Week 7, 2018: this is a test
Hello and welcome to Hannah's Newsletter Experiment. If you're getting this, you helped me get to this prototype. Thank you for your thoughts and inspiration! You can definitely unsubscribe at any time ;-)
My goal this is to:
Share! I've been longing to share more about this bonkers "journey" of entrepreneurship, but have struggled to find a format that wasn't too public for some of the things I want to talk about. Hence, yer inbox. I think it's really important to give back to the communities we come from, and this is a stab at that.
Connect! Running a company can be pretty lonely. Working at Vine was one of the loneliest periods in my life, and it doesn't have to be that way with TRASH 🙂🙃 I especially miss my friends that live in other timezones and I hope this can be a bit of glue for us and maybe you'll even reply with your life!
Practice. One day, I'd really like to write the book I wish I'd had when I was starting my career. I've got a long way to go.
I'm sharing these goals with you so you can tell me if this format is meeting them or like, if this is all bullshit :)
Why this name:
"Let Go and Haul" is an old sailing phrase. It's something you do when you've found the right course for the boat to be on relative to the wind and want to stay that course for a while. This newsletter is about that. It's a weekly logbook of some data, some learnings and some links about the course I was on this week. (Also, if life isn't a series of lessons in letting go and haling major ass then idk what).
Even though I'm from landlocked Alberta, I actually sailed a lot as a kid. My dad learned to sail when his mother sent him to boarding school on the West Coast. (He was too much of a pain in the ass for her to deal with). He passed on his love of sailing to me (along with his entrepreneurial genes and being a pain in the ass). I spent my childhood summers hanging off the side of a small racing boat, capsizing it in the lake, and learning to flip it the right way up again. Bouncing around on the waves, not being sure what is going to happen next but being prepared with my body, my mind, my skills and my data points is pretty much exactly what every day of starting a company is like.
Name poll: like / don't like / meh, pls reply.
Here are the three loose sections I'm considering having regularly in this newsletter so you kinda know what to expect. Feedback tells me this is !important.
Journey:
This week my co-founder Anton and I got into what my friend Robert calls "Deep Design". The kind that does not come to fruition after hours, but after months. We had a big conceptual product breakthrough which is exciting. This work takes place around a whiteboard I propped up against a pillar in the basement of our investor's office. There's no natural light, it's noisy, crowded and has constant construction overhead. One day I'm sure it will make a great nostalgic startup story like the many shit offices I have worked in over the years, but most days it's pretty trying. At least this one sometimes has central air and there's no exposed fiberglass, giant holes in the window, or stacks of German porn in the restroom. Could be worse. Oh, I also ran payroll for the first time. (What a terrifying feeling that is!) This week is the final stretch of building our mobile prototype, wish us speed and smarts!
Journal:
"This week I learned" is a theme that I think will make a semi-regular appearance in this section. This week I learned the importance of asking what we need for creatively when we're collaborating. Collaboration by nature has to be open, respectful, and tuned into the people you're working with. Asking open questions like "how do you want to approach this?" is critical, but sometimes it's also okay to just say what we need. Like when a bassist says to a drummer "give me a beat". I've been thinking a lot about this give and take, and how to set a tone for teams where it's okay to ask.
Another theme to this journal section I think I'll sometimes include is: "this week in shitty men" hahahahaha oh god. I've gotta. I've got to joke about this because if I don't I'll go insane, you'll go insane, we'll all go insane. I had a bunch of potential shitty men stories to put here – like the investor that commented on my piercings in a meeting; the bros who assumed I would give them a bunch of free help and got sad when I told them no; or the many, many, many men who interrupt me when I mention I used to be the GM at Vine to ask me incredulously, "woah, how did you get that job". But, there's a far more hilarious shitty men story that my sister Becky told me tonight, so I'm sharing that instead (with her permission): Becky is 20 year old college student who works as a ski instructor/patrol in and around the Rocky Mountains. Her workplace is a very male dominated environment. The other day while she was teaching, her lift passes somehow came unfastened from her snow pants (she has three season passes for different hills, they're each like + $1000). Luckily though, someone found them and returned them to the staff office, giving them to her colleague. Not just any colleague, but one that she regularly deals with subtle sexist jabs from. We'll call this guy fuckboi. Instead of returning her passes, fuckboi hides them. He waits for my sister to realize what's happened and spend half an hour frantically looking for her "lost" passes while fuckboi sits in the lodge canteen smirking and tucking into a burger. Finally, the truth comes out and upon retrieving her passes, Becky walks over to fuckboi, grabs his burger and entire lunch tray, and silently throws it in the trash as she walks out of the lodge. Goddamn. "He wasted my most valuable thing – my time" she tells me calmly over Facetime "so I wasted his money".
Jams:
Last night I ended up playing my favorite "game" – where my friends and I start playing each other music videos around 2AM. Here are a couple gems I hadn't seen yet (warning, both are kinda NSFW):
Gesaffelstein – Pursuit (driving electronic rhythms, golden hands, clones, guns, who the fuck knows)
Cupcakke – Duck Duck Goose (One of my fav rappers smashes up the patriarchy with dildos)
If you need an palate cleanser, I highly recommend the super fun hilarity of Bassline Junkie by Dizzee Rascal. The church of bass is where I'll be.
Other than getting my shit together to send this earlier on a Sunday and figuring out how to make this look cooler next time, please send me feedback. I have no idea what I'm doing yet!
x Han