In the middle of 2017, Postlight had more work than we could handle, with much more in the pipeline. We needed to grow. But growth is hard, and intentional, strategic growth — meaning hiring! — is even more challenging.

One of our mottos is “team hires team” and we stick to it. Everyone at Postlight comes in the same way and follows the same process (including old friends). Team members dive deep to vet the candidate, to understand how they think and work, and learn how they’ll succeed on the different kinds of work we’ll do. We do our best…

By Rich Ziade, Co-founder, Postlight

It started over some mediocre Thai at my place. Paul Ford and I had been talking about doing something together for a long while. We ran with a theory that our skills and the way we approach work is complementary. We’re different in how we think and work but love the same things: Disruption (real disruption, where regular people get more power by using technology), the open web (what’s left of it), and building not only apps but big sprawling platforms that power them.

The dream was a small team in some dingy converted auto…

It’s one of the more poorly named professions. The product manager. There are plenty of articles out there that try to define it. One article nicely defines the role as the CEO of the product. A handy characterization.

A distinction we like to highlight at Postlight is that a product manager is not a project manager. Don’t get me wrong. Project management is important. But the focus is too often on maintaining a process, not shipping a product. That’s sensible on big projects, but less useful when you need to bring a product into the light. Product managers get in…

By Rich Ziade, co-founder, Postlight

The beauty of the internet is that anyone could put out a shingle.

That’s John Battelle on last week’s Track Changes podcast. John brought an unusually optimistic viewpoint to the state of media and publishing on the internet today. He’s a firm believer in the flexibility and resilience of the web.

At one point in the episode, we started talking about deep linking. John argued that while the hyperlink is fading in influence, the concept of linking would survive and thrive. As he described it, we won’t be linking between pages in browsers but rather…

By Rich Ziade, co-founder, Postlight

About a month ago Postlight Labs released Mercury Reader, a Google Chrome extension that finds the readable content on a web page, yanks it out, and redraws it in a clean, easy-to-read format. If you’re familiar with Apple Safari’s browser, Mercury is similar to the “reader” functionality but gives you more controls to customize your reading experience. If you use Chrome, give it a try.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about how challenging it’s become for an outsider or manager to get a sense of how a project is going by just visiting a Slack channel.

The problem is fairly straightforward: the day-to-day chatter that happens in a Slack channel isn’t useful to me as a manager. It would take a lot of time and energy to read through chat transcripts and surmise how a project is going. My colleague Paul Ford put it best:

Now, of course you can have your weekly status meeting or your status report of some sort, but…

By Rich Ziade, Co-founder, Postlight

It goes something like this: A manager/executive/outsider/bystander (i.e. me) decides to peek in to get a sense of how a project is going. He enters the project’s channel on Slack and it looks like this…

• Jane: I know. I couldn’t believe he brought that up in this meeting. Ridiculous. 🌈😥📭
• Bill: It’s fine. We’re in a good place. I’m still trying to make sure the approach we agreed on a week ago still works. That’s the main priority.

[Six hours with no chat, then…]

• Stacy: BILL NO! STOP IT! Go home.
• Bill: Fine. Fine! Alright…

We’re throwing a party Thursday night. Since the beginning, we’ve had some great guests participate in what we call the Postlight Sessions. They range from presentations to informal Q&As.

For our next event, we’ve decided to venture out a bit and relax in the middle of the summer. We’re going to show videos. Lots of strange, slightly off-the-wall videos. Then we’re going to let a panel of “experts” comment on them. All the while, people will be sipping margaritas and snacking on sliders. It’ll be lots of fun.

This videos come out of a collection of videos I’ve been curating over the past ten years or so. Here are a few examples of what to expect: