My job is reviewing other people’s beginnings.
I work in startup acceleration at a large corporation. I meet early-stage teams, look closely at their technology, and judge whether it can actually change the way we live. I chose this work because I care a lot about innovative technology, and I still enjoy it. But when I spend all day looking into other people’s ‘beginnings,’ my own keeps getting pushed back.
The curiosity I’ve carried the longest points somewhere a little unexpected: toward people who are my opposite — people who make art, who create. While I look at the world through numbers and review memos, they see the same world through an entirely different grammar. I wanted to understand that, so I’ve made a point of seeking out difference on purpose. If you stay put, you never run into it, so I do it deliberately, and sometimes I make myself.
And now and then I imagine things. Things I’d like to try someday. In those daydreams, there have always been other people with me. It was never a picture of doing it alone. It was a picture of sharing time and thoughts with the people I care about.
The problem is that it’s always ‘someday.’ And someday never comes. So I tried a different approach. I write down, as a list, what it would take to move someday into today, and I work through it one item at a time, from the top.
The first line on the list was this: share information and thoughts again with people I know and like.
The best way, of course, is to meet face to face. But that rarely works out. We live in different places, keep different hours, and each have our own lives. Try setting a date a few times and you learn: meeting in person is the best way, and also the one that fails most often.
What about social media, then? Everyone’s already on Instagram, and I scroll it too. But what goes back and forth there isn’t the conversation I’m after. Most of it is one-way and a little superficial. Above all, when I look at the accounts of friends who run businesses, at some point everything has been arranged through a commercial lens. It stops being a hello and turns into promotion. I’m not blaming anyone for that. I just mean that’s not a place where I can say what I want to say.
So I decided to start with a closed community. Not a place anyone can wander into, but one that reaches only the people I know. As for the format, I’m going one-way for now. A newsletter.
That may sound odd. What I want is two-way, yet I’m starting one-way. The reason is simple. Ask for two-way from the start and nobody shows up. I’ve watched it happen many times: someone opens a group chat, it lights up for a few days, and then it goes quiet. So I decided to send first, one-way. Replies can come later.
The first goal isn’t a subscriber count. It’s a single reply.
Sending this newsletter to people I know and getting a reply back — a simple “How have you been?” That’s how I’ll measure whether this attempt worked. Rather than how many people opened it, I plan to count how many replies come in.
How I’ll make the newsletter — I haven’t decided yet. Which tool, how much it’ll cost, what goes in it: all of that comes after. Honestly, I’m not sure this is the right order. But this time, instead of laying out a full plan before I start, I want to just make something and think from there. It’s not how I’d review anyone else’s business plan, but it’s how I’m going to take my own first step.
I haven’t crossed off the first line on the list yet. In the next issue, I’ll write about what I built it with and how, and how many replies came in. If not a single one comes, I’ll write that down just as it is.