001 - Midnight Memos

It's midnight. You're moments away from falling asleep, stuck just between consciousness and unconsciousness.

Suddenly, an idea! A thought! You've solved that work problem from two days ago! Then you fall asleep and wake up the next morning with zero recollection of that final thought from the night before.

Those midnight thoughts and ideas, the latest Taylor Swift masterpiece, and a great movie from the 1960s are the inspiration behind Midnight Memos.

Why a newsletter?

At first, I wrote "a lot of reasons" but then I had flashbacks to third grade and being told that "a lot" is never a valid answer to a question. Fair enough.

I've wanted to start a newsletter for a long time, mostly as a way to get better and more comfortable with longer-form writing, but also as a way to get thoughts out of my head and onto paper.

After we tried out a new structure for our quarterly townhalls at Commsor last week, a few team members suggested that writing about what we did would make a great LinkedIn post.

The problem is, I've never really found myself able to write posts for the feed naturally. They always feel super forced. A longer form newsletter feels more my style for sharing thoughts, learnings, and ideas. (So watch this space for how and why we changed up our townhall format, to great effect.)

What will it be about?

"John Schlesinger's gritty, unrelentingly bleak look at the seedy underbelly of urban American life is undeniably disturbing, but Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight's performances make it difficult to turn away." — critics consensus from Rotten Tomatoes

Midnight Cowboy, the 1960s movie that played into the visual choices for this newsletter, is undeniably a great movie (won best picture in 1969), but it definitely isn't a fun movie.

A few weeks ago a fellow founder was asked: "What would you do differently 10 years ago if you knew what you know now?" Their response was that they probably wouldn't become a founder. Not because they don't love it, but because if they knew what sort of crazy highs and lows to expect, they probably wouldn't have been able to do it.

Founder life can often be like Midnight Cowboy — brutal, rough, difficult to watch, but at the same time great, inspiring, and many of us who choose the life wouldn't trade it for anything. It's difficult to turn away once the founder bug gets ahold of you.

My hope is that by writing more about life building Commsor, I'll be able to better reflect and improve, and share honestly with others who are taking a similar path.

So here I am, launching a newsletter. I've already got topics planned for the first few, including one going in-depth about our remote townhall breakthrough. Expect thoughts on startups, founder life, community building, remote work, and other midnight musings I have while learning to scale Commsor, myself, and my role within the business.