Engineering Feelings
Donald Jewkes on telling Silicon Valley's stories
By Aadil Pickle · Mar 2026
Silicon Valley is obsessed with storytelling right now. Founders are dropping six figures on launch videos pre-product. A16z new media is hiring the best twitter posters to help their PortCos with comms. AI can write code ten times better than it can a blog post. Building things is cheap, so software engineers are getting laid off, but attention is all you...
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Photo: Karina Bao
You can't lose if you never quit
Declan Gessel on building businesses as an ultramarathon runner
By Aadil Pickle · Feb 2026
You can tell a lot about how someone approaches life by watching them play pickup basketball. Playing with Declan is like having a golden retriever on your team. He jumps for every rebound. Sprints to save the ball any time it's going out of bounds. Shoots the ugliest jump shot and having faith it'll go in. Always...
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Do the dirty work
Jasmine Sun on writing and doing everything to win
By Aadil Pickle · Feb 2026
Jasmine is an independent journalist covering Silicon Valley tech and culture. That's the tight one-liner she'll tell you if you ever meet her and ask what she does. What she won't tell you is the million other lives she lives that seem to all perfectly...
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Training the Idea Muscle
Riley Walz on creating viral internet pranks
By Aadil Pickle · Dec 2025
Riley describes himself simply as a guy who likes to do things he finds fun. But to the New York Times, he's known as "The Tech Jester Who Pranks San Francisco". He's responsible for projects like: But before any of his projects went mega viral, before he...
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Inventing the near future
Brian Machado on building a $1000 general purpose human-ish robot
By Aadil Pickle · Dec 2025
My friend Brian has a very interesting take on money. In that, it always feels like he doesn't have any, even though he probably should. He's an incredibly talented engineer who worked on Uber self-driving when he was 19, and has raised millions, yet is three...
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