Startups comms, essays on tech and great curated links.
My work is helping technology companies decide how to explain themselves and shape their story. This is something I care deeply about. I followed Tyler and beehiiv since their early days. Few startups have aligned their product, founder, and public narrative so completely. That made beehiiv an irresistible case. I read through all their public coverage, announcements, key blog posts and…
Unintended consequences are one of my favorite topics. I only wish politicians around the world felt the same. Most of them barely consider the immediate effects of their policies, let alone the second-order ones. They settle on a good‑sounding meme their audience likes and run with it. Years or decades later the consequences catch up but nobody takes the responsibility, even if it’s the…
“There is not the slightest doubt that bicycle riding, if persisted in, leads to weakness of mind, general lunacy, and homicidal mania,” says The New York Times article titled “Lunacy in England” published in 1894. Moral panics are a recurring feature. They are bursts of exaggerated fear that some new thing will wreck society’s core values. The history of mankind is riddled…
Today, AI is being framed as an entity that takes away things: jobs, chips, energy, water, or even creativity. Right as the major labs are about to go public. It has become such a divisive technology. Tech founders and executives love AI. Developers are split. There’s definitely a certain share of people who publicly despise it, ready to dismiss any piece of content that has a trace of…
Strata is a new outliner app for MacOS that I’ve built. It’s completely native and only 2.5 MB. You can get it here . I wrote about outliners extensively in the past. An outliner is a text editor that organizes information in hierarchical nodes. You might have seen one if you ever used Workflowy, Dynalist, OmniOutliner, or Roam Research. Outliner is a superior tool for thought. I find…
I’ve tried working in so many areas. I used to code and wanted to become a developer. I did a bit of design. I love photography. I did venture investing. The outcome of this is a career as a generalist. And being a little bit of everything sometimes felt like a disadvantage because the world rewarded the people around who went deep on something. It turned out the breadth was useful anyway. I…
One thing that Safari does well is its Reading Mode. The people who built it are brilliant, and no other browser can truly match the beauty and seamlessness. But I prefer Dia (or any other Chromium-based browser to Safari, really). They don’t have it. Chrome presumably got an update, but so far, I’m still not seeing it. Which is why a few months ago, I built and released Marble Reader…
This is Product Hunt’s main page today. 4 out of 5 places are taken by extremely large companies that need little promotion: Anthropic, Google, Cloudflare and Vercel. Product Hunt used to be a website I opened daily looking for cool new products. Some of them were just nice personal tools and some eventually grew into billion-dollar companies (I found Truebill there during their launch). But since…
Over the last two months, I’ve done all my news reading through Syndicator . It’s an app I built, and I’m releasing it to the public now. Syndicator is a ranked, personalized reading app. It pulls news sites, blogs, YouTube videos and Substacks into one place, then learns from what you actually read, skip, save, and share. Algorithms have a bad rep, but I 100% believe they can be…
In 2026, first-time founders don’t want to get on TechCrunch. They want TBPN. The Decline in Numbers News publications are down on traffic and laying off people because readers’ habits are changing and there’s harsh competition. This might sound new, but people were saying this in 2009. What’s different now? Most media publications are fighting to stay relevant while…
Bookmarking apps are a cursed category. So many attempts, so many failures. Remember Pocket? Omnivore ? All buried under the sands of indifference. And I can see why. It’s a hard category to break through and an even harder one to make sustainable. Users want the service, but hardly anybody wants to pay for it. Readwise Reader, which I’ve used for the last 3 years, has achieved a lot,…
AI won’t kill the SaaS models. OpenAI itself famously runs on Slack and uses countless off-the-shelf tools. There’s simply no point in rebuilding key apps your entire workflow depends on with vibe coding. You will be just wasting resources. Especially considering how difficult it is to build production apps. After a few experiments, I’m now primarily working on two specific applications. And…
My feeds are filled with posts praising Claude Code. People claim they feel bad if they don’t have an agent running 24/7. Developers are asking for ways to manage more and more agents at once through apps like Conductor. The comments are always the same: “What have you actually shipped?” Fair question. I built several apps that I use practically every day and put the source code…
If you’re a founder, neglecting public communications is a drag on your business. It’s not something you should focus on primarily (that’s what rage baiters do), but you should use this channel just like any other, because it will help you find customers, win candidates, secure partnerships and raise funding. Now, what are comms? We used to call this public relations when it was mostly about print…
A lot of left-leaning people refuse to value the economic growth on its own. To many of them, growth is something negative. A poisoned concept used by capitalists to justify their terrible capitalist things. “Why do we need more growth and isn’t it impossible a finite planet?” they ask. “Why can’t we just stay where we are and focus on helping people?” Because living in an economy that doesn’t…
We should be in a recession. Interest rates jumped after COVID, the war and tariffs ruin global trade, while western countries are struggling with expensive energy, social spending, and competition from China. But the economy is growing and markets are breaking records. This is happening because of AI: it explains roughly 85% of US equity gains this year, and about half of the S&P 500 stocks are…
Tech people adore Stripe. Linear’s old branding infected GenAI so much all its landing pages look purple. Arc Browser received glowing coverages from top-tier outlets even for basic features. Some companies get viral while their competitors struggle to break through the ice. Why? This is a question that bothers many founders and marketers wishing to promote their companies or clients. What’s…
YouTube is full of videos with people trying to replace their iPhone with half a dozen devices. They carry an iPod for music, a dedicated camera to take photos, a Kindle for reading, a notebook for thoughts, sometimes even a flip phone for calls. Companies are selling minimal phones, like the $599 Light Phone that can do only a few things and won’t let you get you an Uber. The market for old…
Zuckerbeg. Nadella. Benioff. An exclusive announcement from Microsoft. TBPN has been blasting from all corners of tech Twitter lately. It’s a technology daily show hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays, streaming live every weekday for about three hours. Sometimes I wonder who has that much free time to listen to it. Both hosts take it immensely seriously and first got the accolades of tech…
Last week, Apple relented and introduced the Sleep Score for the first time since adding sleep monitoring to the Apple Watch. This is huge, since they were always extremely careful about giving out assessments like this. Apple dominates the concept of personal fitness trackers, but other options have been getting a lot more attention, right to the point where you can pick up an Oura at Walmart and…