The following is an excerpted transcript from The Tallahassee Clam Shack, a podcast promoting “business conversations among friends”. In this inaugural episode, ‘Jess Resler: Business Witch, Goddess Manager’, Mike sits down with a longtime friend to discuss what happens when you send an “ass pic” to a Fortune 10 client, the difference between being a creative and being an artist, why kids should swear at adults and other ways of being boldly yourself.

Let’s cold open on Jess Resler.

This is a non-visual medium so let’s start with describing Jess’s vibe. Jess has always been a boss-ass B (and I say B because this is a family program). She has a certain Je ne give a fuh, a self-possession, that serves as its own gravitational force whenever she enters a room. Those who know her remark that she’s been a bellwether for cool since way back. Even in elementary school, kids would be like “whoa, you’ve got great energy, but also like, you scare me…and I want more.” There’s a photo of Jess in third grade where she’s dressed like Madonna and I swear you would have thought a Pyramid Club-era Madonna saw that 9 year old in a mall and thought, yoink, I’m copping that look.

She’s the oldest of three sisters — shout out to Vanessa and Alexa — and while the Reslers are Jewish, from an early age Jess’s ethical framework could be defined more through the lens of feminism and veganism. And, you know, a lot of people claim the title of feminist these days, men especially, who see it as a way to inoculate themselves from potential professional harm or as a way to improve their chances of getting laid. But Jess lives it. It’s like the Supreme Court definition of pornography, you just know it when you see it.

Jess loves advancing the cause of animals as much as she loves promoting gender equity. She embraces what she would consider “Antifa-level veganism” and even today has a small harem of cats and a new pooch, Ren.

She grew up in Seattle, embraced the hip-hop scene as much as grunge, which was ascendant at the time, but couldn’t wait to get the hell out. She took advantage of her pin-up good looks and general magnetism to dance at a club called Rick’s, back when the money was good, and made what she needed to pay her way to NY at age 18 after a couple weeks of trying to make “U-Dubbs” (UW) work.

I first met Jess Resler at a party in 2008 because her boyfriend’s brother was the longtime boyfriend of a friend from college. It became evident very quickly that Jess and her boyfriend, Vito, were two of the cooler people I had ever met, embodying many elements of that mythic “Downtown” culture that all creative people seek when they come to New York. She was building a sex toy company; Vito was a DJ. She threw events; he tagged subway cars. Many people like to project that they don’t care what other people think but with Jess, I knew I was in the presence of someone who was really gonna leave it if I didn’t take it. Jess and Vito, each had each other’s names tattooed on parts of your body that I didn’t think was possible for a tattoo artist to reach. Maybe it was illegal or required some kind of special license. If there was, it didn’t matter, because they had their 17 year old neighbor, an aspiring tattoo artist, do the work.

To really blow my mind, Vito legally changed his middle name to “Fun”. The proof was right there on his driver’s license and in the spirit of fun, showed up to his brother’s wedding in a dress, a Dennis Rodman-level act of transgression.

Being around Jess in these years felt like being the earnest narrator in a story recounting the heyday of a scene, pinnacle moments of one’s youth. As time went on, many of the artists Jess worked with succumbed to their vices but Jess leaned into her business instincts along with her innate ability to learn and evolve.

Even if you think astrology is a bunch of BS, in Jess you instantly recognize a kind of undeniable Gemini energy in her boundless creative drive. She lives at the intersection of art and commerce, where an FIT degree meets an NYU MBA. Her voice can have that fun Valley Girl roller coaster affect, which tempts you to underestimate her. Should you make that mistake, her voice narrows, takes on an edge, capable of slitting the throat of everyone in the room.

Prior to meeting Jess Resler, I thought sexy witches only existed in the Spirit Halloween store catalog. Words are spells, she’ll say and damn if she ain’t right. And you know how every successful person you know has a team, like they’ve got their legal counsel, their accountant, maybe a financial manager, a publicist, whomever. But Jess? She has a coven. She has Daganit, a sorceress; she has an animal medium and when she needs give-it-to-me-straight business advice, there’s Prof Scott Galloway.

Since I’ve known her she’s had an ever-replenishing crew of young dudes, her “Skater Boys” as she affectionately calls them, to do her bidding the way a video game boss dispatches hordes to impose her creative vision on the world. Perhaps a more fair description is to refer to this as her version of the “artist-apprentice” model because for those willing to learn, Jess is there to teach. She provides exceptional counsel. Those in her orbit will know that there is no fiercer defender than Jess, a business witch who mixes art, intelligence and alpha energy. If she is a video game character, she’s always in cheat mode.

Jess alternated between being a big sister and a younger sister, depending on what the occasion calls for. She’s most my big sister when helping me understand the mindset and occasionally the psychosis of the fairer sex and I’ve been grateful to offer older brotherly love when it comes to people who may be able to help advance her career.

But she hasn’t needed much help from me. When I met her she had just started an event company that hosted events on the Intrepid, that brought an indy rock concert into a big top circus. She recognized that New Yorkers yearn for more space but don’t always want to move to Westchester, so she built a time-share backyard in the city’s Lower East Side.

This is to say that Jess is an artist and a true artist can make art using sticks and stones or with a Fortune 500 company selling laptops and phones. She built a retail franchise at the start of the pandemic, not in an act of unfortunate timing, but recognizing that people still want to play pool but maybe want the safety of playing only with people in their early Covid pods.

Today it is inextricable to think about Jess without considering Gosh, Gosha Levochkin.

I first met Gosha in 2017 as a guy that Jess was starting to see regularly. I had heard he was rad, a rad artist and when he wasn’t painting, he ran a studio that offered art lessons for actual artists looking to make some extra cash in their downtime. I loved Gosha from the jump. He’s playful, he’s mischievous; he can embody the worldview of a rambunctious teenage boy one minute and say something startlingly wise the next, perpetually keeping you on your toes. He’s a laugh out loud mimic who invents new characters on the fly, many of whom would be inappropriate here. In a future world, you can see him illustrating and voicing a cartoon of his own design, filled with sensitive souls…and dicks. Lots of dicks. You can’t look at him without smiling.

Gosha is clearly Jess’s soulmate. Humor is at the core of being a Resler, humor that lives in the demented and dark crevices of our lives.

The best part in reflecting on Jess is knowing that she’s just getting started. She has honed her powers and is limited only in imagination. My expectation is that she’s going to summon her sorcery, experience, business acumen and global network to manifest her next big project into existence, Vegan City, an amusement park for the vegans, by the vegans.

We’ll learn about that and much more but first, let me officially welcome, Ms. Jess Resler.

Listen to the first episode of The Tallahassee Clam Shack below:

When most people turn 40, they remark on how they feel old. Oh my God, I’m 40. To those who know Mike Brown, who note his three children, two beautiful homes, the hobbies he keeps, the responsibilities he gladly takes on, this feels like a Benjamin Button birthday. This guy’s only 40? In the parlance of venture capital, at 40 years old Mike Brown is finally growing into his valuation.

I had the privilege at his wedding to take stock in Mike as a single man and now I’m blessed to do a performance review of his last ten years as a business owner, husband and father.

Judging by the people here, you can see that one of the hallmarks of being Mike Brown is his inherent stability. The friends gathered here are many of the same riff raffs and charlatans who were at the wedding, along with some wonderful new folks he’s met along the way. A good VC will invest in people and that’s what Mike does, doubling and tripling down on the relationship over the years, investing in friends like founders, across each life stage, from singledom to coupledom to parenthood.

At 40 years old, Mike has kept up his figure pretty well. We’ve done 5 Ironmen together over the last ten years and as you get older, you realize it’s often easier to catch up while working out. It’s also arguably a better way to chase dopamine than to fade 6 vodka sodas before getting kicked out of a nightclub. Hey, don’t knock it ’til you tried it.

You may have noticed that over the last decade, Mike has become more modulated. We remember with rolled eyes how Mike could get get real big on the ups and deep in the downs but at 40, Mike has found his energetic cruising altitude. Sometimes he overcorrects with the stoicism. Three times in the last decade, when Mike would share not just good news, but like, the best news of his whole God damn life, it would go something like “Liz. Pregnant. Boom”. I’d be like whatsthematterwithyou and greet the news with the ecstatic joy that you think the moment deserves — “dude holy sh — that’s so exciting!” and…Mike would deflect. He deflects with a “mehhh.” Meeeeeh. Anti-climax Mike over here.

I recently said something to Mike about how oh you wouldn’t want to do that it’ll affect your quality of life. Mike’s like “pssht, quality of life, come on, bro, you know I don’t care about that! Whatsthematterwithyou?”.

That’s the other great thing about Mike that hasn’t changed: he still sounds like he’s got a perpetual sinus infection, like a Jersey James Cagney. If Mike wasn’t so deeply rooted in family and heritage, perhaps his accent wouldn’t work so well for him. But the thing is, for high achievers, the enduring gift of growing up in New Jersey is that it makes you sound like an ordinary guy even with all the success in your life. “Hey. uh, yeah, Miss, uh how you doing? Yeah, it would be real great if you could, uh, help me notarize this form, so I can buy this second home”.

But Mike never condescends. He shows up kind and curious with whomever he’s talking to, from the neighborhood high school kid to the cab driver. Everyone has a light that Mike sees and something from whom he can learn, from stone masonry to upstate lumber supply chain. While most people just hire contractors, Mike must apprentice with them to learn how to refurb board and batten siding or reno a greenhouse his damn self.

These abilities as a polymath make him a great VC. The talent that allows him to become an upper quartile performer among Columbia college alumni is the same that makes him the envy of the Columbia County garden scene.

And while he’ll diligence investment opportunities to the hilt and research the how-tos of homeowning, Mike intuits parenting. When it comes to loving his boys, he goes by feel. When it comes to moving them around, to feeding, coordinating and transporting them, his geekish fascination with systems and logistics kicks in and like his parents before him, he handles the work with relish. Pick, pack and ship ’em out to camp.

As you get older, you start become more like your old man and another thing that will never change about Mike, like Mike Sr. before him, is that he’s constantly dropping names of people you’ve never heard of that he assumes you should know. It’s not celebrity name dropping but an endearingly familiar name check, spanning all the people in his life: “You know Bob Cusamano, great guy, Germantown Garden Supply. Oh you don’t know Kurt Bauer? Great guy, St Thomas Episcopal Parish Board of Trustees. David Giannetto? Great guy, CEO of WorkWave, cloud-based solutions for service providers.” I don’t know these guys, I’m pretty sure Liz doesn’t know these guys, but Mike does and they genuinely seem great.

After being noticeably absent from social media, on July 2, 2021, Mike debuted The Peary Homestead, an Instagram account that documents “bringing an old home back to life one day at a time”. The Peary Homestead (TPH if you’re nasty) reads like insight into Mike’s subconscious: rigorous explainers mixed with impressionistic landscapes, speckled with loving looks at his family. The account reveals an artist at the helm, a guy with a beautiful eye, not just a green thumb. It’s yet another example of Mike’s love of mastery, stepping into something new, finding mentors, learning a space and getting good over time.

These days we’ll spend as much time together as a couple and in that we have The Mike and Elizabeth Club — two Jersey guys with southern gals bopping to the Keys, shopping in Paris and getting real y’all in Montreal.

And I know this moment is about Mike but I love Liz dearly. If the last ten years have confirmed anything, it’s that she’s the best decision Mike’s ever made and the greatest stroke of divine luck in Mike’s life. She’s kind, deeply loving and feels ever more like chosen family.

The thing about turning 40 is that relationships become harder. When you’re younger it’s easy to take time with your friends for granted, you’ll walk by their house, you’ll be in the neighborhood but around now is when you start to feel the weight of responsibility that life imposes like gravity. Friends move away, they have competing demands for their time, work demands more of you, until you realize, I haven’t seen this person in friggin’ years. It takes intentionality, planning, negotiation; it takes energy, force of will even. Just to see Mike these days, I’ll need to get on a plane or he’ll have to hop on a train, then take a cab over to Brooklyn or I’ll bike over to Manhattan at 630 in the morning or Mike will fight Lyme disease and take the tubes out of his arms and sprint out of the hospital to get to his buddy’s wedding.

All of this to say, you realize that some friends come into your life for a reason, others for a season and some for a lifetime. Mike came into my life for a very specific work-related reason, now we’ve crossed over into multiple seasons — single man, serious relationship, marriage, kids — so we’ve officially entered lifetime territory. Let’s raise our glass and toast the man with the wine-stained teeth, Mike Brown, great guy.

There is a photo of me that my wife has since made into a coaster. The photo depicts me at 18 in the late ’90s in what appears to be the kitchen of a house at the Jersey shore, cheap wood veneer cabinets over my shoulder, cans of period-specific Diet Pepsi in view, along with an open bottle of Rolling Rock, a staple on any countertop during my teenage weekends. I’m tanned, shirtless and flexing, arms curled into two parentheses, pecs ablaze, face scrunched as if to acknowledge that this kind of unchecked aggression is funny but yo’ those muscles though! I was months removed from my senior wrestling season, finishing a respectable 16–7, and in fantastic shape. The hard, drink-’til-you-can’t-drink-no-more partying on the weekends could be balanced with intense payback sessions in the gym fueled by peaking testosterone.

Perhaps what’s most remarkable about the photo is my neck. My trapezius muscles, the muscles between the shoulder and neck, were thick and visibly vascular. I was a scholar athlete so someone generously remarked that they were “the meat-stairs leading up to the campus library”. No joke, my neck at that time had a measured a circumference of 18.5”. That’s a lotta salami. I knew this because I had to have my one nice white shirt tailored for formal school events otherwise I couldn’t button the top button when the occasion called for a tie. Only the XLs had collars that could accommodate my neck girdle but being only 5’6”, those shirts were always too long and pillowy, even when tucked in under my brass-buttoned jacket. You’d think the tailor would find these measurements amusing but this was Jersey and, whatever, I was just another Tuesday appointment.

Having thick neck muscles serve a function in wrestling: you often use your neck as a fulcrum when executing various offense and defensive maneuvers. A thick neck prevents your opponent from snapping your head from a standing position, which would put your body in a compromising angle and make it easier for you to be taken down. Football players also train to build up their traps because it helps with tackling and general injury prevention. The head is supposed to be on the outside of the ball carrier as you drive them to the turf with your legs. You’d train in the gym with what we’d call Farmer’s Carries, holding heavy dumbbells in both hands as you squeeze up, trying to engage the traps while trying, as much as possible, to relax your arms.

This was also a moment when WWE and WCW were ascendent, the two primetime television wrestling organizations, and my friends and I couldn’t get enough. Like a lot of things among boys, our fandom for “fake wrestling” started as a joke, after all we were actual wrestlers and televised wrestling bore as much in common to Hungarian ballet as it did to high school scholastic wrestling. But jokes, you know, have punchlines and the line between meta and actual enjoyment quickly disappeared.

