On this episode of the Slow Hunch Pod I'm so excited to welcome my old friend Dani Grant who is the CEO of USV's portfolio company Jam. Dani and I got to know each other dating back to when she was an analyst at USV from 2018 to 202. During that time we had a blast working together on lots of things, including making investments, writing blog posts together and building apps together.

One of the things that always stood out to me about Dani is the infectious energy that she brings to the process of building things, especially building things as a team. And that's what her company Jam is all about: Jam build tools that help product and engineering teams fix bugs and collaborate on improving products in ways that are not just efficient but joyful and fun.

In our conversation we'll talk about Dani's journey leading up to building Jam, all the way back to her childhood in mountain view where she got the bug for building, and including some of her tips for cultivating curiosity, building a personal professional network, and helping teams achieve their highest potential.

As always, you can listen to this episode on Spotify, Apple or wherever else you consume podcasts and can watch the full video on YouTube:

I'm so excited to hit publish on the latest episode of the Slow Hunch Podcast, where I chat with author, thinker and creator Steven Johnson.

As anyone who's read this blog over the years knows, the idea for the concept "The Slow Hunch" comes from Steven's book Where Good Ideas Come From. I've always loved that book and have drawn so much inspiration from it over the years.

One of the key ideas in WGICF is the "Commonplace Book", which was essentially a scrapbook of ideas, notes, and thoughts, typically kept by some of history's great thinkers. Steven chronicles how thinkers like Darwin used a commonplace book not just to capture their own thoughts, but to paste notes from readings and others' ideas. And, most importantly, the key to making a commonplace book work was committing to re-reading the notes over time, on the chance that connections likely exist that you might not have realized previously. Thus, laying the groundwork for turning Slow Hunches into big breakthroughs.

Shortly after reading the book (nearly 15 years ago now), I wrote this post seeking a digital version of the Commonplace Book. A way of replicating this experience but using digital tools and stitching together notes, ideas and thoughts from across our digital lived experience.

It took a while, but now with the advent of LLMs, it's more possible than ever to build such tools. And in fact, and of course, Steven has actually been working on one -- for the past several years he's been working with the team at Google Labs to build NotebookLM, and AI-powered commonplace book.

In my conversation with Steven, we talk about his personal Slow Hunch on the path to "tools for networked thought" -- spanning his first explorations with Hypercard in the 1980s all the way to his work on NotebookLM today.

As always, the episode can be found on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, and anywhere else you might catch a pod. Enjoy!

In the last few weeks, I've found myself in the middle of several very complex negotiations. Getting something done in any negotiation requires leverage. But leverage is tricky. You need to have it to drive an outcome in your direction, but you want to be careful using it.

Brazenly using leverage can be effective, but it's somewhat distasteful, and can create bad blood / tarnish relationships. Leverage is also slippery and elusive. It may be that you have it, but sometimes it's not necessarily 100% clear, and things can change quickly.

Taking these two things together, I always find that it's wisest to try and understand what your leverage is, but also avoid wielding it too openly. Both because you may not actually have as much as you think, and if it turns out that you don't, you end up exposed as someone who's not afraid to use it.

But all that said: navigating real-time contentious situations is a good reminder that leverage is best built up over time, and planned ahead for as much as possible. That way, when it comes time you use it, you can a) be sure you actually have it and b) use what you have as modestly and comfortably as possible.

Image from Getty on Unsplash