I read Founder Mode, by Paul Graham, with great interest. I’m lucky in that I’ve seen both Steve Jobs and Brian Chesky work up close.

A few caveats. I wish that my experiences with them had lasted longer, been closer, and involved more projects. Also, I saw more of Steve than of Brian.

Even with these qualifications, I think it worthwhile to offer a distillation of ten things I did see. There are some overlaps, but this is a subtle topic, not a simple one.

Here is what Founder Mode looked like from my perspective as an observer of these two great founders.

• Steve and Brian were deeply intuitive. In any particular situation, they knew what they wanted. They could also change their minds as the situation changed. They were decisive, but open.

• Steve and Brian worked very hard all the time. I’m not sure either of them ever really turned off. Look elsewhere for notions of work/life balance. Their work is their life, which they pursued with boundless energy.

• Steve and Brian never cared what you thought if it conflicted with what they thought was the right thing to do. They were on a personal quest to ask the most pertinent questions about their company and then find the best possible answers. Not a thing they could delegate.

• Steve and Brian were great editors of other people’s work. They gave out the ideas, jobs, projects, the things to do, and then they commented on, guided, and shaped the results that came back with clear and cogent feedback about what should happen next.

• Steve and Brian did not micro-manage. They right-sized their involvement. They trusted their best people to do great work without smothering them, but then were always there to give feedback and support.

• Steve and Brian demanded progress. Nobody had a comfortable job working with them. They expected people to produce tangible work product on a regular basis. They demanded tight iteration cycles.

• Steve and Brian were always visible. Sometimes it seemed like they were everywhere working on everything.

• Steve and Brian were focused. They banished distractions. Their concentration didn’t waver. They were able to work on a specific task for as long as necessary.

• Steve and Brian exuded extreme confidence. They possessed an intense personal charisma. It made the people around them strive to do their best.

• Steve and Brian never got confused about what their companies were supposed to be doing. They always kept their eyes on creating meaning and value for customers.

A note on verb tenses. I expressed my list in the past tense, as a description of first hand observations I made in the past. It seemed odd to talk about Brian in this way, but there it is. I hope Brian continues his work far into the future.

Do you trust a tweet? Well, here’s what’s in one:

• a display name, the “human readable” name. Historically, this has been freeform text. I’ve always used my true name, Ken Kocienda. Others are more creative and change their display name often.
• an avatar, an image. Again, a freeform field. Use a portrait, a logo, whatever. Another chance to express yourself.
• an account name, the @handle. This doesn’t change. It’s unique in the Twitter namespace. Set it once at account-creation time, and that’s it. Even so, it’s also freeform. In general, you can claim whatever name you want—as long as nobody else has it already.
• the account bio, a click away in all clients I know about. Another freeform field.
• Finally… the text of the tweet, in 280 characters or less.

A tweet also might have a blue checkmark. The presence of this verification badge, or lack of it, is one more piece of information to consider when reading a tweet and deciding whether to trust it.

So once more, using this information, do you trust a tweet? For some accounts I follow, like @Popehat, the avatar has been as much a sign that the account was the real thing, especially since Ken White (the man usually behind the tweets) often has been in the habit of humorously changing his display name to “ReflectTheLatestLegalSillinessHat”. The cleverness of the display name du jour was also a sign the tweet was genuine.

Although the now-retired verification process Twitter used was never made completely clear or transparent, the system sorta worked. For myself, I always looked to the blue checkmark as a signal that the account was who or what it purported to be—and therefore the tweets were too. Tweets with blue checkmarks carried more trust along with them.

To some extent, this also means that I trusted Twitter to perform the verification. I never applied for verification under the old system myself, but I did read the page to see what was required to submit a verification request. As I recall, an organization needed to prove it was indeed that organization (perhaps with legal documents?). Presumably, a government official would need to do much the same. A journalist would need to provide press credentials of some sort. An otherwise “notable” individual would need to make a case for actual notability by pointing to wikipedia pages, google links to articles in reputable publications, etc. It’s very likely that I don’t have all the details right, but it doesn’t much matter. The point is that Twitter gathered and vetted information to verify that accounts were owned by someone or some organization who was, in fact, who they said they were. This is a key. It was the account that was verified, not the display name, or the avatar, or the bio, or the text of the tweets. The account can’t be changed. Up until now, with the previous verification scheme, all the other fields could be altered by the account holder on a whim.

