I share short, partly visual emails, crafted through my lens as a creative director in deep-tech. Join me for insights on effective communication, marketing, design, psychology, and the philosophy of value.
Is your product beautiful?
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"This picture is beautiful." These things seem unrelated, yet they all share the descriptor 'beautiful.' Why? "Pretty" is surface-level—something that looks good but lacks substance. When we call something beautiful, we recognize excellence in context. Philosopher Denis Dutton, drawing on Darwin, says that beauty signals something done well, even if we can't always articulate why. Why am I telling you this? We create things of massive complexity. Whether it’s a new technology, a software product or even an investor pitch, we are limited in our capacity to make all the decisions rationally and objectively. When you aim for beauty, you're really aiming to make the thing the best it can be. Beauty isn’t just an outcome—it’s a guide. A compass that helps us create solutions that not only function but resonate. Yours, |
Creativity in Deep-Tech
I share short, partly visual emails, crafted through my lens as a creative director in deep-tech. Join me for insights on effective communication, marketing, design, psychology, and the philosophy of value.
In the previous newsletter, I shared a talk I gave at Nest Catalyst about investor pitching. That first talk focused on the mindset behind pitching complex ideas. This second talk is more practical. It focuses on how to approach shaping your pitch - through principles and examples. The last five minutes are especially practical: an easy framework to help you craft your narrative. This was quite challenging. After years of doing this work, a lot of it has become intuitive. Breaking it down to...
If you've ever struggled to move people toward a complex new idea, or if you just want to finally understand what it is that I do (like my parents), Or you just feel like watching something interesting … I finally had the opportunity to record a talk I’ve been piecing together for years. I had the pleasure of speaking to a group of scientist-entrepreneurs at Nest Catalyst - a Bay Area program supporting life science founders building companies in the biotech ecosystem. The talk is visual,...
There's a way to improve your startup by orders of magnitude in 10 seconds.Here’s what you do:Go to your email signature and add this to your title: CVO, Chief Visionary Officer. (You can keep your CEO title or replace it — I don’t mind.)Boom! You just made your startup more effective and drastically increased your chances of building a great product.By assuming the CVO title, you made something explicit that most startups leave vague: that there is a single source of intent in the system....