed to pair the
+    client and project names to make this more meaningful.
+  • Not every project type should be reported back. For example, sharing back
+    PTO hours still seemed awkward and inappropriate, no matter what copy you
+    put in.
+
+Putting these together in a high-fidelity prototype in Figma made our initial
+vision complete!
+
+[eyJidWNrZXQiOiJ2Z3QtdmlnZXRjb20tYWxsLWFzc2V]
+Some final screens from our figma prototype.
+
+Building It
+
+The first big question we had was, “How are we going to get the data out of
+harvest, and into a format that shows the metrics we want?”  We looked into
+using the Harvest API, but quickly realized that we might spend all our time
+there. So instead, with the help of some of our brilliant Vigets, we used a
+tool called [40]Hasura to set up a GraphQL endpoint over a slice of a data dump
+from Harvest and set up a simple static app on a self-hosted instance of [41]
+Dokku.
+
+But… we quickly got blocked by the tooling and with our limited time frame
+realized we needed to adopt a simpler approach. So we boiled everything down to
+the barest minimum to fetch and transform our data. From there, we worked with 
+[42]tidy.js to get the data structured in the way we needed, and built out the
+visuals for a functional prototype. At the end of Pointless Palooza, we had a
+prototype that could read in the raw data for any single individual, calculate
+(some of) the necessary metrics, and show them across a couple of screens!
+
+[eyJidWNrZXQiOiJ2Z3QtdmlnZXRjb20tYWxsLWFzc2V]
+Nathan giving the Viget team a demo of our functional prototype.
+
+With Another 12 Hours
+
+We managed to accomplish a lot in 12 hours, but didn’t get the fully functional
+prototype we had hoped we could build (though we knew that would be a long
+shot). So what if the team had another 12 hours? Or another 24? Where would we
+take this project next?
+
+We could:
+
+  • Add in more metrics to show you how you spent your year at Viget.
+  • Create dynamic animations and chart visuals that convey scale.
+  • Conduct more advanced analyses that explore things like connections with
+    peers (e.g., who did you work with the most?) or comparisons across Viget.
+  • Include additional data sources into the experience, like Slack data or
+    blog data (e.g., number of articles published and GA4 data). 
+  • Consider other staffing cases, like biz dev, strategy and people team.
+
+There’s a lot more that we could do with Viget Rewind and I hope that in the
+coming months, we will have a chance to work on this project again. But even if
+we don’t, what we’ve already created is a testament to our existing skills and
+willingness to learn and try new things. Here’s to looking forward to the next
+Pointless project!
+
+[43] Megan Raden
+
+[44]Megan is a Quantitative UX Researcher working remotely from Mississippi.
+She specializes in helping others understand the what and the why of
+human-computer interaction.
+
+[45]More articles by Megan
+
+Related Articles
+
+  • [46]
+    Do I need a jacket?
+
+    Article
+
+    Do I need a jacket?
+
+    Steven Hascher
+
+  • [47]
+    Radical RAG: An Embeddings Experiment
+
+    Article
+
+    Radical RAG: An Embeddings Experiment
+
+    Joshua Pease
+
+  • [48]
+    StackStash: Taking Bookish Musings to the Next Level
+
+    Article
+
+    StackStash: Taking Bookish Musings to the Next Level
+
+    Laura Sweltz
+
+The Viget Newsletter
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+References:
+
+[1] https://www.viget.com/articles/viget-rewind-a-reimagining-of-spotify-wrapped/#content
+[2] https://www.viget.com/
+[3] https://www.viget.com/work/
+[4] https://www.viget.com/services/
+[5] https://www.viget.com/articles/
+[6] https://www.viget.com/careers/
+[7] https://www.viget.com/contact/
+[9] https://www.viget.com/
+[11] https://www.viget.com/work/
+[12] https://www.viget.com/services/
+[13] https://www.viget.com/articles/
+[14] https://www.viget.com/contact/
+[15] https://www.viget.com/about/
+[16] https://www.viget.com/careers/
+[17] https://www.viget.com/code-of-ethics/
+[18] https://www.viget.com/diversity-equity-and-inclusion/
+[19] https://pointlesscorp.com/
+[20] https://explorations.viget.com/
+[21] https://code.viget.com/
+[22] https://www.viget.com/newsletter/surfs-up-new-product-open-social-web/
+[23] https://www.viget.com/articles/viget-rewind-a-reimagining-of-spotify-wrapped/
+[24] https://www.viget.com/
+[25] https://www.viget.com/articles
+[26] https://www.viget.com/articles/viget-rewind-a-reimagining-of-spotify-wrapped/#hero
+[27] http://eepurl.com/gtHqsj
+[29] https://www.facebook.com/sharer/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.viget.com%2Farticles%2Fviget-rewind-a-reimagining-of-spotify-wrapped%2F
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+[31] https://x.com/intent/tweet?text=We%20wanted%20to%20take%20the%20unique%20aspects%20of%20Spotify%20Wrapped%E2%80%94its%20personalized%20touch%20and%20sense%20of%20community%E2%80%94and%20see%20what%20we%20could%20do%20with%20our%20Harvest%20time-tracking%20data.%20https%3A%2F%2Fwww.viget.com%2Farticles%2Fviget-rewind-a-reimagining-of-spotify-wrapped%2F
+[32] https://www.viget.com/about/team/mraden/
+[33] https://www.viget.com/about/team/mraden/
+[34] https://www.viget.com/articles/?category=news-culture#results
+[35] https://www.viget.com/articles/?category=data-analytics#results
+[36] https://www.viget.com/articles/?category=product#results
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+[39] https://x.com/intent/tweet?text=We%20wanted%20to%20take%20the%20unique%20aspects%20of%20Spotify%20Wrapped%E2%80%94its%20personalized%20touch%20and%20sense%20of%20community%E2%80%94and%20see%20what%20we%20could%20do%20with%20our%20Harvest%20time-tracking%20data.%20https%3A%2F%2Fwww.viget.com%2Farticles%2Fviget-rewind-a-reimagining-of-spotify-wrapped%2F
+[40] https://hasura.io/
+[41] https://dokku.com/
+[42] http://tidy.js/
+[43] https://www.viget.com/about/team/mraden/
+[44] https://www.viget.com/about/team/mraden/
+[45] https://www.viget.com/about/team/mraden/
+[46] https://www.viget.com/articles/do-you-need-a-jacket/
+[47] https://www.viget.com/articles/radical-rag-an-embeddings-experiment/
+[48] https://www.viget.com/articles/stackstash-taking-bookish-musings-to-the-next-level/
+[49] https://www.viget.com/newsletter
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+[58] https://www.viget.com/careers/
+[59] https://www.viget.com/code-of-ethics/
+[60] https://www.viget.com/diversity-equity-and-inclusion/
+[61] https://pointlesscorp.com/
+[62] https://explorations.viget.com/
+[63] https://code.viget.com/
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