All of the professional wrestlers had big traps but the wrestler with the biggest traps was also one of the most famous wrestlers at the time, known simply as “Goldberg”, the “Smith” of American Jewry. I was captivated by Goldberg. I had never known a Jew to be that tall and muscular and menacingly bald, not just bald-bald. Also most Jews in show business go out of their way to disguise their ethnicity — Isadore Demsky to Kirk Douglas, Allen Konigsberg to Woody Allen, Charles Buchinsky to Charles Bronson — and here’s this guy saying “F — you, I’m GOLDBERG”. He had also refused to wrestle on Yom Kippur, which felt like a meaningfully principled position for a fake wrestling program. The Sandy Koufax of my generation. After Goldberg would execute a theatrical finishing move, get the pin, he’d bounce up from the mat and flex his traps, which had so much definition that you could see the striations in the muscle fibers. “I can kill!”, the move suggested, “and I can kill again! Whah! Goldberg!”

In these moments you feel the primal truth of flexing. You’re not just mobilizing blood flow to muscles involved in fight mode. Flexing is the wild animal at full strength, the last thing an opponent sees before annihilation. To flex is to be the face of Shiva the Destroyer.

My traps became a kind of calling card at River Dell High Cchool. Flexing them became an easy crowd-pleaser. What the people wanted — a lethal Quasimodo. By my senior year, flexing my traps became a legitimate form of hello in the hallways before class. Often if a wave of friends walked shoulder to shoulder down the hallway, I’d flex a “hello” to each one in turn — ah-GOOZH! ah-GOOZH! WAM!, POP! WHOOOO! — and by lunch, my shoulders were actually sore.

One flexes so they don’t have to fight. It’s both law of the jungle and Cold War-style containment. You don’t want to mess with this. Please don’t mess with this? I did a lot of posturing in high school but never actually had to fight outside of the parameters of a wrestling mat. Ironically it wasn’t until I went to a leafy liberal arts college in New England did I actually clock anyone in the face, basically at a clip of one incident per year, Freshman through Senior year. Each time it was in defense of my roommate, James (or “Jimmy” when he really got going) whose mouth had a tendency to write checks his body couldn’t cash. The last guy whose face I punched was such a smug, spoiled sonofabitch that I’m convinced I did him a favor. I was a literal hitman sent from the universe because you know what? Some people need to get their face smashed in to let them know that no matter how cosseted an environment they live in, they still live in the world with the rest of us, and sometimes the world is going to punch you in the face.

A friend of mine came over recently and saw the coaster.

“That you?” he said. “No. Way.”

“Uh huh.”

He looked at the photo again and looked back at me. “You know he’s still a part of you,” he said, pointing at my chest. “He’s in there somewhere.”

And you know what, God damn it? I hope he is. That beast within is a tool if I need to assert my will against an unwilling world, the source of Big Zeus Energy. While Goldberg is a corporate product of the WWE, the mythopoetic wildman is a valuable tool in the adult world with which to draw boundaries, get out of our heads, and remember our power. The work of civilization is to make sure that he works for me, forever lurking, there in a jiff.

Practically speaking the strong neck provides the protection I need as my body transitioned from the pride of River Dell wrestling to a jungle gym for a pride of kids, nieces, nephews and feisty puppies. Ah-GOOZSH!

Your relationship with Damien always starts with a POP. The cork flies, the fizz pours, the table says salud! Here, try this he insists, an invitation to new flavor as much as a Damien life philosophy. Damien, the Brooklyn bon vivant.

The first thing anyone will say about Damien is that he’s chill. “The chillest person I’ve ever met”, Naima, his wife, concurs. “He’s [and I love imitating her French accent here], he’s cool”. When your wife of over ten years, with whom you have two kids and four bars admits that you’re cool, you best believe it. Damien won’t announce himself with a lot of fanfare, even his social media posts are written in a small, sub-10 point font that you need to squint to see before they’re gone. He slips into a room the way an old man eases into a pool, slowly, until submerged up to his neck, wading around, taking in the scene. With his assortment of beanies and Clark Kent glasses, he’s stylishly low-profile, the careful architect of a scene rather than its boisterous center of attention.

Even his voice is chill. He maintains a consistent low glottal sound, like he’s just getting over a cold, which he usually is. The voice is often punctuated by laughter, particularly following a second glass of wine. The man’s got so much drip that he can rock a sweatshirt and a wide-brimmed fedora to a country wedding and still look appropriate to the dress code.

Damien and I met in a work context at Grey Dog Cafe, a down-home, fast-casual NY franchise that’s perfect when you don’t know if you should be selling the other person or vice versa. He was hustling to introduce New York to Secret Cinema, the experiential movie platform popular overseas, and I ran a publishing business that promoted unique, local experiences. We each liked what the other was selling well enough that our second meetup was at the Experimental Cocktail Club (the “ECC”), a buzzy mixology bar that also had origins overseas. We drank, we invited friends to join us and I got to see how naturally Damien would weave together elements of a great night.

“The manager? Vince? He’s a friend.”

“I got us a larger table because I invited more people I thought you’d enjoy.”

“I ordered all the food on the menu, I hope you don’t mind.”

Over the next several years Damien would share his dream for opening up his own spot. He teemed with ideas. As a commercial real estate broker, he had locations already spec’d out. He had a vision board in his head of layouts he loved from bars he visited in Europe, bar stools he fell in love with on a trip to who-knows-where and a best-in-class front of house guy in the ECC’s Vince, a magnet for models with a tractor beam smile and a regular assortment of cool outfits. The nights would go long and the concept of his perfect hospitality experience grew more vivid.

Finally, Damien disappeared for a few weeks and when he re-emerged and I asked where he’d been he told me “I’m doing it. I got the funding, I got the spot, I’m going to open up a bar in Williamsburg”. I thought immediately of a video I had seen of a wildman in the hinterlands of Australia who hunts down a deer simply by pursuing it on foot, step-by-step, exhausting his prey, slipping in a chokehold, running down that dream.

What this episode also recalls for me is that to know Damien is to know that he’s a romantic at heart. It’s not just that he understands design, dim-lighting, music, conversational pacing, and all of the periodic elements of a vibe. That elevated taste profile suits his work in hospitality well. But the thing about Damien is that he can play it cute too. Back when he took Naima on their first date, he a Brooklyn boy and she a little miss sophisticated Parisian girl, he’s all like “let’s go dancing in the streets of Paris” and against all her instincts, in the presence of his undeniable charisma, his genuine joie de vivre, she obliged, and that was it for them. Before Naima knew what was happening, Damien had moved in and even with his broken French and their broken English, he had ingratiated himself with all her friends.

So where does a guy like Damien come from? I went to school with a lot of my friends so I know where they grew up or where they got their degree but ten years later, I couldn’t tell you much about how Damien came up, he just arrived. The dude is relentless or what we’d call having a “growth mindset”. He’s his own best teacher. He reads books about succeeding in business, living a good life, improving the quality of your relationships or on the power of meditation. If you have a house upstate, you need to be self-reliant and for Damien, there’s YouTube for that. He wants to know things, make up for lost time. He told me once that he’s careful to bring people into his life that can help push him forward. As a result of his self-education, he invigorates any conversation he’s a part of. It also should be no surprise that he’s one of the oldest of my friends yet he runs the social hub for Gen Z. Creeper? Nah, he’s a master pupil.

