Ways of Looking #1 (September '24)
In this issue: a $37 life-changing stretching device, an unexpected reason to donate blood, five articles I wrote in September, and more...
Welcome to Ways of Looking. Roughly every month, I send my friends a few things I’m enjoying — content, products, and experiments — and summaries of anything I’ve written recently.
About me: I’m a three-time founder (Eco, CoinList, Sidewire) based in Austin, TX. I’m currently spending time on: Eco, exploring the home health & environmental toxins space, supporting FreeWorld, hacking on a few products, and investing in and advising great companies and founders.
Check out my more regular writing and reply to this email anytime. Thanks for reading.
— Andy
In this issue: a $37 life-changing stretching device, an unexpected reason to donate blood, five articles I wrote in September (including on Toxic Progress, Minimum Effective Quantification, and how to get the truth on reference calls), and more.
What I’m enjoying
Product: Fanlecy back stretcher. Yes, it looks ridiculous (imagine a year or two ago when all they had was the flesh-colored one), but I’m pretty sure I’ve sold at least a dozen of these to friends. Lie down for 5-10 minutes, move your arms around, and your back will feel 100x better.
Book: The Caesars Palace Coup, by Sujeet Indap and Max Frumes. Really great inside story of the Caesars saga, from buyout to bankruptcy and back. Excellent inside color on the whole situation. My only gripe: it needed better copy editing.
Experiment: niche, but: if your blood tests show high SHBG and you have normal-to-high iron saturation, consider donating blood or getting therapeutic phlebotomy (after consulting a medical professional, which I am not). I’ve had high SHBG for a long time, no doctor has ever been able to improve it, and it turns out that simply dumping some blood fixes it. Doing so may also have other benefits, like reducing PFAS levels in the body. Maybe bloodletting and leeches are Lindy after all…
Article: Lab-grown diamonds, by Javid Lakha. If you’re like me, you’ve heard some buzz about lab-grown diamonds, but know little beyond “I think they’re pretty much the same as real ones?” This article fills in all the gaps. Feels like the unfolding Moore’s-Law-of-diamonds shown below is likely to continue to impact the market.
App: Claude’s Projects and Artifacts features. I had been mostly a ChatGPT user (and still love it for multimodal, o1, etc.), but my friend Justin Mares convinced me to give Claude a try.
The Projects feature is amazing for code or writing — I upload a bunch of context (for code: an architecture writeup for the project, my preferences, some of the codebase; for writing: examples of what I’m going for, either stylistic or content) and then when I prompt it, all that context is in memory.
And Artifacts is great for those same use cases — it’s so nice to be able to prompt for edits/changes and it updates the Artifact file in place, instead of spewing out partial content in the response body.
What I’ve written
Tools for getting the truth on reference calls — reference calls are an exercise in collecting data the respondent is hesitant to share. This post is about tools for getting that information.
The Toxic Progress Paradox — Progress is Good, but also causes us plenty of problems. Why is that, and how can we reconcile those perspectives?
Minimum Effective Quantification — I used to be big into “quantified self,” but ran into diminishing returns on tracking data. MEQ is my answer to the problem, and helps give me the best chance to feel great every day.
How I write investor updates — here’s the investor update format I’ve refined over the last decade.
On Freedom Phones and Focus Accounts — how to set up a distraction-free phone that solves for common objections (“what about emergencies??”).
Thanks for reading. I’ll see you next time.
— Andy