From the only Steve Jobs biography you ever have to read: Becoming Steve Jobs by Brent Schlender and Rick Tetzeli
Crying in the Garden
I always loved how this biography opened. A young 24 year old, way ahead of his skis. Undeniably brilliant, and undeniably reckless. Sitting in his car after a philanthropy meeting that he’s thrown out of… crying.
Life is a constant act of becoming. We get out over our skis, we get humbled, we fall in love, we ruin it, we get excited, we get disillusioned. And the entire time our character, our hearts, are being shaped by each moment. The way we view the world gets colored by these experiences.
We find ourselves crying in the garden because of our own emotional outbursts. Our own failures of character. In Christianity we talk about how our sin is always inside of us, not some force outside of us trying to lure us towards it. In the same way, our potential for failure is a function of our own character flaws that reside in us. We work to overcome them day in and day out.
These last two weeks I found myself crying in the garden. For the second time in the past few months, a promising acquisition was pulled away over (from my vantage point) very simple bumps to smooth out. And I was finally left with the most logical choice that no founder enjoys. Shutting down.
Eternal Love
The feelings of closing Eternal have been a bit of rollercoaster. On the one hand, I’m deeply disappointed in the outcome. And I’ve found myself really sitting with that… sort of just Kubrick level staring into nothingness. I’m sure this will fade.
On the other hand, I know we’ve produced work that looks and feels like nothing else. It was fiercely unique and throughout our life cycle we received a lot of hate from those that didn’t see the vision. But the vision was there.
We built shows like Exit Sign to a fandom of over 100k young people. Documenting the sub-cultures we were platforming on our apps. We launched 6 beautiful experiences that challenged what a consumer app could be, and towards the end we were cracking the dark magic of charting in the app store.
But the thing I’m most proud of, is a team that was dedicated to de-fanging very loaded technologies. Our last projects were AI games, aimed at kids weary of the dark language that AI brings. 40% of surveyed players reported that our experience was their first time interacting with AI.
I couldn’t be more happy than to have broken an incredibly important technology for them. And I’ll be spending a lot of time thinking about how we can de-fang crypto for true consumer adoption and joy, not just anxiety over coins.
What’s Next?
One joy of spiritual clarity in a decision is that you don’t feel exhausted afterwards. I feel full of energy and full of ideas. And honestly, the world is moving too quickly to be stuck in a container that isn’t as adaptable as you’d like it to be.
I’ll continue to focus on hardware ~ helping folks out, writing, and prototyping. I truly believe we are headed for a new type of spiritual crisis with the devices we have. Put as directly as possible, I believe it’s a dopamine crash. We are strung out daily for our dopamine fixes, and we need to present serious alternatives.
I’m going to be giving a lot of focus to crypto/web3. There’s simply too much to do, and too many folks playing the wrong games. If there’s one thing I saw at Eternal, despite our ability to create incredible brands and audiences → distribution on old platforms is broken. Tokens and other onchain mechanics are the solve here. And I’m excited to build and launch a few things we have in the idea chamber.
Finally, Luca and I are looking to formally consult clients that we align with. We’ve been doing this on and off throughout the years, when projects weren’t too much of a pull on our evening time. But now we want to see what kind of creative work (brand, comms, strategy and positioning, GTM) we can deliver to folks that we’re excited by.
Keeping This Short
This post could have been a lot longer, but that feels like a different thing. I’ve been doing a disgusting amount of reflection. My Obsidian file is long and very raw.
I don’t know if I’ll ever publish the depth of my lessons running Eternal, but I know that that depth exists. I suppose the point is to show those lessons in my future work.
I’ll be taking a lot of time for just meeting with folks. I feel like I have a lot of catching up to do here. When you meet people while in founder mode, you unfortunately tend to pass the interaction through the lens of your work. Now that that is gone, I can’t wait to head out to SF and keep bouncing around NYC hanging out with folks doing cool work. If that’s you, drop me a note. I’d love to hang.
I don’t do edits really, so excuse typos and things that don’t make sense.
Thanks so much for giving me your attention. I hope it was worth it, if not… unsubscribing will not hurt my feelings, and will give you back time you literally cannot have back.
Much love.
Live in the light