The Pipette
A newsletter for product builders with links so good their ideas warrant a reply, a forward, or even a discussion in real life.
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With The Pipette, our goal is to share links to the good parts of the internet. We will include context for why we chose them that draws from our lives, relevant conversations, and offline sources. The topics will appeal to those working on digital products and be inclusive of what motivates and matters to us as people.
Feedback is strongly encouraged. We want people to “slide into our newsletter” and reply with their links, suggestions, and personal thoughts. Credit given if we share! While a newsletter format is easier for distribution, we do not want to miss the conversation we could be having together. Our hope is that we collectively take our good links, wrapped in real lived context, and “pipette📖 pipette/pipetting/pipetted – (verb) Using a pipette, a tubular laboratory instrument, to transfer or measure liquids. Paraphrased from Oxford Languages definition found on Google. ” the knowledge to one another.
Good parts of the internet, eh? What makes them good?
We believe the best stuff on the internet comes to us from real people we trust – colleagues, friends, family, podcasters, and experts. These resources are usually links or phrases we can Google later, but the important thing is that we do not learn about them from online feeds where people are posting for internet points. No, instead we get these interesting thought-seedlings through trusted channels: they are texted, emailed, mentioned in the middle of a podcast, or brought up in actual conversation with people that we respect and care about.
Not sending everyone these links. Because “what if they find out what I am trying to become?”
This valuable exchange of information is the backbone of virality and explains why so many people try to harness it for profit. As a result, we have become more strict with who gets to be let into our true worlds of intellectual digital pursuit, because it often is how we reach for skills or concepts we don’t yet have but plan to foster.
Using these links to level-up and stay connected to helpful peers
This private knowledge-exchange deserves credit for how we stay looped-in or level up within our industry. By fostering these connections to peers, even as jobs and locations change, our respected colleagues are able to help us, often by sharing links and recommendations to tools, processes, and skills.
For example:
- Angela brought in Slack to replace Google Hangouts at a new gig in 2014 because Grey was using it as his new job. Google Hangouts was total garbage – you had to add everyone in the company to your contacts when you were new. It made for some distant and strange connections.
- We’ve used to Notion organize everything from knowledge bases (Vertico Labs, The Atlas) to dog/house sitting instructions. Our closest connections use it for business and their lives. All of this stems from our friend Jackie sharing it with Grey in 2018.
- Grey heard about the book The Manager’s Path from a former manager. He has shared and discussed it with direct reports and friends to help grow their careers.
- Our “place to live” value has been eagerly adopted by our former colleague David, and was pieced together as a phrase by Angela from reading best practices for learning new codebases.
And yet how strange that the value of these connections were created by a web of links and the thought exchanges they provoked? Packaged and intended for warm debate or “ah ha!” inspiration – for humans, by humans.
The Pipette is a way to keep the process going, a free exchange of thoughts and hand-picked resources; stuff that we can’t wait to share. We want it to be a two-way street — not just giving these precious links, but receiving them too. We would love nothing more than to be trusted enough to receive those hard-earned gems from our peers.
We’ve done this before: Real life with real people!
During our time leading engineering at The Atlas, we held weekly “meetings” where anyone in the company could join to discuss technology, casually. They were not for status updates, professional credit, devil’s-advocate-style debate, or stockpiling content for the company Twitter!
Instead, people came to share articles or books they read. They typically heard about them from a circle of trust: colleagues, friends, family, podcasters, or experts in their respective industries.
These conversations were often so interesting and thoughtful that we continued to process them afterwards. We discussed them outside of work with our own close people. They influenced what we wanted to read later, and shaped what we wanted to produce next and why. For example, we stumbled upon “Digital Gardens”, and it inspired at least 4 of us to create our own! Additionally, we shared this single concept with dozens of people we felt needed to know.
These meetings were the impetus for approaching Vertico Labs as a garden (The Pipette Newsletter & Juice Box Community included). We want only the most juicy, valuable, interesting, human-trusted good stuff on here. Money be damned! Let there be good quality 100% juice for all.
Get these good, good links in your inbox:
We hope that what we share in this newsletter will work its way into your conversations, thoughts, and pursuits.
Likewise, we hope you will do the same for us. Please “slide into our newsletter” via reply and tell us what you think, what links you’ve got – all ramblings encouraged! Remember this is casual, fun and thoughtful stuff – with humans we trust with our links!