A Newcomer Baby & Reflections on Newcomer's Five Year Anniversary
Deep Dives
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Entrepreneurship
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This newsletter is 5 years old. My daughter is 29 days old.
My desire to produce profound reflections on what I’ve learned from 5 years building this small-but-mighty tech media empire is colliding with sleep deprivation from taking care of a sub-1-month-old.
One life milestone — going independent and then building a well-respected bootstrapped multimillion-dollar revenue Silicon Valley-oriented media and events business — has reached a moment worthy of reflection.
The other life moment is at its most frantic, most novel, and — if you’ll indulge me — its cutest.
Before I dig into what’s going on at Newcomer these days, let’s talk about the real news item here:
My wife, Sara Joe Wolansky, and I couldn’t be prouder to introduce you to Esther Emilia Newcomer, born at Mount Sinai Hospital on Oct. 1 at 8 pounds 15 ounces.
This is our first baby, but my sense is that on the scale of infants she’s pretty pleasant to be around. We are finding her absolutely adorable. I’m writing some of this with her half asleep on my chest.
Ezzy has been snuggled up in a Kleiner Perkins blanket, nuzzled next to an Index Ventures bunny and an M13 sloth, while staring off into the distance as her mom and I read books from Root Ventures and Graham & Walker. (Shernaz, we’ll dress her up soon.)
We’ve been extremely fortunate to have a lot of help and support. On the home front, grandmothers have set up camp to help out for days and weeks. We’ve had a grandfather hard at work building furniture and another one visit from Macon, Georgia. A night nanny is helping to make these Brooklyn evenings more manageable.
It’s the most cliché thing in the world — but it really does take a village.
And these days, it takes a village here at Newcomer, too. I’ve been mostly offline on paternity leave for the past four weeks. Hopefully you haven’t missed me too much — ideally, you didn’t notice my absence at all. We’ve published exclusive reporting on Andreessen Horowitz’s returns, dissected AI’s impact on software-as-a-service and in Hollywood, kept you apprised of the top deals and happenings in Silicon Valley every Friday, all while publishing a weekly podcast. Jonathan Weber, our editor-at-large, has been overseeing stories filed by staff
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