Playing With Networking Weekly Recap - 12/6/2025
December 6, 2025·0 comments·zg
Sunday Music: When Discovery Becomes A Policing Service
A college floormate handed me a CD in 2000 with a Madlib track that led me down a decades-long rabbit hole of samples, stories, and connections across generations. I traced that sample to John Phillips and a 1970 film I'd never heard of, understanding for the first time how curation works - it's a golden thread connecting eras. But Spotify just bought WhoSampled, the tool that made discovery possible, and suddenly I'm terrified. When the platform that stores infinite music also owns the enforcement mechanism, what happens to the artists who built careers on clearing samples?
Grow Where You're Planted
Before you scale to a million people, you have to understand how to help one person - really help them, not just your brother or a college friend. Danny Meyer spent ten years perfecting one restaurant, refusing to open a second. His daughter built Caffe Panna by collaborating with fans on the menu. The unsexy truth is that small things are where real magic happens. You prove your idea works at the smallest scale, make sure you actually love it, then figure out how to put more of that love into the world. That deepening comes before the spread.
Brand Is Feeling
Jordi Hays and John Coogan built TBPN into something the New York Times called "SportsCenter for LinkedIn," but that's not what makes it work. They tapped into a feeling they both loved: live news energy. They focused on making it for the 200,000 people they imagine in tech, harnessing an internal feeling at scale. Brand is what people feel when they experience what you do. The infectious fun they're having is the brand.
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