This seems like a shaky foundation for verification, but I can’t remember a case in the past where a checkmark was given incorrectly (in that the account was a fake), and while I heard of many instances where someone applied for verification but was denied (for reasons that nobody outside Twitter could fully understand), the blue checkmarks kinda functioned as intended, even with Popehat-style shifting display names, changeable avatars and bios, and the rest. I guess we came to trust Twitter to get it right enough when doling out the blue checkmarks.

Does the recent ownership change affect the trust question? Maybe it does. For sure, paying $8 for a blue checkmark without any verification process was never (ever!) a good idea. Just ask Eli Lilly.

On November 25, there came news that there will be three different colors of verification badges, with blue check marks for people, gold for companies, and gray for governments. I don’t know what this accomplishes. Take the example of the 45th President of the United States. He was, and remains, a notable person. He’s also the head of a company (and technically, probably several). He also was a government official. Does that mean that any future famous business-owning government official will have a row of badges? This seems like a recipe for confusion—or perhaps clutter—rather than clarity. If the display name is locked together with the account account name as part of the verification process, this could help to build trust that a tweet is being made from a knowable source. Will avatars and bios be locked too?

And what does paying have to do with it? I get that Twitter needs to make money to keep the servers humming and pay the employees who remain, but does a one-time check of claims and credentials warrant paying $8 per month in perpetuity? Will paying boost tweets in the algorithms? Is this system really more of a subscription with verification as a perk? Will this help people trust tweets?

I guess we’ll see.

After I finished my morning coffee with my wife, I looked at Twitter. I found a link to this essay by Craig Mod: Walking Venice.

Venice is cursed. It’s also beautiful and astounding and I walked up and down its alleyways.

https://craigmod.com/ridgeline/144/

I made a mental note to look it later in the day.

Now the admission. My cerebral reading list is a leaky bucket. So many articles and posts get poured it. So few get ladled back out. Most drip out the bottom and evaporate in a wisp.

Untroubled by this sad fact since it’s a daily occurrence, I scrolled on through my timeline. I soon saw the darkly glowing reply from Sebastiaan de With.

@craigmod What an agonizingly beautiful read. I really, really loved this. Thanks, Craig.

I stopped what I was doing right there and read Craig’s essay. It’s wonderful. I won’t spoil any of it. I suggest you go read it right now just like I (eventually) did.

Then come back and enjoy this partial footnote from Consider The Lobster, the essay by David Foster Wallace*. In his piece about visiting the Maine Lobster Festival in 2003, Wallace wrote about what it was like to be a tourist in America near the turn of the 21st century. His comments are about traveling inside the USA, but they are a suitably apt addendum to Craig’s contemporary experiences in Venice, which, it seems, doggedly lives on in the imagination of so many as La Serenìsima Repùblica Vèneta.

As I see it, it probably really is good for the soul to be a tourist, even if it’s only once in a while. Not good for the soul in a refreshing or enlivening way, though, but rather in a grim, steely-eyed, let’s-look-honestly-at-the-facts-and-find-some-way-to-deal-with-them way. My personal experience has not been that traveling around the country is broadening or relaxing, or that radical changes in place and context have a salutary effect, but rather that intranational tourism is radically constricting, and humbling in the hardest way — hostile to my fantasy of being a true individual, of living somehow outside and above it all… To be a mass tourist, for me, is to become a pure late-date American: alien, ignorant, greedy for something you cannot ever have, disappointed in a way you can never admit. It is to spoil, by way of sheer ontology, the very unspoiledness you are there to experience. It is to impose yourself on places that in all non-economic ways would be better, realer, without you. It is, in lines and gridlock and transaction after transaction, to confront a dimension of yourself that is as inescapable as it is painful: As a tourist, you become economically significant but existentially loathsome, an insect on a dead thing.

Excerpt From
Consider the Lobster
David Foster Wallace
https://books.apple.com/us/book/consider-the-lobster/id357663852
This material may be protected by copyright.

