On Monday, I started a new gig with the very same company that hosts this here publication. I met my team and those in its immediate vicinity. Lots of intro calls over Zoom and lots of drinking from the Slack firehose. The team is great and I look forward to working with everyone.
At around 80 people, the company has just started adding a middle management layer so it’s fertile ground to come in and do my thing. Bring some order to the chaos, as more than one person said.
More broadly, I’m excited to hopefully inch the landscape away from Zuck and friends. Substack won’t solve all the problems but some of its innovations should help: a business model that’s driven by writer succees, not by eyeballs on ads; a simple relationship between reader and writer, not a feed that optimizes for attention and extreme emotion.
A couple stray observations from the week:
several people at the company had written user guides to themselves. This is such a cool idea and invaluable to an incoming manager. The ones I read helped me understand core motivations, preferred communication patterns, career and personal aspirations.
onboarding as a remote manager is tricky but, I think, kind of suits me. I have a much easier time throwing a Zoom call into someone’s calendar than I would approaching their desk and asking to grab
coffeetea. Introvert for life.
I posted this review of All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr to Goodreads, one social network that’s A-OK in my book:
Anchored by the perspectives of two children, All the Light details the Nazi "harvest of a generation". The novel reads like a thriller, short chapters alternating perspectives and points in time, following the hunt for a cursed diamond and secret broadcasts. What glimmers in the end, though, is the light lost in so many children.
Werner, a brilliant young orphan listens to children's broadcasts on his makeshift radio and becomes enchanted by science and engineering. He seemingly escapes a short life in the Reich's coal mines only to be inducted into a top academy for Nazi cadets. His regard for humanity is systematically eradicated and he is brainwashed to serve his führer.
A journey towards some kind of redemption eventually brings him to Marie-Laure, a blind but precocious girl living in Nazi-occupied France. While her father sends letters of the wonderful meals at his labor camp, Marie-Laure tries to survive with a great-uncle scarred by the Great War and his caretaker, an elderly woman secretly nurturing a resistance movement. She reads Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues, surrounded by dangers as hidden to her as those of the sea. In some ways, she is lucky to be blind; she cannot see the horrors Werner could not escape.
"What you could be," says Volkheimer, a ruthless yet kind Nazi officer, to Werner. He is only a few years older.
What they all could have been.
It’s a very moving novel, beautifully written. 5/5.
It’s so interesting to read about an inside perspective on Substack - very cool piece indeed.