I spent yesterday afternoon in a small coffee shop in Richmond, Virginia, watching people interact with their phones. It is a quiet kind of observation, the kind that makes you realize how much the digital landscape has shifted under our feet while we were busy looking at the latest tech updates. A few years ago, … Read more
The screen glowed a bruised purple in the early hours of a Tuesday in Seattle, the kind of damp morning where the coffee feels more like a survival tool than a luxury. I was staring at a manuscript that had been sitting at eighty thousand words for three years, a dead weight on a hard … Read more
I remember sitting in a drafty coffee shop in Seattle back in 2019, watching a guy at the next table struggle with a laptop that sounded like a jet engine taking off. He was trying to mine something obscure, heat radiating off his keyboard, likely spending more on his latte than he’d ever see in … Read more
The first time I saw a cap table get shredded because of a burn rate that looked like a forest fire, I realized the old way of building companies was essentially a suicide pact. We used to hire people for their time as if their presence in a chair—or their green status dot on a … Read more
I spent the better part of last night staring at a flickering cursor, wondering if the traditional novel is finally hitting a structural ceiling. We have been telling stories in a straight line for centuries. Page one leads to page two, and the hero either dies or gets the girl, and the reader is just … Read more
It is funny how we spent the last few years obsessed with the hum of electric motors and the promise of a lithium-ion future, only to find ourselves staring at a fuel tank that still needs filling. I was sitting in a small diner just outside of Chicago last month, watching the midwestern rain wash … Read more
There was a time, maybe five or six years ago, when we all thought the internet would eventually turn every town into a carbon copy of a digital warehouse. You know the feeling. You walk down a street in Austin or maybe a quiet corner of Savannah, and every shop starts looking like an Instagram … Read more
There is a specific kind of silence that settles over a room when you are staring at a blinking cursor, knowing that the rent is due and the masterpiece in your head is currently nothing more than a collection of disjointed scenes and caffeine-fueled notes. For years, the myth of the solitary author has persisted—the … Read more
I remember sitting in a coffee shop in Austin about three years ago, watching a friend obsessively move four thousand dollars between three different banking apps just to chase a quarter-point of interest. It looked like a full-time job for a payout that wouldn’t even cover our lunch. Back then, we accepted that “liquid cash” … Read more
I spent most of last Tuesday staring at a flickering neon sign across from a coffee shop in Austin, Texas, wondering if I had finally become obsolete. My screen showed six different projects moving at a pace that would have killed a human department three years ago. There were no frantic Slack messages. No one … Read more