Happy 2nd anniversary, Building the Builders!

Some updates and announcements in honor of turning 2

Two years into launching this Substack, I’m feeling proud of what we’ve built together so far:

• a core collection of essays that ambitious founders and creators consistently report finding helpful—especially these:

  • A different and better way to live

  • Raising humanity’s psychological ceiling

  • Vision or delusion? Why ambitious founders need self-trust (Part 1, Part 2)

  • Your flaws matter less than you think

  • “Intellectual humility” is a copout

  • Death is the default

  • Worrying on schedule: What founders and people with generalized anxiety disorder have in common

• a steadily growing readership of 2690 subscribers as of today

• an intellectual home base for the ideas, methods, and examples I assimilate across my many disparate professional endeavors, including:

  • coaching of individual founders

  • teaching and training of graduate student therapists

  • collaborating on various builder-centric side projects (like the Founder’s Mindset podcast and the Maximize Your Mind with ChatGPT course)

  • talking to amazing builders on their platforms (like my recent appearances on the Hannah Frankman Podcast, where I got to wax poetic about building a builder’s mindset in my 4-year-old, and Dan Shipper’s How Do You Use ChatGPT podcast, where I laid bare my personal end-of-year journaling process)

Perhaps my biggest point of pride, though, is just that I’ve kept it going for this long. Through major career transitions, inter-state moves, childbirth and breastfeeding, serial illnesses, and good old-fashioned writer’s block, I’ve stuck to my “1 post a month” minimum. Turns out Paul Graham’s famous advice to YC founders is equally applicable here: “startups [and newsletters] rarely die in mid keystroke. So keep typing!”

Of course, I am just getting started. There’s a lot more and better content still to write, a lot more of the world’s most ambitious builders still to reach—and a lot more value I could be providing to you, my current customers subscribers.

Toward that end, I’m excited to announce a couple of updates, both taking effect on March 1:

1) Paid subscribers will no longer need to jump through hoops to join my 45-minute Zoom AMAs every other week. You’ll simply get an email with the Zoom link and day/time a few days ahead of each one.

2) Instead of a Slack workspace for paid subscribers only, I’m launching a “Building the Builders” Discord server accessible to all subscribers (stay tuned for an invite link coming to your email on Friday!). This is an experiment to see if Discord’s community features can help us more fully leverage the value of this growing network of ambitious, thoughtful builders. I’ll be around to answer questions and solicit feedback (including what you’d like to see me write about next!), and some of my veteran community members will be on hand to jumpstart conversations, recommend relevant resources, etc.

I’m also cooking up some fun experiments to try on the content side (e.g., a series of curated “builder profiles” piggybacking on David Senra’s amazing Founders Podcast??), so stay tuned, and let me know what you think!

Excited to see how it all goes, and to keep building and iterating together for many years to come.

Cheers,
Gena