Yeah, that's me. Blowing out the candles and spitting all over the cake. Hockey rink cake, obviously — because some things about a person are established early and never really change.
No COVID back then. Nope. The only things in the air to worry about at a kid's 8th birthday party were cigarette smoke and ozone-depleting hairspray.
So. Much. Hairspray.
"The Friday Dispatch is how I spend a few hours each week doing something that kid would be proud of."
Every Friday I sit down and build this thing — reading through the week, pulling out what actually matters, cutting the noise, and writing it up the way I'd want to find it in my inbox. Not because anyone asked me to. Not because there's a VC-backed content strategy behind it. Because there's a version of me in that yellow shirt who would think this was genuinely cool.
He'd also be relieved to know I still play with GI Joes and harass people at movie stores.
He appreciates that we've never grown out of that.
The Friday Dispatch lands in your inbox every Friday. It's a curated mix of opportunities worth chasing, politics without the doomscroll, world news without the yelling, job postings for roles that don't look like a hostage negotiation, deals that aren't garbage, and stories that make you go "huh, neat."
It's free. It's weekly. It's written like a real person wrote it — because one did. And it's designed to feel like the most interesting thing on your desk at 3pm on a Friday, when you're technically still working but honestly you've already mentally left the building.
The kid in that photo would've gotten it immediately. He had good instincts. Questionable haircut, but good instincts.