* I enjoy DFW’s nonfiction so very much, and of course, I need to tell you about it in a footnote. At moments like this, I can’t specifically describe why I enjoy Wallace’s essays because it’s everything. So smart. So geekily baroque. So many unrestrained and overelaborated footnotes. Writing so good that it inspires me to write, and yet is despairing too since there’s no way I can hope to approach his level. But I digress.

Some of you may know that I’ve taken an interest in mechanical watches, and I have been putting together a collection of pieces I like to wear. I also like to think about them as products, design objects, and examples of human ingenuity.

It’s easy to find watches for any budget, including budgets far exceeding mine. For example, this morning, I was browsing a couple of my favorite watch dealer sites, and I saw a new posting offering a Rolex Sea Dweller, a watch that typically sells for well over $10,000 USD, but… this particular example had a “COMEX” signature on the dial, referring to the relationship between Rolex and the Compagnie Maritime d’Expertises (COMEX), a French deep sea diving and technology company well known for pushing diving to new depths. Since comparatively few of these pieces were made, they are rare, and given the association with an illustrious company like COMEX, they are special too. Therefore, this particular example was being offered, with the original box and associated papers, for $140,000 USD.

Wow!

This $140k asking price raises the question of what objects like watches or Rolexes or specially signed COMEX Rolexes are rightly worth, and can also cover similar questions we might ask about Impressionist paintings, vintage Superman comic books, a Mickey Mantle baseball card picturing him in his rookie year, or all the new attention being paid to NFTs. What are these things really worth?

As I thought about this question, I was reminded of a time when my wife and I were watching an episode of Antiques Roadshow. It’s been quite a few years, and I may not have all my details right, but I’m sure about the main parts of the story.

An appraiser began to introduce an early American document, a Letter of Marque and Reprisal signed by President James Madison in the 19th century. In the age of sailing ships, such letters were official proclamations naming specific individuals as operating under the auspices of the US government. In other words, they were privateers, not pirates. Letters of Marque and Reprisal are mentioned in the US Constitution (and shows how just how old the US Constitution is: it has specific provisions for dealing with pirates on the high seas). My wife and I thought this was an incredibly cool object, signed by one of the Founding Fathers of the United States. Yet, the appraiser gave a disappointing auction estimate: $1500.

The show went bling and went on the to next item, which was, to our eyes, an incredibly ugly early 20th century vase by someone neither of us had ever heard of. But… oh… the appraiser was quick to add that this artist has suddenly become collectible, especially works depicting chickens. Yes, his indeed, the chicken pieces have become highly sought after, and lucky for you, the appraiser added, “Since the vase you’ve brought in today features chickens so prominently, I feel confident giving an auction estimate of $4500.”

My wife and I laughed, and ever since then, she and I share an inside joke. Whenever we see an item that isn’t as good or special as it might be, especially pieces of art we don’t like, we say, “Well, if only it had a chicken on it…”.

There’s a point to the chicken vase story I try to remember as I think about watches and collecting them. No object has intrinsic value. We make the valuable things valuable, and whether it be a COMEX watch, a Letter of Marque and Reprisal, or a chicken vase, the monetary value of a thing is usually just a simple case of supply and demand, and often reduces to little more than a silly and fickle popularity contest.

In my watch collecting, I aim to avoid getting caught up in that. My watches may never be the ones that will suddenly become highly sought after but I don’t care. I tell myself: Just collect and wear what you like. I even bought a watch this morning. I can’t wait for it to arrive.

There’s something charmingly unmodern about correspondence describing a lunch with a new acquaintance. It’s a throwback to the age before mass media, when life moved at a slower pace—or at least it seemed to from today’s perspective—and when penning and posting letters was the way the cognoscenti kept in touch with each other.

I woke up this morning to read that Om Malik had written about our recent lunch in this style. I just had to respond.

I know about Om through his writing, his photography, his investing, and his watch collecting. I share many of these interests. I always figured that Om and I know many of the same people too, and for many years I’ve said to myself that it would be great to meet him. That never seemed like a real possibility, since everyone is always so busy, breaking the ice with new people isn’t my best skill, and there just didn’t seem like there was a simple way to connect the dots.

Then a couple of weeks ago, Om and I exchanged a couple Twitter DMs—this was around the time I made the twentieth anniversary announcement of the start of the WebKit project—and before I knew it, we had set a time to meet for lunch in San Francisco.

