She pushed the needle into my arm…

Hello friend,

Here's what I'm thinking about…

She pushed the needle into my arm. A little poke, a second of discomfort.

No going back now. My palms started gushing sweat.

I lay down on the couch and the nurse passed me an eye mask and noise-cancelling headphones. Then darkness. Minutes crawled by as I listened to the pulse of mellow electronic music and forced myself to breathe.

Why did I agree to this, I wondered. I hated drugs.

A few minutes after the injection, I started sinking. Deeper and deeper. My body felt weightless, then…just gone. I melted into something warm and formless, dissolving like cake batter. Then, a few moments later, I died.

At least that's what it felt like…

Read the full essay →

They got 30,000 people to watch a video about…paper?

Here's what you need to know about business school students: within thirty seconds of walking into a classroom, you can predict who will actually start a business and who will end up as a bureaucrat in corporate finance.

Chris and I recently spoke to a class of local business students at the University of Victoria. As we spoke, I looked out at a sea of faces, most staring blankly—the telltale sign of kids who are there because their parents pressured them into it or because "business" looks respectable on a resume. I felt a bit let down.

But afterwards, two students walked up to me and started peppering me with questions—the kind that immediately told me they were entrepreneurs. Their names were Aiden and Hiroko...

Read the full essay →

I was left feeling unsettled by this Diary of a CEO interview with Geoffrey Hinton, who is largely credited for many of the academic breakthroughs in AI.

My favorite quote:

"If you want to know what life's like when you're not the apex intelligence ask a chicken"

Ignore the clickbait title on the podcast. It's actually a very calm and rational interview, but it's fascinating to hear it from somebody who has been at the edge of this for a very long time and no longer has any skin in the game.

Spotify / YouTube / Apple Podcasts

Speaking of starting agencies: running one is stressful as hell.

Eighteen years ago, I was burnt out from running Metalab, so I decided to go backpacking in Europe.

Being an inexperienced fool, I decided to hand off the operations to one of my best friends from college, Mark Nichols.

At the time, he had no experience running a business—in fact, his only job experience at the time was mopping floors at a Starbucks in a Burlington strip mall—and I did a very poor job of onboarding him...

Read the full essay →

PS: Metalab just did some insanely beautiful work.

They just rebranded Windsurf, one of the top AI coding platforms, which just sold to OpenAI for $3 billion. I absolutely love this rebrand.

This comes on the heels of work for Suno, Pika, Grok, and MidJourney.

My hometown, Victoria, used to buzz.

From 2008 to 2018, you could feel the energy building. Great shows, incredible events, a city coming alive.

Then COVID hit. And frankly, we've been in a bit of a funk ever since.

Don't get me wrong—there are still some amazing event organizers doing incredible work here. But their numbers are dwindling. Many of the people who used to bring fantastic performers and mid-sized acts to town have shut down or sold to faceless corporate groups.

Here's the thing: Victoria is packed with talent and potential. But there's always been this barrier—you want to book that comedian everyone's talking about, or bring in that band, or throw an epic party, but you need a huge deposit upfront. Too much risk for one person to shoulder alone.

So my friend Josh Franklin and I decided to do something about it.

We're launching The Culture Fund.

We're offering loans between $1,000–$50,000 to help people put on incredible events that make Victoria better.

Music shows. Comedy nights. Festivals. Massive parties. Whatever makes this city more vibrant.

Here's the deal: This isn't charity. We're trying to stimulate a sustainable arts, culture, and music scene. The city doesn't benefit if these events fail financially. So we're going to be disciplined about it. The numbers need to make sense. You need to be able to pay us back.

But if you've got a killer idea and just need the capital to make it happen, we want to talk.

My robot-induced cat feces trauma is over.

In my book, I shared a funny story about how a rogue robot vacuum once smeared cat feces throughout my house:

"When I staggered back through the front door of my house, I was hit with a smell so foul it made my eyes water. The whole house reeked like a pit latrine. Gripping my nose, I walked down the hall and into my dining room. Then, I saw something I can never unsee. It appeared that my cat didn't share my fine taste in furniture and litter boxes. The sand in the box was left untouched, and in the hours since I'd left, she had defecated all over the floor around it. My robot vacuum, on its nightly schedule, had smeared a thin layer of cat feces across the room in a circular pattern, like a Franz Kline painting, and the little Roomba was now beeping shamefully in the corner."

Well, I'm a glutton for punishment. I've since tried 2-3 more robot vacuums, and while I've never experienced this level of depravity again, none of them have worked very well. They almost always got tangled on cords or stuck under things, and I ended up spending as much time managing them than I otherwise would have vacuuming manually.

I recently bought one that I absolutely love. It's called the Matic and it was built by two Google engineers. It's basically a mini self-driving car, with full machine vision, and can avoid any objects left on the ground.

It's incredible, and it mops and sweeps our house each night.

My favorite part: we let the boys name it and they somehow came up with the name Gregothy George.

I'm a fan, and speaking from experience, I give it a big thumbs up. Check out the Matic robot vacuum here

The Verge just called our absurd $3,600 keyboard "the best."

A few months ago, I wrote about an investment we made in Norbauer & Co—my old friend Ryan Norbauer's company that makes luxury keyboards that cost more than most computers. (You can read the full story here - it's a fun one.)

Well, The Verge just published their review of his masterpiece, the Seneca.

Their verdict?

"The best, and most expensive, thing I've ever typed on."

The reviewer, Nathan Edwards, goes on to say:

"The more normal you are about keyboards, the less impressive the Seneca is. I am not normal about keyboards, and the Seneca is goddamn incredible."

"For lack of a better word, the Seneca feels permanent."

"The typing experience is sublime."

And no keyboard review would be complete without a typing test:

"A deep, muted thock, without a hint of ping."

If you're a fellow keyboard obsessive, you can check them out here (we sold out, so you'll have to wait).

Random Stuff:

• I spent many years of my childhood cackling at Tom Green's antics on a grainy television in my parent's basement.

  I just watched This Is The Tom Green Documentary, which, as you would guess by the name, is a documentary about Tom Green's rise from small-town Canadian cable access fame, to Hollywood, and back. I found it insanely nostalgic and laughed a lot. Trailer / Letterboxd

• A few weeks ago, Chris and I shared Tiny's 2024 Annual Letter, where we walked through what we've been up to over the last year.

  TLDR: Our cost-cutting program led to a 38% QoQ jump in Q4 Adjusted EBITDA, while recurring revenue is up 4x since 2021. We also acquired a 66% stake in Serato for $66M, which is expected to boost earnings by approximately 45%.

  You can read the full letter here.

• A lovely guy from Italy named Giulio Michelon flew out to interview me for his podcast.

  It turned out really well. We talked about:

  • Why agencies are so stressful (he has one too)
  • Why I still feel "Never Enough," even after writing a book about it
  • How incentives make or break companies

  And a bunch more. Spotify / YouTube / Apple Podcasts

• We're still looking to hire someone to manage our local events. Through my personal network and businesses, we host a ton of speakers, lunch and learns, forums, and conferences, and we're adding to our events team. We're looking for someone who is: a big people person, has incredible taste (aesthetics + you know all the best spots in Vancouver/Victoria), and ideally some event planning experience.

• I'm just going to leave this here. Connor O'Malley never fails to make me cackle. His latest video, presented without comment: Slugs.

That's all for now…

-Andrew