Let Go and Haul: Gen, Franck and grunge
Week 34, 2018 – Brooklyn
Announcement: no email next week, I’m going to be back home with my fam in Alberta. If you wanna see some legit mountain stories, follow me @han on Insta 🏔
Journal: where we’re at
Gen and Franck have joined us in NYC full time!
Gen is our co-founder specializing in computer vision who joined in the spring, and she’s now relocated from Boston. We’re so lucky to have her on the founding team!
Franck is a Columbia data science grad via École Polytechnique who previously completed an internship with us. He also makes beats and brings a ton of valuable music making perspective to what we’re doing with video creation. Welcome Gen and Franck!
This week we did a product deep dive with the whole team. It was intense and awesome and we came out of it with a handful of big risky experiments to rapidly prototype based on all the feedback + our own experience using the alpha currently in TestFlight.
Journal: what I learned
I’ve been thinking a lot about grunge recently. I can count more than one hand of fingers about similarities between that culture and where we’re at today; the 90s are definitely back in for a reason; and I find all of this curious and worth paying attention to. I found myself blasting all of Nevermind last night for the first time since junior high (middle school). Growing up in Western Canada, grunge was the most significant influence on my early teenage years because of the proximity to Seattle (and the general west coast influence that floats over the Rockies to Alberta). The American channels are broadcast to that part of Canada from Spokane, so we ended up a kind of Washington state flavored TV too. (For a long time when I was a kid I thought Spokane was a place cool TV came from, I had no idea it was a city). Re-approaching a cultural concept objectively when it was something you also lived (and is a part of what made you who you are) is a weird but cool curiosity expedition. I’m here for it.
Anyway, grunge. If you’ve been thinking about this or read anything interesting on why it’s showing up in trends again, I’d love to hear from you.
I caught up with my amazing friend Amanda who’s a content strategist / designer at Spotify (and related to all this grunge talk – happens to be from Seattle). She and I met when I was working at an agency one summer after the department MTV had hired me into reorg’d and shut it down, dumping me p flat on my ass in New York City. Fun times! It was a challenging time in my life for a number of reasons, but some of the working methods I found really difficult to get my head around at the time (for example, their near ruthless approach to running user experiments). Coming from a hyper creative, but sloppy af run-and-gun startup background, this was pretty painful for me. I was so mistrustful, frustrated and anxious. Now that I look back on it years later, I learned so much at that job and left with a super sharp toolkit that I’ve employed over and over successfully at jobs and projects since. It was a brutal bootcamp and I was learning exactly what I needed to be learning at the time. Makes me wonder how different life could have been if I’d been able to be more… calm…ha! If you’re frustrated with your job right now, maybe you’re learning exactly what you need to be learning...
Jams: what I’m into
Also if you need weird video wall projections for your next party, I made a playlist of those too for my friend Arkadiy’s birthday last night with help from Katheryn. If you’re into 80s SIGGRAPH computer animation videos, you might want this.