Three years ago, I joined a scrappy Series A startup named Commonstock. The journey was full of twists and turns I never could have anticipated: we navigated the sudden run on SVB (our bank at the time), the dramatic end of the ZIRP era, and waves of tech layoffs reshaping the industry.
Despite these headwinds, we found a path forward when Yahoo Finance acquired Commonstock nearly two years ago. Transitioning overnight1 from a tight-knit team of fewer than 20 people to becoming part of one of the internet’s oldest and most iconic companies was an experience I’ll never forget.
At Yahoo Finance, I’m incredibly proud of the work we accomplished — especially launching social features2 that encourage investors of all backgrounds to connect, learn, and grow together. Seeing a vibrant community begin to flourish on such an established platform reinforced my belief in the power of community-driven products.
But startup life has been calling me back. The opportunity to build from the ground up, rapidly iterate, and directly impact users (and the business) at scale is hard to resist.
So, today was my last day at Yahoo Finance. I’ll be taking a couple weeks off to reset, and then I’m excited to be joining the team at Whatnot! 🥳🎉
When I connected with some of the awesome folks at Whatnot, it felt like the perfect intersection of my past experiences in e-commerce and my more recent passion for building consumer social applications. On top of that, everyone I met was thoughtful and genuine, and I appreciated the intentionality throughout the process.
Whatnot’s vision of creating the best community-driven marketplace resonates with me, and I’m looking forward to helping contribute to that vision. I’ll be joining the team focused on logistics and fulfillment, building tools that help sellers on the platform prepare and ship orders to their customers quickly and easily.
I’m grateful for everything I’ve learned and experienced at Yahoo Finance, and equally excited to jump back into the world of high-growth startups with Whatnot.3
Here’s to the next chapter!
Literally, we had a celebratory video call to pop some champagne on Friday afternoon, logged off for the weekend, and the following Monday we were sitting in a virtual onboarding call with the Yahoo team. It has been the most unique “job change” of my career (so far). ↩︎
The community is in early beta right now, but growing rapidly. Feel free to check it out! ↩︎
The first rule of blogging is very similar to the first rule of Fight Club — if you ever write about:
Recommitting to regular posting, or
How much easier your new blogging setup makes posting,
…you’re guaranteed to abandon your blog for months. At least, that’s always been my experience 🙃
The last (checks notes – holy $%^#!), year has absolutely flown by. I won’t give you the play-by-play, but it’s been a good/wild ride.
Looking forward, I genuinely love this time of year in Utah. Everything is reaching peak shades of green, and the weather has finally settled into reliable shorts-and-t-shirt territory. Even better, golf and mountain biking season is back, bringing fresh energy into my life after the offseason.1
Without making any promises, I hope when I’m writing another update in May 2026 that this upcoming year will be packed with at least half the fun and interesting experiences as this past year. If so the lack of blog posts will be worth it.
This past winter, I experimented with an indoor golf simulator membership, which turned out to be a perfect escape during the cold, snowy months (and it even helped shave a few strokes off my handicap). ↩︎
The simpler it is to write and publish content to your website, the more likely it is that you will. I don’t make the rules, that’s just human nature.
Most of the time I write on my MacBook, but there’s no technical reason preventing me from publishing from my iPad or iPhone, it just requires some setup the first time.
Today I picked up the new 13” iPad Pro and the matching Magic Keyboard, so I figured it was a great time to publish a little article from the new mobile setup with my first impressions of the new hardware and the apps I use to write on the go.
Louie Mantia has been on a roll lately in his prolific advocacy for making things on the Internet. He wrote a post a couple months ago titled Make a Damn Website and he followed it up today with the very practical How to Make a Damn Website.
We overcomplicate what a website needs to be, and it gets in the way of actually making it. So take his (and now my) advice, and make a damn website.
Sometimes I have thoughts along the lines of: “why am I blogging this if no one is reading it?” and on good mental days I’ll respond back1 with something to the effect of: “my writing is primarily for me, and if someone else sees it and appreciates it, that’s an added bonus of writing it down publicly.”
Today as I was contemplating a few different posts that are rolling around in my head, I had one of these thoughts pop into the foreground, stopping me in my tracks. As I was working through it, justifying the blogging process to myself once again, I decided that blogging is a bit like gardening2.
Tending to a garden is often a means to an end: you want to harvest the food you’re planting, or you want the plants and flowers to exist for the beauty they bring to the area. While those are valid reasons, gardening is also it’s own reward: you are carving out time and space to meditate and reflect, and over time it becomes a place that you made your own, the result of many different deliberate (and accidental) decisions.
If other people like the look of your garden, that’s great! However if you start ripping out plants that people don’t like, or adding in flowers that they said would look better, it would start to become a community garden, not your own. There’s nothing wrong with a community garden, and there’s nothing wrong with building consensus in a group, but there is also room in the world for your own space. Your own little corner of existence where you can pick, prune, and plant to your heart’s content.
That’s what blogging is to me. It’s a place where I can write my own thoughts, and revel in the process of editing, rewriting, and publishing my posts.
It’s my little garden on the Internet.
Yes, I have conversations with myself, doesn’t everyone? ↩︎
After I posted a link to this note on my Mastodon account, Kyle Hughes pointed out that I had stumbled upon the same terminology that many people have been using over the last few years, including this wonderful post by Maggie Appleton on her website. I have a lot more to think about now! ↩︎
