Regular Communication How big should a company get?

From Jason Rodriguez

Happy New Year, I hope your holidays were peaceful and full of rest.

In the last newsletter, I promised I wasn't building my own company. That's still 100% the case today, but I do have thoughts on how that company would look in the future. So, I wrote up a second post about some of the principles behind a future company of my own making. This time, it's all about keeping teams small.

What made your favorite team work so well? Email me back and let me know.

On a completely unrelated note, I whipped up another quick blog post on how I've been using Apple Shortcuts to make posting to my blog easier.

Interesting Things

If you've been reading for a while, you likely know my dislike of the email platform Substack. If you need more reason to hate the leadership and their decisions over there, Marisa Kabas (who is thriving on beehiiv) has a good article on why, "The best time to leave Substack was a long time ago. The second best time is now."

Related: Buttondown built a nice calculator to explore the costs associated with different creator economy platforms.

Another Jason hits on something I think too many of us are forgetting in our excitement about federation/decentralization (and AI, which I'm less excited about): The next evolution of the web relies on massive amounts of computation and four companies are likely going to end up owning all of that computing power. It'll be the moat to end all moats. 😟

How many Juliuses have you known throughout your career?

I've seen a few variations on what an unrealized Beatles album would have looked like had they not broken up, but I really, really like Geoff Graham's take on it. All those choices make sense to me. He even put together a playlist for us! Enjoy.

Oof... This post from Jenny Zhang hits hard.

Tracy Durnell wrote about something I've been thinking about lately, too. I read a lot of non-fiction and almost all of it is needlessly long. The last few times I've gone to the book store, I've purposefully looked for shorter books. 100-200 pages is a sweet spot that I wish more authors pursued.

Jarrod Blundy tells the story of discontent with retail work and making the leap to his own business instead. Inspiring!

And finally, Reagan Ray has an amazing collection of titles from sci-fi movies. My favorite is either the 1956 Invasion of the Body Snatchers or 1988's Akira. How about yours?

Some Music

I never really listened to the band Geese, but I have been playing the lead singer's—Cameron Winter—new album, Heavy Metals. It's really good. The standout track to me is Cancer of the Skull. I can't find a video of him doing it online, but head to one of the playlists below to check it out. It's so weird and charming and sloppy but orchestrated. Can't ask for much more, huh?

Listen to all my newsletter music recommendations on Apple Music or Spotify.

Cheers,
Jason

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