I always worry when I meet someone like Om, a person I admire and is so accomplished. Will the chemistry be good? Will we find it easy to talk to each other? Will I get nervous and fail to make sense about anything?

I needn’t have worried. We found it simple to chat, and as Om commented, we meandered through several of our favorite topics.

We talked about his photography, his use of Leica cameras, his love of the cold and the snow, and how being out in the wilderness is an opportunity to focus on an inner dialog with our thoughts and experiences.

We talked about watches, how Grand Seiko makes up a large part of his current collection, the piece on his wrist with its stunning blue dial, and how one Grand Seiko that Om bought in the 1990s became the grail watch for an avid Japanese collector.

We talked about technology, our thoughts about what computing in the future might be like, how helpful it might someday become, and comparing it to the gadgets we brought with us to lunch.

I had a great time meeting up with Om. I’m so glad the pandemic has eased to the point where it’s possible to get together with wonderful people and share a casual meal. I missed that over the past eighteen months. I look forward to the next time Om and I can get together.

A postscript. In my conversation with Om, I mentioned a photographer. It was Richard Benson. Everyone called him “Chip”. A wonderful artist. He taught me a lot. I wasn’t in contact with him much after I left Yale, but I remember him very fondly. www.nytimes.com/2017/06/2…

I woke up and looked at the clock. 3:15 AM. I had a clear picture in my mind to make something new. It took me the next six months to make that drowsy vision real.

The result was Up Spell, a word game for iOS. But that’s the end of the story.

On that morning, it was April 2020. We were still in the first few weeks of the pandemic. When I had closed my eyes to go to sleep hours earlier, I already knew that my new job at Airbnb had gone off track. I had recently accepted an open-ended role with the company, an opportunity to look around and find interesting work to do with interesting people. Instead, as Airbnb was circling its wagons to figure out how home stays and travel could possibly go on amid global lockdowns, I felt like an odd man out. I left the company just ten weeks after joining.

I didn’t know what to do. That’s why my early morning idea was so appealing, because in that moment, I was sure I had a plan. Creating a word game was appealing notion, since I like word games, and I was reasonably sure I could make one that would be fun to play. But that wasn’t the actual idea. To explain what my real goal was, I need to step back in time.

Back in June 2001, I joined Apple to work on what became Safari and WebKit. Mac OS X was new. It had been released just three months earlier. With it, the commitment Apple had made years earlier to bring NeXT technology to the Mac had finally come to fruition. During my second week at Apple, I attended an internal training program to learn about the Cocoa frameworks and Objective-C, the foundation technologies for Apple’s new operating system. They were the main developer tools for programmers inside the company and those making their own apps to run on the platform.

Over the next fifteen years, I wrote code in ObjC just about every day. The language offered me a small collection of rules on the surface and a deep well of flexibility underneath. This combination facilitated and encouraged quick and playful experimentation. The language allowed me to wink and say, “I know what I’m doing.” ObjC winked back and became a willing participant in helping me make computers do cool stuff.

I made URL loading APIs for the Foundation framework, I wrote the keyboard for the original iPhone in ObjC (with some C++ mixed in for performance-critical work), and I coded the Solar face for the first Apple Watch. So much more too. All in ObjC. It remains one of the best languages ever for creating apps and frameworks. I’ve loved every minute I’ve spent coding in it.

On that morning in April 2020, it was clear to me that ObjC was no longer the future for Apple technology. It made me sad then, as it does now, but I’ve come to terms with it. However, it still seemed possible to do one more project in ObjC before its technological sun set over the horizon. In 2020, ObjC still had full access to everything iOS could do. I could make an app with no compromises in the old style.

Over the next six months, I spent so many enjoyable days programming. While the pandemic was raging in the US and around the world, I wrapped myself in a safety blanket of square brackets. ObjC helped to keep me sane and safe. I shipped Up Spell in October 2020, and while it didn’t sell as many copies as I had hoped it might, that’s OK.

The real idea I had on that morning months earlier wasn’t about making a word game. It was about stopping time, capturing a moment, making the fast-moving world of technology come to rest for a moment, so I could savor one small piece of it one last time before it disappears.