More than most, Damien is down for whatever. Let’s jet to Bogota? Done. How about Mexico City or maybe I see you in Paris?

He has a zest for life that only a guy who’s brushed with death can have. Whether it’s kidneys or Covid, he’s fended off forces that have tried to take him out and emerged not just alive but enlivened.

All he wants to do is share that life with his friends. He wants to make spaces for them to feel comfortable, to honor them as the family you choose. He’ll do this with the people he works with too against all the received business wisdom of our time that teaches managers not to treat colleagues like family. There’s too much risk! “Fk that”, Damien says, as he rents a house for his whole team and flies them to Paris to enjoy the harvest with him. “Sauced family is family”.

When Naima shared that she was pregnant with Nash, she cried. Damien cried too, but for a different reason. Loosie had just opened that night and he had to work the kitchen. “What the hell am I going to do now?” he thought. He quickly had an answer: I’m going to show these kids a great life on my terms. Damien loses himself in fatherhood; it’s his flow state.

Jon-Damien, Dahm-ee-ehn, shopkeeper, rainmaker, our Boricua francophile: May the world continue to smile on you, your friends and your family. Love you, brother.

“It is nothing to die. It is frightful not to live.”― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

No one I know seems to enjoy the experience of living quite like Mike Albanese. The biggest compliment he reserves for other people is the same compliment he most richly deserves: he’s got such a great spirit about him. Mike buzzes with energy and he is never more alive than when he’s mid-conversation at a busy restaurant in the company of his creative, pugnacious, handsome and sexy peers, whose faces you’ll find in faded Polaroids on the walls of the best red sauce joints in town.

And you will know him by the sound of his voice. For some men, their reputation precedes them. For Mike Albanese, it is his voice, which has a low, rumbling, guttural quality like a smoker’s growl without the pulmonary damage of a regular habit. Musicians call this “scraping the pan” — 101.1 delivering you the classics all night long — that you feel as much as you hear, particularly in his long “O”’s, regularly punctuated with a deep and satisfying Delirious-era Eddie Murphy laugh.

When Mike knows you, he will mouth-trumpet the occasion of your arrival — “hut-duh-duh! Hut-duh-duh!” — like you’re a nobleman who’s arrived at his court, emphasizing the point by adding a florid, singsongy “Mis-ter Roth-man” or “Sir Roth-man”, which realizes my lifelong ambition of someone calling me “sir” without then adding “you’re causing a scene.”

Mike greets you with his arms wide overhead, an airplane marshaller gesturing for you to come on in and get yourself a good squeeze. And when you do get in close, expect a bear hug so fierce that you could just as easily go to the mat as you could take your seats for dinner. Sir, you’re causing a scene!

If you didn’t know Mike, and just saw him on the street, you’d notice that he walks with a determined gait, head forward, leading the way. When the weekend rolls around, Mike’s walk is marked by a light hip swivel, a kind of ‘70’s Mick Jagger strut, which makes sense because one of Mike’s singular pleasures is to cruise the streets of New York immersed in deep-cut rock tracks from the ’70s to early Aughts.

Ladies, Mike Albanese is a good looking man. He has strong cheekbones and good skin. The man paid heed to Baz Lehrmann’s call to “Always Wear Sunscreen”.

Ladies, Mike’s got a ravishing smile. He can light up a room with a grin so wide that you think, for a moment, that he may somehow have more than the standard 32 teeth, like a loveable creature from Where The Wild Things Are.

Ladies, he’s got the body of a high school middle linebacker who’s since discovered yoga and leaned out. His schedule of regular meditation gives him the ease of a man comfortable in his meat suit. Like most well-to-do men of a certain age, he perpetually sports a beautiful tan that comports well with his Sicilian olive skin.

But above all else, you will know Mike by his piercing blue eyes. They look ancient and oracular. In an earlier time these eyes would make him either deified or persecuted. It’s not purely superficial; it’s the way the eyes are held, how they narrow, indicating a deep reserve of hard-wrought wisdom.

Mike and I first met at a dinner party I hosted in what was then a common conceit — throw party to meet new friends, meet girls or meet friends who can introduce us to new girls. I saw Mike from across the room and in a glitch-in-the-matrix kind of way I felt like I had known the guy for years. It recalls that line from a song in The Muppets Movie: “there’s not a word yet for old friends who’ve just met.”

We’ve since gone on adventures near and far — from Miami to upstate New York, Mexico City and one time decided on a whim that we had to rent a yellow Mustang convertible and drive to Joshua Tree while blasting the U2 album of the same name. I don’t know what we’re expecting, like maybe we thought the whole park was named after a single, destination tree but the ranger was like “you boys lost? This park is the size of the state of Rhode Island”. Oh ok.

Mike then as always engages fiercely with the social moment, loves just chopping it up with whoever’s in the room — man, woman and child — fueled by an endless and beautiful curiosity. He’ll dance with your grandma; with your kids he’ll play floor is lava!. When he’s spent, he’ll exit a room as quickly as he can, begging the question from those left behind who was that wonderful man?

Mike gravitates towards Big Life Energy: the big writers with the big thoughts (Hemingway), rockstars with their feral intensity, big titans like Joe Kennedy — mascots of a bygone masculinity.

Mike has a voracious appetite for culture. He straight-up inhaled Les Miserables in what must have been a weekend. What next? Infinite Jest? TFG. What for most people is a doorstop for Mike is a beach read. Similarly, few people love a multi-season premium cable drama more than Mike, from The Leftovers to Mad Men to Halt and Catch Fire.

Never far from a photo shoot, Mike is an amateur lensman who has a keen eye for composition. He is in touch with the divine feminine and loves beautiful women not just for obvious reasons but also as a true aesthete who understands the psychology of glamour.

It should surprise no one then he built a thriving career around these interests. Mike Albanese is one of the most interesting and unheralded entrepreneurs in media, parlaying an outstanding career at Spin to President of Observer Media overseeing programming around art, real estate and high-brow gossip to Galore. If the New Republic was the in-flight magazine during the Clinton years, Galore was the in-stall rag of choice in the bathrooms of the trendiest downtown clubs during the Obama years. Before the mainstream world had ever heard of them, Mike’s parties featured Lizzo and Emily Ratajkowski. He hosted a series of festivals for badass women in the culture industry called Girl Crush, spearheaded an early model influencer network, spun up a private label beauty line before pivoting the publication to focus its lens on LatinX culture. Now he’s leveraging Galore to create a brand for empanada delivery. What George Washington Carver was for the peanut, Mike Albanese is for editorial content extensions.

Outside of media Mike has cultivated a portfolio of work involving a fintech incubator, residential real estate and crypto investments. He is nothing if not a multi-hyphenated man of his time.

While Mike thinks about the future, he keeps a connection to his past via a years-long group chat with his high school friends labeled simply The Boys. It’s a nourishing 24/7 line to his roots. At their best these kinds of group chats serve as integrity checks rather than limits to growth that elicit calls of “what are you big timing me, city boy?”

Politically Mike leans center-right in what at present is less of a spectrum than a whirling oceanic garbage patch. He believes in minimal government intervention in business but identifies socially as a free-thinking libertine. He thinks that man should be well-informed and that private enterprise is typically the most efficient vehicle for progress. It’s less that he’s philosophically opposed to large-scale government interventions but more that he’s a pragmatist and outside of vaccine roll-outs, he’s been disappointed in the federal government’s ability to move at the speed of the modern market.

Mike is a romantic and I’ve been lucky to see him in love. I’ve seen him happy, I’ve seen him clumsy, I’ve seen him be ok with being in the dumps. He’s embraced “all the feels”.

“Silvio”, “Uncle Mike”, “Thanksgiving Mike” and “Miami Mike” will no doubt find a partner who will relish the conversation, laughter and fellowship that we cherish in Mike. Michael James Albanese, you’re beloved by all who know you and I’m lucky to have you as a friend. Love you, brother.

First, a word about her name. I’ve called Carolina Santos-Neves “Santos” since we’re in our early-20s. It started naturally; I call many of my close guy friends by their last name and “Santos” came first in her typically hyphenated Brazilian last name. Santos is phonetically satisfying to say. It revs up with “Sannn” and descends with equal velocity in a satisfying percussive splash “Tos”. It’s, it’s, it’s just fun; it sounds like “Santa” (I know him! I know him!) and who would deny the joy in Santa? Conversely, Santos sounds masculine and tough like a grunt in the marines: Santos! Get your ass over here and get ready to ship out at 0800! that is hilariously at odds with Carolina’s sweet, gentle demeanour. Santos is — yes, we’re still talking about this — two syllables as opposed to Car-o-li-na’s four and frankly, I ain’t got all day here. I’m a guy who crosses the street at diagonals to shave seconds off my commute, ok? I know a handful of Carolinas, always pronounced in the more hee-haw way like the state, but I only know one Santos. She is sui generis.

Additionally, and not to harp on this point, but Santos, particularly when pronounced Saaan-tooooos like Principal Chalmers intoning Simp-soooooon, from a low to higher register, connotes a kind of comedic exasperation, which is an accurate way to describe my side of the buddy dynamic. You can almost imagine a kind of gun barrel zoom on Carolina’s whaddayagonnado face as credits start to roll.

Carolina and I first met at The Ratty, the nickname for the Sharpe Refectory, which is a name people don’t use any more for cafeteria, like icebox for a freezer or knickers for pants, unless you live in Tottenham. The Ratty referred to the quality of the food or the tidiness of the facility or both and anyway the name stuck. It was a place we’d gather for hours with our emerging social circles, debating ideas, sharing news and dishing hot campus gossip, pausing occasionally for refills on bowls of cereal, a hard-boiled egg and if we stayed long enough, an entirely new meal as lunch rolled into early dinner. Medieval clans had taverns, Enlightenment thinkers had coffee shops and we had our modest Ratty.

At one of these drawn out Ratty klatches, Carolina insinuated herself into a group discussion around the table. She seemed familiar yet worldly, conversant in cultural in-jokes like quotes from Wayne’s World, while dropping subtle references, without even a hint of pretense, about time spent in Russia or Mexico City. She’d dish out gentle ribbing and could take a brotherly swipe — clearly someone with sibling experience.

One of the first things you notice about Carolina is that she’s beautiful — smooth skin, a light rouge in her cheeks and inviting brown eyes. Her accent indicates, to the careful listener, that she’s not from around here and your inability to place it — vaguely South American, tinged with a light Continental inflection — invokes an aura of mystique around her girl-next-door presentation to the world. The result is a Kerri Russell in The Americans quality, in which Carolina’s cover would be regularly blown when she inadvertently breaks into Portuguese or conversational Spanish.

Carolina’s dad is a career diplomat for Brazil who held posts all over the world, including Mexico City, Moscow and London. He held the title of “Ambassador” but his nickname at Brown was “The Colonel” because of his severe bearing and none of us had any real context for how an ambassador should look though we had plenty of military references in pop culture to make our case.

Carolina takes more after her mom, Mary, especially her watchful kindness, her love of film and interest in cooking. Her mom has lived a life, as they say: she grew up in Ohio and worked at a movie theater at the student union in college, falling in love with Brazil when she screened “Black Orpheus”. Mary later went on to become a film editor for Kung Fu movies in Hong Kong in the seventies. She studied Portuguese and met “The Colonel” at a party in The Hamptons after he spied her from across the bar and threw olives to get her attention.

Carolina also has her mom’s sense of style, which finds elegance in vintage fabrics across an international assortment of colors accumulated from a life spent entertaining guests around the world. She’s never without gorgeous pendants and other accessories; compliments over her earrings have been ongoing for over 20 years. Sometimes Santos takes vintage accessorizing a bit too far, like the time she temporarily moved into our apartment hauling in hobbly wheeled luggage and clothes carried hobo-style in extra strength garbage bags. In this regard I am a natural born tea kettle calling the pot black given that it’s taken years of living with a woman to wean me off my habit of wearing down every last garment down to its last thread before replacing it.

Carolina is the classic middle child between two brothers. Miguel, the oldest, has a soft, handsome face that recalls a blue-pilled Keanu Reeves as a compliance officer. Her younger brother, Gabe, is shorter and built like a slab of concrete, as solidly wide as he is tall. He played hockey, trained in grappling and now channels his aggression into complex commercial litigation. They share a fondness for each other and an ability to put anyone at ease, a skill no doubt honed over many years in the presence of distinguished guests. They’re well-read, mannered and share a kind of charming clumsiness in performing overt displays of affection.

Among many ways in which Carolina has made me proud, her decision to go to culinary school looms large. Very soon after graduating from college, Carolina and I began hosting potluck dinner parties at Carolina’s parents’ apartment — borrowed fancy — a more sophisticated step up from the keg parties I threw in high school when my parents weren’t home. Carolina would reserve the hot entrees for herself and it became readily apparent that she had an instinct for cooking. I tried to help as best I could but it quickly became clear that my talents were best placed at curating the guest list, getting the drinks and generally serving as the emcee. When Carolina’s mom tired of having wine drunk young 20-somethings at her apartment late on a Sunday, we began hosting the dinners at restaurants for a negotiated prix-fixe. We made letterhead — The Sunday Night Supper Club — a logo and official-sounding press releases that we distributed to restaurant GMs hoping to score a good deal.

Carolina was writing for a food blog at that time and after two years of telling her “kid, you got talent”, she summoned the courage to go to the Natural Gourmet Institute. Shortly after graduating, she teamed up with two friends to open the restaurant Comodo, which quickly became a hit serving elevated pan-Latin comfort food and we kvelled at seeing “Santos” living out her dream.

Santos and I have traveled all over the world together: London, Lisbon, Rio, Tokyo, Seattle, Portland, Miami, Austin, hikes all over NY. We’ve collected a lot of travel miles together because she’s an easy travel companion who loves adventures, culinary and otherwise. She loves to dance and is never more in her element than when she’s jumping up and down to a banger from the ’90s or an Afro-Brazilian beat.

Indeed Carolina has often felt like a younger sister. I mean that as a compliment, because ladies always want to be seen as younger, am I right ladies? She’s been a sister, a confidante during the most formative period in my adult life. I love Carolina and what many have failed to understand about our relationship and its insistently platonic character over the years, is that the relationship operates as its own third space into which we’ve invested so much energy and honesty over 20 years. In many ways, it is bigger than the sum of both of our combined affection for each other. Functionally, we could pass as a couple at weddings, dinner parties, to hotel front desks without having to deal with the expense or emotional calculus of an actual relationship. There are still several couples who assumed we’re dating and it was just easier to go along with it than to disabuse them.

Carolina and I share the mixed blessing of only being able to see the best in people, of capturing most people we meet in soft focus. It’s a great way to build a large community of friends and it historically has tripped us up romantically.

As I grew up and eventually met the woman who I knew would be my wife, I wanted Carolina to meet her right away. They met within the first month of our courtship and it’s been so intensely gratifying to see that these two women who mean so much to me see what I see in the other.

Carolina’s superpower is that her fundamental decency serves as a magnet for good people. This makes sense as the chef’s role is to create the table around which the community gathers. It’s a quiet power. She is a summoner; she can call the community together in which the community can take collective action.

Indeed, there is a beautiful motherly instinct alive in Carolina. You see it with how she dotes on her niece and how she takes care of her kitchen staff at work, constantly putting their needs before hers, whether it’s covering an extra shift on her day off, offering money out of her own pocket or holding space for those down on their luck.

Carolina makes everyone feel good simply by being around her. She is an active listener and can make you laugh for no reason. Likewise there have been moments where I would just start laughing spontaneously in front of her and she would join in. It’s not mere mimicry, it’s trust; it’s connection.

May she enter this next year embracing the lessons learned from the last, awake to the opportunities ahead and fully aware how much her community admires everything about her. Santos, te amo com todo meu coração.

The first thing you notice about Rachel is her beautiful shoulder-length hair that recalls depictions of King Arthur’s Guinevere. It frames a face that radiates kindness, which is the first thing you feel in Rachel’s presence. As tumultuous as her life may be in any given moment, she is calm, deliberate, self-possessed. It may be her natural, practical state as a Capricorn but more likely the result of a rich inner life fueled by family, values and a deep connection to spiritual realms.

We met through a cold call. Rachel was working at a large media buying agency placing digital advertising for JetBlue and I was selling advertising for a publication that wanted JetBlue to advertise with us. I reached out to a friend from college who worked at JetBlue who introduced me to a colleague who gave me Rachel’s number and Rachel dutifully agreed to chat after I reached out and name dropped where I had gotten her contact info.

It was an uneventful phone call as these things went, likely one of a dozen each of us had that day and the best you could hope for is to make a modest case as to why the conversation should continue. According to the kabuki of the business development process, the next step (there’s always a proscribed set of Next Steps) would be to take Rachel and one of her junior teammates out to lunch near her office, free lunches being a key perk of our jobs, and we would explore ways to continue to mutually inform without offending with the hope of graduating to the next major milestone — the Request for Proposal — in which Rachel and her team would formally ask to evaluate our publication’s worthiness as a suitor for JetBlue’s investment. The RFP is an opportunity any up-and-publication receives with grave responsibility, even though statistically the rejection rate at this stage is upwards of 67%. Fatefully, our publication moved on to the next phase, a test investment for a regional ad buy, and green shoots of trust emerged.

As the business relationship evolved, so did our opportunities to put our guard down over meals and drinks. Invitations to events flowed in both directions. We both shared a love for music and attended shows together. She introduced me to her husband and to close friends of theirs, who are all conspicuously attractive, many professionally so, from chiseled dudes who model $8000 attaché cases to women doing catalog work. It’s like an alternative world, like Australia, in which everyone is over 5’11”, fit and capable of moving about their lives with great ease.

Shortly after Rachel and I started working together, I had a birthday party in which I rented a short yellow school bus to drive us around town while a band called Guyz Nite, a semi-satirical, over-the-top alpha male group who sang songs about drinking beer, action movies and leering at each other’s moms, performed in the back. At some point amid the haze of the evening, Rachel thought this debauchery could be translated into a strategic marketing solution for JetBlue. Rather than take over a school bus, what if we commandeered an entire airplane for a mid-air party and went to Vegas for 24 hours to celebrate JetBlue’s latest route and newest WiFi-enabled planes? It was a tribute to our collective spirit that several months later this vision came to life and JetVegas entered the annals of marketing legend.

Our dreams grew larger and the following year, instead of hosting a 24-hour party to and from Vegas, we decided to host a 3-day trip to a foreign country and not tell any of the guests where we were going until they arrived at the gate and thus JetMystery was born. As they say in Scooby Doo, we would have gotten away with it had it not been for the flash hurricane on the island of Kokomo in Jamaica that caused scaffolding to topple onto guests during a mosh that formed on the dance floor to The Black Eyed Peas’ “I Gotta Feelin’”. Rachel and I scrambled to evacuate injured guests to the local hospital and long story short, that was the last time we worked with JetBlue on overnight events.

By that time Rachel and my friendship achieved escape velocity and we were regular companions at industry events. If we didn’t go together, we’d be excited to see each other there. It’s often overlooked how valuable it is to have a dependable plus one at these spaces during this time in New York, a friend who could reliably “show up and show off”, turning up the energy when the music got cranking. Few doors were unavailable to us. I kept strange men at bay and Rachel broadcast that I wasn’t a total creeper to women I tried to meet.

Given that our birthdays are a week apart, it was inevitable that we joined forces for “Rothveigas”, a portmanteau that gave a name to the type of ecstatic free-for-alls we wanted our parties to be. For ten consecutive years, we combined invite lists, found DJs, performers and subterranean spaces in which to spray champagne, jump on banquets and generally celebrate one more year of being alive.

To know Rachel is to know that she’s an exceptionally deep spirit for whom God plays a central role in her life. I was honored when Rachel invited me to this Sunday Side of her when I first got to attend the church on 22nd street, witnessing how neatly music interplayed with Scripture and community.

I also got to see more of the texture in Rachel and Tiago’s relationship. It occurred to me that there are some couples that perform really well together. They photograph well, dress to the nines, laugh confidently at each other’s jokes and address each other as “honey”, “sweetheart” and other florid terms of endearment. These couples stress everyone out. How do they do it? Easy: they’re Mormon Instagrammers. Rachel and Tiago offer more charity: they show you the work. They show you there’s God in every act of creation and relationships are no different — they require you to re-up and recommit every day.

In her deliberateness and the high expectations she holds in the company she keeps, Rachel has always represented divine maternal energy so it’s been a joy watching her raise two beautiful girls. To them, she’s been a source of play, a tour guide and a teacher of secular knowledge and human nature. In low moments when some stray news item causes me to fret about the future of humanity, I think about Rachel as a mom and the possibility that there are other Rachels out there, raising happy ninja poets who will share their grace with the world.

Rachel’s connection to God makes a habit out of synchronicity. If I happen to be struggling with something, Rachel will somehow know to text a prayer, which in those moments feels like a balm. Shortly after Rachel met my wife back when we were first dating, Rachel texted me the next morning with a lucid description of a dream detailing what my wedding would look like. Her vision, down to the location, emotional context and even the description of the dress my wife wore was 100% accurate, defying any secular idea of randomness. Rachel’s daughter JJ has these vivid dreams as well, what she calls God Dreams. The apple never falls far.

On this 23rd day of January, on Rachel’s [redacted] birthday, my dream is that she continues to share her light with the world. She is a warrior for her friends, for her colleagues and especially for her family. All that vigilance can make you tired. So today, may you receive the rest that you so richly deserve. May your home reverberate with your favorite tracks, the kitchen cabinet with your favorite snacks and know that I, along with the rest of the world, love you back.

The good guys rarely get the attention they deserve. They operate with little fanfare and pyrotechnics; they’re behind the spotlight, pantomiming instructions to those on the stage. They don’t want their name on a building, or their likeness illustrated and blown up on social media, maybe just that you’ll pay their kindness forward. In your local community, these are volunteer firefighters and Little League coaches. In the creative world, it’s Adam mfn Neuhaus.

Adam and I first met in Tribeca a little over 15 years ago. He was working an event — not networking but like working-working — hauling tubs of dirty glassware across a screening space, in an entry-level role at a non-profit that connects artists with the resources they need to develop their work. Classic Neuhaus stuff. A friend thought Adam and I would hit it off and we knew enough good people in common that through transitive properties alone a friendship seemed inevitable.

The first thing you notice about Adam is that he’s got a sly, kind of mischievous smile that suggests he’s got something cooking, like a show about condiments, or an inside tip on a rare Communist bookstore. Talking to Adam in our initial conversation felt like Louie Anderson’s character in Coming To America: First I’m bussing events, then I’m working a desk for a big agent, then assistant producer and that’s when the big bucks start rolling in. He’s always had the drive of the archetypal entertainment up-and-comer from the jump, like a young Mike Ovitz in the mailroom at the William Morris Agency.

Adam and I quickly bonded over our love of activities, literally any activity, ranging from talks to screenings to parties to meals with new people. We both share an earnestness about the wideness of the world and our ability to explore what’s on offer.

A top read across a decade and a half of email correspondence brims with energy, the theme of “LFG” bristling from one exchange to the other. As the relationship evolved, we traveled together — from Wanderlust in Vermont, surfing in Nicaragua, extended stays in Miami, hanging with grandma in San Diego — not just because we’re great bosom buddies for nights on the town but because we also liked nothing more than to be alone together, reading and comfortably saying nothing to each other for hours on end.

That quality speaks to Adam’s love of inward exploration, the sense that journeys within can be just as nourishing and expansive as what’s on the other end of a long-haul flight. For a guy who’s in the business of selling narratives, he’s careful not to get too high on his own supply and can lean into uncomfortable interior spaces.

To know Adam is to know he loves tennis, an interest that also reflects his approach to conversation, which always feels like a rally, batting ideas back and forth, lobbing thought starters, throwing in spin to see how you react. He hoovers content at an ungodly pace, giving him a formidable view of the creative landscape and making sure he’s someone on whom no cultural reference is lost.

To know Adam is to know that every hang starts like a pitch meeting, premised on a reveal of a new adventure around the corner or a big idea he’s yearning to explore. “So..”, he’ll say, relishing his ability to build tension before the reveal, “I’ve been thinking of signing up for a Wim Hof course in Poland”.

“So…I’ve just signed up for an overnight survival course in the Pine Barrens”.

“So…I’ve just procured the rights to a show about Bruce Lee”.

Not surprisingly, Neuhaus Ideas became the name of his production company with which to translate these enthusiasms into commercial products. My wife reminds me that of course he has a lust for life, he’s a Pisces! But while he’s a gourmand for experiences, first hand or vicarious, he’s not obnoxious about it; he doesn’t need to perform his taste but like a great producer, cares mainly that his taste will have purchase with a broader audience.

To understand Adam is to know that he’s the product of great parenting, specifically two doctors who met as lab partners in medical school — one the son of Holocaust survivors who grew up in the Dominican Republic and the other the daughter of Brooklyn in the 1960s. They encouraged the good brotherly behavior they saw in Adam among his two sisters, whether it was working with Kate on her free throws in front of the house or taking his sister Rachel on trips to LA.

This passion for mentorship carries beyond his family, to the networking group he ran for years called Headsets and Highballs, to the Ghetto Film School or Unlock Her Potential. In fact, if you’re to crystalize what makes Adam tick it’s that he loves stories and relishes in human potential. Adam Neuhaus: champion of human potential.

Sometimes when you meet people with real charisma it feels backslappy and draining because you feel obligated to match their energy but with Adam it’s other-directed — it inspires rather than exhausts. This is not new, this is an actual report from his third grade teacher:

Adam’s level of performance and effort can only be described as high energy and intense motivation no matter what the task. Best of all is Adam’s contribution to the group dynamics in the classroom. He is always considered a valuable member of a team as he freely contributes new creative ideas and can organize people and work to task completion. Besides being a highly intelligent, creative thinker, Adam is a sensitive, kind and caring person with great leadership skills. It has been a pleasure to be in his company this year.

Adam once told me about a show business axiom in which your career can be defined in four acts: who is Adam Neuhaus? Get me Adam Neuhaus; Get me someone like Adam Neuhaus; Who was Adam Neuhaus?. At the ripe age of 40, we are squarely in Act Two. Everyone should have you a friend, colleague and brother like Adam Neuhaus.

Generally speaking, the only time a guy from Jersey gets to share sincere affection for another guy is at that guy’s wedding or during his eulogy. Not to be confused with all of the other times when guys from Jersey share raw, unstructured emotion, such as (ticks off fingers) in a car, at a bar, waiting in line, getting bumped by another person, thinking they got bumped by another person, thinking their friend just got bumped by another person (“that girl push you? that girl push you?”), or when his mother calls

“maaa why you calling me I’m at work!”

“you’re working from home!”

“It’s still work!”

I met Roy Cho, or “Chones” as he’s been perpetually branded in my phone, after Roy Jones Jr, reputedly the best pound for pound fighter in the world, in our first days of Brown University.

I had on one of my tight Banana Republic T-shirts, which signaled an aspirationally upmarket taste while showing off my hot bod, with a silver chain girdling my 18 inch neck. Roy had on a matching outfit, which by today’s standards would probably look like a costume. It was less a “meet cute” than “cute meat” as we immediately bonded about being muscled up wrestlers from Jersey trying to navigate this strange new Ivy League environment filled with boarding school kids, international students and girls who were more amused than charmed by our fish-out-of-water schtick.

Roy shared that he was not only third in the state in wrestling but a decorated Tae Kwon Do champion. I would soon learn that this meant he was good on the ground, good on his feet and lethal in the streetz. It was love at first fight.

We’re a week into school, everyone’s getting their bearings, making friends. Except L — , the cocky quarterback with a 1980’s prep school coif, who singles Roy out for not being properly deferential to him outside Oliver’s, the local college bar. The quarterback has at least 70 pounds on Roy and his entire offensive line semi-circled around him, punching their hands, daring Roy to question the quarterback’s place in the emerging social pecking order. Roy tries diplomacy, warns the quarterback, the quarterback laughs villainously and then — SNAP! — Roy roundhouse kicks the quarterback in the face, knocking him over and subduing him in the street. The crowd erupts and a legend was born.

The episode reveals a passion for justice and cinematic flourish that have become twin hallmarks in Roy’s life.

To know Roy is to know that he lives by an honor code. He has an abiding sense of fairness, which likely helped compel him towards law school. But there’s an artist in Roy, who deep down is that same boy who would engage for hours in “Swish Swish Time”, imaginative backyard play in which he would have on his little Indiana Jones hat, enacting complex battles in the dirt. It’s this Roy who today writes screenplays that work through his perspective on the world in the characters he creates.

In the language of TV tough guys, there’s a saying: I can either be your best friend or your worst enemy. For those blessed to know him, there is no better friend than Roy. To those who transgress his sense of honor, change your locks.

Roy makes everyone feel like his best friend. He is a human air horn when you walk into a room. You feel the bright light of his attention, the warmth of his Hollywood smile, the affection in his “what’s up, buddy!” or even in the observant compliment about an article of clothing. From anyone else this would feel insincere but from Roy feels like genuine appreciation. You’re alive and you’re here, right now.

