Finding a New Medium
You may have noticed a new look at Both Sides of the Table today and that’s because I’ve migrated my blog to Medium. I’ve been planning a migration for some time because I believe Medium is the best product built for writers. I don’t manage web pages, I care only about ideas and thought.
Let me expand.
When I meet people for the first time amongst the things I get asked about the most is about blogging.
People have a strong curiosity for the oddity of what it takes to sit and write frequently and put one’s thoughts in the public marketplace. Most now recognize the importance of blogging but seem baffled with how and why I do it. Many enquirers ask for advice on blogging themselves, few will follow through on what I tell them.
It’s much simpler than one would imagine.
Why I Write?
It’s very simply — I love writing. It’s my outlet of bottled creativity. It’s when I can switch from Manager to Maker. I can express and convey thoughts about complex topics that help others peel back the layers of an onion in trying to understand the worlds of startups, technology and venture capital.
I also write because the only thing I truly compete for in my job is “share of mind.” Money is fungible. People select venture capitalists because they believe you’d be helpful as a partner as they build their businesses. What better guide for people whom I’ve never met than to let entrepreneurs know how I think, talk and interact.
WYSIWYG.
And share of mind is not just about entrepreneurs. What may surprise you is how selective VCs are about working with other VCs. They play an outsized role in the selection of which VCs can invest in their follow-on rounds and of course having influential downstream VCs interested in your portfolio companies can have an enormous impact on the success of your investments.
Ultimately you can only be a consistent long-term blogger if you love the creative process of writing or more broadly the process of creating. When I first take on a topic it usually consumes me in the shower or in a long drive. I literally zone out and imagine the headline, the thesis, how I would deconstruct the topic and what points I’d make. I write in my head long before it hits the keyboard.
I write because along with public speaking it’s my primary source of creative energy in a job that might otherwise be limited to reviewing legal docs, board packs and spreadsheets. I enjoy hearing the passions and ideas of entrepreneurs as they tell me their plans and show me their products. I love watching their creativity, but this keyboard and these words are my personal creative outlet and I love that, too.
Writing isn’t an obligation or chore. Writing is my alone time. It’s my refuge. It’s my time away from group meetings, obligations or responsibilities. Writing is often what I’d prefer to do to watching TV. I sometimes set my alarm early to wake up and write before I have to start the drudgery of checking email.
How I Write?
I start and finish. I’m not being flippant but that’s the number one recipe. I publish or perish. I’m in the game consistently and I’ve had my 10,000 hours. I don’t worry that each and every post will be a work of art or talked about. I know that if I obsess over any individual post I would simply never write.
I was speaking with my good friend Bryce Roberts yesterday about blogging. We both agreed that often we feel inspired to cover a topic and we sit at our keyboards until the idea is on the screen. Some days we nail it, others we think “meh” but in either case we hit publish and move on.
I told Bryce that I’ve had the “blogging conversation” with so many VCs and I always start the same way. “Most likely you will fail” and then I pause to watch their reaction.
VCs aren’t used to people telling them they’ll fail. But many VCs struggle to blog precisely because they overthink it.
“You’ll fail simply because you’re too smart. You’ve gotten to where you are by being a perfectionist. You will only want to write fully researched pieces. You’ll want too many people to read and comment on your posts before you hit publish. You’ll want to write long, thoughtful posts that make you sound academic. When you start you will publish 5 long posts filled with industry jargon and buzzwords and the process will kill you. By month three you will have stopped out of exhaustion.”
“If I could give you one piece of advice it would be this. Take a topic, deconstruct it into individual parts and make each bullet point a post. Each topic should have 10 ideas and if you have 3 topics then you’ll have 30 posts ready to write before you even start. Keep each under 750 words, use no jargon, and at the end of writing each post hit publish. Publish or perish. You can always revise it later but frankly you’re better off moving to the next post. 70% of what you write will just be ok, 25% will suck and 5% will be inspired.”
“But you have to be in the game constantly to develop a feel for the medium. You need to constantly put out thoughts, shape ideas, debate with audiences and one day when you are writing at 2am from your hotel room and you don’t give a fuck what anybody else is thinking because you’re in your own head and just writing what’s on your mind — BOOM!”
Develop a feel for the medium. For the Medium. It is precisely why I’ve embraced this new platform. As somebody who loves writing and the process, I also appreciate the medium by which I communicate.
Out of my late-night sessions came: Lines Not Dots, Entrepreneurshit, Deer Hunters or Valuing Startups. None of these were planned. I have many other posts people ask about all the time but many people refer back to these.
Why Medium?
I recently wrote about my love of trying new products and testing new mediums (media).
I find that many people adopt products and when they become familiar they hate the idea of change. 10 years ago I abandoned a PC for a Mac and just accepted that I was going to have to learn a new OS and Keynote instead of Powerpoint. The move was painful for a few weeks of reduced productivity but liberating and I can’t imagine having not embraced the new platform.
Even harder was giving up my Blackberry. It’s not that I didn’t understand the beauty and benefits of an iPhone but rather as a writer I like a keyboard. Many years ago I ditched the Blackberry and never looked back.
A few years ago I announced to my partners that I was getting rid of their PCs in exchange for Macs so we could modernize and standardize our entire office including finance and assistants. They reluctantly agreed. I told them we were giving up our local server and moving all of our files to Dropbox. They gave me the knowing look, “Suster, we know you’re going to be a pain in the ass and relent until this is done — so just go ahead already!”
But when I told them we were abandoning Outlook and Exchange in favor of Gmail it was mutiny. If you take people who have used one email system for nearly 20 years — day in and day out — and then change this system it is PAINFUL. Email is the system by which most people write frequently.
We of course switched and I got to hear first hand all the terrible things Gmail doesn’t do that an Outlook client could. That was years ago and we haven’t looked back.
People hate change. But of course change is progress.
Platforms evolve and new products are built that serve new purposes and were designed for a new era. And that’s why today I’ve moved my blog to Medium.
Writing is all that matters to me. I don’t want to think about: Audience building, column formatting, image insertion, commenting systems, spam filtering, headline building, layouts, widgets or any other background distractions to my mission. I’m a writer. I want to write.
And Medium is the most elegant tool I’ve seen to date that is built for people like me. I was fortunate enough to be contacted by Ev Williams years ago to be an initial launch writer when he first launched Medium. I was excited because I was both an early user of Blogger (which he built) and Twitter (he also built) so the thought of using his next creation was appealing.
From the first time I used Medium I knew I would end up here. I knew that it was crafted by somebody who understood me. The tools of the trade are so much easier to use: Headlines, linking, image insertion, quote paragraphs, lists. It was created by a team that obviously understood and cared about the details of creators.
And as a writer — I’m not looking to monetize by my thoughts — I’m simply looking to add to the world of knowledge and be challenged when I miss the mark. Medium was built for this purpose.
Medium’s marketing headline for new users is
“Medium is a community of readers and writers offering unique perspectives on ideas large and small.”
That suits me. It took me a couple of years to migrate because I had a few professional requirements such as having my own domain, being able to integrate my email lists, etc. So I watched from the sidelines for a bit.
But Medium has now build so many tools that enable people who have existing audiences and that enable me to switch my professional blog over that I felt now was the time to point at the future and to write into an existing “community of readers.”
Medium isn’t built for website creators it’s built for idea creators. And the Medium team understands our world. I can write this draft and easily send a link to colleagues to review and provide inline comments before publishing. The simplicity of that alone is awesome.
So thank you to Ev and team for caring so much to put out a product that is so lovingly built for people like me so I can focus on the one thing I really love doing— writing.
