About Me (and this site)

Dan's Notes is written by me, Dan. I have spent the last fifteen or so years in tech, the first chunk of it founding two companies, one in hardware and one in software, and the last seven working in corporate America in product management, scaling teams and running the kind of meetings where decisions that affect a lot of people get made in forty minutes by six people who have the egos to rival NBA players. I am currently a Senior Director of Product Management, which is a title that means different things at different companies, and I will leave it to you to guess what it means at mine.

Which is to say I have sat in enough of the rooms where the decisions get made to have opinions about how they get made, and enough of the rooms afterwards, where those decisions get translated into all-hands slides and press releases and LinkedIn posts, to have opinions about how they get described. The gap between the two is most of what I write about.

The blog exists because that gap has gotten wide enough that somebody ought to be writing it down, at length, while the news cycle moves on to the next thing. Most of what gets said about layoffs, AI, corporate strategy, and political failure gets said in the week the story breaks, by people on deadline, in a format that cannot accommodate a second thought. The second thought is usually where the interesting part is. These posts are an attempt to catch it before it disappears, across tech, politics, and the places the two collide.

The writing is opinionated because pretending otherwise would be dishonest. I am writing about things I have views on, and the views are the point. They are also, I hope, argued rather than asserted, and sourced rather than vibed. When I cite a number I will tell you where it came from. When I criticize a company or a politician I will name them. When I am guessing, I will say I am guessing. Where I have a conflict of interest, because I have worked at or with a company I am writing about, I will flag it.

Posts go up every few days and tend to run long, anywhere from fifteen hundred to three thousand words, because the things worth writing about are rarely well-served by eight hundred. If that sounds like a lot, it is probably not the blog for you, and I mean that without any judgment attached.

Subscribing

Everything on the site is free, and will stay free. If you put your email in the box below, new posts will land in your inbox the morning they go up, and nothing else will. No marketing sequences, no "have you seen this" follow-ups, no algorithm deciding which ones you get to see. If you decide it is not for you, the unsubscribe link is one click and I will never hear about it.

There is no paid tier yet. There may be one at some point, if there is ever something worth charging for, but the free newsletter will remain the main thing this site does.

Getting in touch

I read everything and try to respond to everything. dan@readuncut.com