It’s been a long time since I’ve blogged very much – or even really tweeted very much – and I miss it, so I’m going to start again.

I used to blog all the time – I started 20 years ago (!) when I had just about left my own startup, Reactivity, and hadn’t yet joined Mozilla. I was reading a ton and playing a lot of World of Warcraft, and getting ready for our first son Sam to be born, and was doing a lot of thinking about the first 10 years of my career and what I wanted for the next 10 and the 10 after that. Blogging was kind of new, and it was a really fun time just to learn to express myself on the internet – really just doing it to help myself think and learn.

And it turned out to be very useful professionally as I joined Mozilla – I started blogging more about the open web with posts like this one that got a fair amount of attention.

I must have had a lot more time back then, because I wrote a lot. But it was fun, and I was trying to figure out what I thought about a lot of different things.

Twitter started in 2006 and I started tweeting pretty soon, and that was something completely new & alive. While blogging was post & response, Twitter was really quick conversations, about just about anything. It’s hard to explain to anyone who wasn’t on it in the late 2000s, but Twitter really had the feel of hanging out at a bar with your friends after work, but way richer. Over time I would blog a little bit less month to month and tweet a lot more, and it stayed that way for awhile.

Over time, my attention span got shorter & shorter – the kids came, social media became more pervasive, and as I’d become a VC at Greylock, my attention was naturally pulled between a million different competing interests. The other thing that happened for me specifically is that since I was meeting one to two thousand companies a year, I felt like my head was suddenly filled with ideas that weren’t really mine to share.

And honestly social media started sucking a lot. I still got a lot of use and enjoyment from it, but it definitely was starting to show really problematic signs in the early 2010s and kind of went off the rails in the second half of the decade – politics, disinformation, tribalism – it all just sort of sucked. That coincided at a time in my life when I left Greylock and started thinking about what to do next, then…covid.

Since 2020 I’ve been off the map a little bit in a lot of ways, dealing with lots of the things you deal with as you work your way into and through middle age: parents, kids, siblings, friends, sense of self – stuff that’s often pretty tough to write about as you’re going through it – not to mention some of the stuff I’ve been involved with at the board level of Figma, Duolingo, Nuro & more.

But what really got my attention is that in 2022 my 17 year old son Sam was diagnosed with leukemia. We think he very nearly died that week, but he’s good now, after some very tough and scary times, and some extremely high quality medical care – but it completely dominated our lives for a couple of years, and we’re still processing it in a lot of ways.

Anyway. So now I find myself at 54 wanting to write again, to go back and figure out what I think about some things again. I don’t know what the cadence will be or the topics, although there are a few that are kicking around in my head.

As Thomas Wolfe wrote, “You can’t go home again” – but I think writing more, trying to extend my attention span, working to create more than react – that’s what I plan to do for awhile. I’ll have to experiment with where to post this stuff – right now I’m posting to my own blog, and some distribution to Bluesky, Threads, (maybe but likely not for long) Twitter, Facebook (maybe?).

We’ll see!

Thanks to Harper for all the help and encouragement getting set up. I’ll leave the Yak Shaving description for a little bit later. (Also, it might be Bike Shedding that I’ve been doing. It’s tricky to tell.)