Check your Pulse - Check your Pulse #65
Hi, I’m Sari Azout and this is the the 65th edition of Check your Pulse, a tech and startups newsletter designed to make you feel human. Hello friends, old and new. It’s been a while. As you might have guessed from my 4+ months long absence, I can no longer continue writing this newsletter on a regular basis. I’ve gone all in on startupy and I foresee this taking up most of my mental space into the near future. My days now mostly revolve around back to back hiring, team meetings, lots of admin stuff, product prioritization, and finding time in between to raise good humans and keep them alive – including the high-stakes job that is keeping an 8 month old from putting toilet paper in his mouth. I’ll be back, I promise. In the meantime, there are a few other ways to keep up with me:
This has been quite a run. Your encouragement, kind words, thoughtful comments, and sharing my work on social media are what gave me the confidence to go all in on startupy, and were the perfect flywheel for attracting the kinds of people and conversations that brought me real-lasting joy. Humanity in tech seems to be one of the most important themes of my work, and I’ve experienced that in spades here. I’m indebted to you all and extremely humbled by it. With incredible gratitude ✨ On community-curated search enginesWhen I first shared what I was working on, I billed startupy as a community-powered database of startup knowledge, organized associatively. At the time, I’d been relentlessly curating a repository of content on Airtable with no intention to build a meaningful business around it – and that content was mostly tech related. Over the past year, there’s been a big shift in how I’ve allocated my brainspace. I’ve gone deep down crypto, but also self-improvement, parenting, management, wellness and many other rabbit holes. Throughout that time, my excitement for startupy and the importance of curation has only grown but it turns out the startup focused description wasn’t quite right. Thriving in an information abundant world requires being able to dance across disciplines and cross pollinate ideas from a wealth of places – if you’re building a DAO but only reading DAO content and researching other DAOs, you’re missing out on the best insights. So here’s the pitch: Startupy is a community-curated search engine for meaningful insights across a long tail of culturally relevant topics. Zero SEO BS - just a delightful library of human-curated content, topics, people, and companies, all organized based on their connections, and made searchable. How can I make it better? On building human-scale organizationsThe fact that you can connect with anyone in the world, have anything you could possibly want delivered to your doorstep within a day, and retrieve any information you could possibly want in seconds is incredible — scale has unlocked enormous benefits. But a lot of the good stuff has been lost in this endless quest for scale — the human touch, empathy, joy, delight. It’s very hard to preserve these things at mega scale. There’s a reason it’s impossible to speak to an Amazon customer service representative; this level of intimacy is impossible when your customer base is the entirety of the human race. So maybe it’s not about aiming for mega scale or human scale but about interrogating what is the optimal scale, the scale at which the highest degree of quality for your product can be achieved. Right-scaling organizations is not a part of the thinking process in tech the way, say, MVP or growth hacking or Series A and other BS round nomenclatures are, so maybe all I’m saying is; I think it should be. On consistency > intensityBeing an ideas person is a double edged sword. I get the biggest highs from running radical experiments and doing the work required from napkin to introducing it to the world. The problem, I’ve learned, is that what really matters is not the big things you do sporadically (i.e. the launch) but the small things you do consistently. Intensity makes for a good story, but consistency makes progress. On The Modern BillboardThe first ever experiment in tokenized advertising allowing you to own digital real estate in websites you believe in went live last month. The startupy billboard was a resounding success with ad lots now trading at 4x initial price in secondary market. I’m very excited about this project and think there’s enormous potential. That said — project was built by a group of Internet friends who can no longer keep up with the demands of the product. To that end, we’re looking for a CEO/leader type person interested in stewarding, nurturing, and harnessing its potential. Ideal profile: web3 curious, scrappy, and experience building/growing early stage products. Hmu if this is you or anyone in your orbit! 👀 Oliver Burkeman’s 4,000 weeks: Time Management for Mortals. What a book! This passage on our cosmic insignificance stopped me in my tracks.
