Writings

(originally posted on Medium) I’d started gathering notes on my experience with the Watch on the weekend it was released (a little over a month ago) but quickly realized that the device fit into such a new place in my life that hot takes wouldn’t cut it. Below is the result of me capturing thoughts over the course of about a month and then going back and doing a little revising as some of my hottest takes ended up melting away as I got used to this new device in my life. I wanted to capture th

(originally posted on Medium) This past weekend I ran my best half marathon ever by ~3 minutes and I owe most of it to the Garmin running watch above that I borrowed from my wife. Over the years, I’ve been a heavy user of the Nike Running and Runkeeper apps and while the audio updates they provide on pace and distance are certainly better than nothing, they’re too infrequent to really have a material impact on my runs. I’m also not someone who’s interested in pulling out my phone every few min

(originally posted on Medium) My overwhelming use case (>80 %) for Pinterest is to save something, usually an image/screenshot from my desktop or camera roll or via an extension (both iOS and Chrome). The other 20% is to find something I know I’ve previously saved to one of my boards. Every time I open the Pinterest app, I’m reminded of how small a segment of the Pinterest audience my behavior must represent because I’m surprised at how many steps it is to do either — this is particularly true

(originally posted on Medium) I’ve been longing for something “between Twitter and Medium” and in some respects today’s Medium changes look to be just that. That said, I’m honestly still a little mindfreaked by them and am struggling to get my thoughts in order. Here’s a quick stab: * A few months ago I switched my Twitter bio url to my Medium posts in the hopes that, over time, the product would evolve to replace the blogs many of us used to call home in the late 90s- 2000s. Today’s changes

(originally posted on Medium) A look back at 2014 and forward to 2015 Most years as December winds down, I resolve to change 5–10 things that fall roughly into the categories you’d expect: lose some weight, be more active, sleep better, read more, etc. Before articulating what I’m planning to work on this year, I wanted to look back at what I set out to do last year and see how I fared. I threw down some quick grades on the goals I’d laid out, OKR-style: * Sleep better (0.8) — Gone are the

(originally posted on Medium) Over the past year, I’ve found myself discovering more and more new, great music thanks to The Hype Machine. You can do a whole lot more on the service but I tend to stick to a pretty simple workflow that yields a lot of value with minimal effort (always a big product win) that hopefully others can benefit from. That workflow is as follows: 1. I go to the Popular tab, hit Play 2. When I hear something I like, I give it a heart/fave 3. Over time, my Favorites li

(originally posted on Medium) Note: This post originally aired in February 2014 on Tumblr but was moved to Medium in October 2014. Over the past few months I’ve gotten to slow down a bit, spend some more time with my kids and enjoy a lot of coffees with a wide variety of people here in the city. The range of interesting new people I got to meet and projects I got to learn about was inspiring, particularly as lifelong New Yorker who cares deeply about continuing to grow the consumer product pre

(originally posted on Medium) Good post outlining some of the hurdles Twitter faces and touches on something I’ve felt for a long time. While there are certainly services that benefit from pure network effects (where more connections directly translate to a better experience), I’d argue that many of the most popular feed-based products (i.e. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram) walk a thin line between “enough varied content to be interesting and something you want to check regularly” and “so much con