How To Send A Haunted VC/Startup Newsletter

As you may or may not know, I have a newsletter I’ve been sending out since May 2016 on a roughly weekly basis. If you want to keep up with what I write at the day job and the most interesting links I find while procrastinating at my day job, consider subscribing: Rowley.Report.

Considering it’s Halloween and all, I figured I should share some of the tips and tricks I use to produce that content.

You have to understand that to produce something like that every week, an elaborate conjuring ritual is involved. Trick or treat?

1. Start by arraying five beeswax candles in the shape of an upside down star on the floor. Light the candles.
2. Fashion a miniature boat out of cocktail bar coasters and glue, and use one of the heavy metal pens they give you to sign your bill at the Rosewood as a mast.
3. Print out the most recent leaked term sheet and fashion it into a sail, affixing it to the makeshift boat.
4. Anoint the small boat with samples of billionaire founders’ blood, sweat, and tears.
5. Place the boat in the middle of the inverted star on the floor.
6. Burn and scatter the ashes of one of the last remaining hard copies of Georges Doriot’s Manufacturing class notes into and about the small boat.
7. For safety, blow out the candles in your house and take your boat to the nearest body of water, ideally while riding a Bird or Lime scooter.
8. Short-circuit one JUUL e-cigarette battery such that it begins to heat up, and place it in the boat.
9. Also place a USB stick containing the weekly output of charts and all items, read and unread, from my RSS feedreader.
10. Push the boat into the open water. If timed correctly, the short-circuiting JUUL battery will light the whole thing on fire, resulting in a kind of viking funeral effect. Like this: ?⛵
11. Summon the Owl by hooting vigorously toward the blackness of the woods. Speak of phenomenal risk-adjusted returns with it, in tongues, until sunrise.
12. Go home, and sleep.
13. Kind of all in one fell swoop: Merge accumulated notes in iA Writer & Drafts 5 into a new document; edit markdown in iA Writer; in iA Writer, left-swipe with two fingers to reveal well-rendered and semantic HTML; copy; paste into new Mailchimp email campaign.
14. Press send.
15. Wait.