Tyler Haney, the founder of Outdoor Voices is back — this time with a Web3 commerce tool called Try your Best 🤷🏽♀️ A very accurate description of parenting (& building startups) by Glennon Doyle 👇🏾 If you’re wondering who’s behind this newsletter:My name is Sari Azout. I am the founder of Startupy, a community-curated search engine for meaningful intellectual insights. I spend my days thinking, building, and investing at the intersection of Web 3, curation, and the future of knowledge. Want more?Follow me on Twitter and Instagram. Thanks for being here! If you’re wondering who’s behind this newsletter:My name is Sari Azout. I am a design-thinker, strategist, early stage startup investor at Level Ventures, and founder of Startupy (coming soon). My mission is to bring more humanity and creativity to technology and business. Want more?Follow me on Twitter, Medium, and Instagram. Or get access to my second brain. 🧠 If you're enjoying this newsletter, I'd love it if you shared it with a friend or two. You can send them here to sign up. And if you come across anything interesting this week, send it my way! I love finding new things to read through members of this newsletter. Thanks for being here! |
Older messages
Check your Pulse # 64
Wednesday, November 10, 2021
Introducing The Modern Billboard, invest in and own digital real estate on promising sites
Check your Pulse #63
Tuesday, October 19, 2021
Re-organizing the world's information: why we need more boutique search engines
Check your Pulse #62
Friday, July 16, 2021
tokenized advertising, reframing failure as possibility, and why the talent is staying focused
Introducing Ghost Knowledge – a startupy.world drop
Wednesday, June 16, 2021
Knowledge from the people that don't write enough
Check your Pulse #61
Wednesday, June 9, 2021
on my mind
You Might Also Like
Your Phone’s Other Number 📱
Saturday, April 27, 2024
Let's talk about your phone's IMEI number. Here's a version for your browser. Hunting for the end of the long tail • April 27, 2024 Today in Tedium: As you may know, Tedium is a blog and/or
🕹️ How to Play Retro Games for Free on iPhone — Why I Can't Live Without an eReader
Saturday, April 27, 2024
Also: Anker MagGo (Qi2) Power Bank Review, and More! How-To Geek Logo April 27, 2024 📩 Get expert reviews, the hottest deals, how-to's, breaking news, and more delivered directly to your inbox by
Weekend Reading — The Bob Ross of programming
Saturday, April 27, 2024
This week we use coffee tasting as our design practice, get as close to and as far away from the metal as possible, find an easier way to write documentation, discover why Google Search is getting so
Issue #538: All the Jam entries, Panthera 2, and Tristram
Saturday, April 27, 2024
Weekly newsletter about HTML5 Game Development. Is this email not displaying correctly? View it in your browser. Issue #538 - April 26th 2024 If you have anything you want to share with the HTML5 game
Daily Coding Problem: Problem #1424 [Easy]
Saturday, April 27, 2024
Daily Coding Problem Good morning! Here's your coding interview problem for today. This problem was asked by Microsoft. Implement a URL shortener with the following methods: shorten(url) , which
Charted | Countries That Became More Happy (or Unhappy) Since 2010 😅
Saturday, April 27, 2024
Which countries had the highest happiness gains since 2010? Which became sadder? View Online | Subscribe Presented by Voronoi: The App Where Data Tells the Story FEATURED STORY Countries With the
Noonification: What Is E-Waste Hacking?
Saturday, April 27, 2024
Top Tech Content sent at Noon! The first AI-powered startup unlocking the “billionaire economy” for your benefit How are you, @newsletterest1? 🪐 What's happening in tech this week: The
TikTok faces a ban in the US, Tesla profits drop and healthcare data leaks
Saturday, April 27, 2024
Plus: Amazon's new delivery subscription and a deep dive on Rippling View this email online in your browser By Kyle Wiggers Saturday, April 27, 2024 Image Credits: TechCrunch Welcome, folks, to
🐍 New Python tutorials on Real Python
Saturday, April 27, 2024
Hey there, There's always something going on over at realpython.com as far as Python tutorials go. Here's what you may have missed this past week: Write Unit Tests for Your Python Code With
Bogus npm Packages Used to Trick Software Developers into Installing Malware
Saturday, April 27, 2024
THN Daily Updates Newsletter cover Webinar -- Uncovering Contemporary DDoS Attack Tactics -- and How to Fight Back Stop DDoS Attacks Before They Stop Your Business... and Make You Headline News.