Similarly, he’s the ultimate hype man, a Michael Buffer of the dinner table, making sure that everyone gets a fulsome introduction filled with the highlights of their personal and professional career buffed up with a 10 percent spit shine. In the way that newspapers keep obits on celebrities on file in the event of a sudden passing, Roy has fully formed paragraphs about everyone he knows locked in a card file in his head. He keeps score but only counts your wins.

He’s not all talk either. The guy shows up. You have an event? Roy’s there. Your kid is turning 5? Roy’s got ’em a nice Tonka truck. Your company having a third anniversary party? That’s Roy, front of the line, early to RSVP.

He’s a machine, even on social media. The guy’s a one-man-clinic on community management. Not a single comment, on any platform, no matter how distant the acquaintance, goes unanswered. It underscores the silent effort Roy invests to be there for people. It also speaks to another code by which Roy lives: respect your past and know that everyone has something to teach you.

Roy’s respect for his community reflects a deep spiritual upbringing. His father’s family was Buddhist and Roy was raised going to church every week. For a time his family thought he may be a pastor. While the family integrated into their suburban surroundings, a Confucianist mindset, celebrating the sacred in the everyday, came to define Roy and his sister’s core values and probably served as a bulwark against crass Jersey materialism.

Since this is Roy’s birthday, I’d be remiss for not stating the obvious: the guy’s handsome. Roy’s got wavy black hair, most often slicked back and firmed into place with product in the classic “hunk” style.

While Roy is more of a writer than actor, the guy fluctuates in weight more often than Christian Bale. There was one time he put on no less than 20 pounds after a week at Sundance and then immediately lost it in some kind of dangerous crash diet like he was rehearsing for The Machinist. Old wrestling habits die hard.

The fact that Roy, never bashful about gym selfies, would willingly gain that kind of weight speaks to his commitment to work. In AMC he has finally found a career that blends his cognitive abilities in contract law, his gifts for retail politics and his love for good storytelling. The ticker tells the tale: since Roy’s been at AMC, the stock price has gone from $55 to $78 per share.

This brings us to Ashley Davis, Doctor Ashley, Roy’s lovely girlfriend, a trained veterinarian who improves the lives of cats, canines and household pets. You can also call her Jane Goodall because in Roy she gets to closely observe a live gorilla. I knew things were trending in the right direction when Roy met Ashley’s father and brother-in-law in Saint Petersburg. Three alpha males beating their chests, sniffing out and approving of each other. Ashley sees Roy for who he is and loves him dearly for it. There’s nothing I could want more for him in a partner.

My grandma used to offer what she called “Happiness Wishes”, nightly benedictions filled with her hopes and dreams for me before I’d go to sleep. I’d like to offer my happiness wish for Roy and that’s that with all his relentless ambition, that he recognizes, even for a moment, that he is already first among men; it’s his birthright: Roy, french for “king”. Roy, you creative warrior, may you feel the love of your friends and may it propel you across whatever introspective depths and personal peaks you have yet to explore.

It turns out there are a lot of ways.

At a time when Google, Facebook and Amazon capture up to 70% of all ad dollars generated in the US and newspapers across the country have shed half their journalism jobs since 2008, you may think only a masochist would make a career in ad-supported media right now. But every period of creative destruction provides a wellspring of opportunity for entrepreneurs with passion, a point of view on the world and a capacity to embrace uncertainty.

I’ve worked in media for nearly 20 years. I was on the founding team at Thrillist, started Fatherly, and have invested and advised a dozen other media brands big and small.

To benefit anyone trying to build a content business, I’ve compiled a list of successful revenue models. I deliberately left out advertising models because I want to highlight what else is out there in a world where a predictable advertising business is increasingly out of reach for all but the largest platform providers.

What’s remarkable about this list is the sheer range of options. At the time of this writing, I’ve counted 25+ different revenue streams that can support a content-focused business. Hopefully, this list serves as a primer for wherever you are in your entrepreneurial journey.

One characteristic of healthy media companies is that they can monetize each piece of content three times. For most web publishers, this means some configuration of not just advertising but also affiliate programs, licensing, and IP sales. What revenue model you choose and how to operationalize each approach is a question that you can expect to revisit every six months as your company scales and new vendors enter the market.

For the sake of readability, I’ve attempted to bucket each of these ideas into a category. However, as in life, nothing ever fits neatly into one bucket, so you may notice instances in which several categories may apply. Lastly, I consider this to be a working document, so if you have any feedback, please write to me, and I’ll make sure to update on an on-going basis.

1) Commerce: Broadly defined in this context as any model in which a content creator profits from driving transactional behavior rather than merely stoking an intent to buy.

• Affiliate: A marketer provides a referral fee, generally ranging from 5% to 20%, as a reward for direct sales attributed to the publisher. Publishers can improve their rev share with volume and work directly with a marketer, instead of through an intermediary like Skimlinks. Retailers like Amazon may also include bounties for driving traffic that ultimately lead to a sale after a period of 28-days. Example: Wirecutter
• Product marketplace: To improve your affiliate margins, media operators can assume inventory risk or develop a drop-ship relationship with a merchandise partner and only fulfill what you sell. Example: Food52
• Virtual/experiences marketplace: Like a product marketplace but with a virtual or services-based inventory. In this space, many companies begin with a glorified affiliate model of curating other provider’s merchandise before uncovering the business math to make slightly customized to fully customized virtual goods or services work. Example: Atlas Obscura
• Job Listings: Since media brands are nodes in larger information webs and those webs are merely connections between people, it’s no wonder media companies have an edge in building talent marketplaces. The most common model is a pay-per-listing approach that taxes the job poster, sometimes with a first-one’s-free incentive to demonstrate value. Example: PR News
• Clubs: The clubs model focuses on recurring revenue memberships to access discounts on products that align with a media company’s audience. Rather than starting from scratch, many companies test this model by first using a white-label partner. Example: NYT Wine Club (powered by TastingRoom)
• Dating: It makes sense that if you cultivate a community of likeminded people, those people may not just want to meet but actually pay for the privilege of dating each other. This is especially the case, in the example below, if your content is focused on ideas around sex and relationships. Example: Nerve
• Custom Product Development: There is enough variation in this category to merit a separate post, but at a high-level, this involves working with an OEM to create a single product or multiple SKUs that serve an unmet need of your audience. Occasionally, the product becomes so successful on its own that it gets spun out into its own P&L. Example: Futurism developing the Gravity Blanket
• Merchandise: There is a story that as MTV exploded in popularity, its founder/CEO rejected his team’s efforts to start developing branded T-shirts. He reasoned that while he could control MTV’s image on-screen, he couldn’t control the type of people who would wear his apparel in the world. When it comes to merchandise, your buyers are your billboard, and your merchandise becomes a tribal symbol linked with a cultural identity. When the brand is strong and the tribe is hungry, merchandising sales can become a significant revenue source, as in the example below. Example: Barstool
• Event-Based Commerce or Drops: Limited inventory merchandise designed to generate buzz from novelty and scarcity. In the best of breed example below, MSCHF co-ops the conversational commerce model to create a new digital experience every two weeks, like Scream Club — a website in which you can scream with random strangers around the Internet — or a physical product like the Jesus Shoes — Air Jordans blessed with holy water from the Jordan River — that creates a community of participants who all share the same tribal affiliation around Internet culture and its rapid hype cycle. Example: MSCHF

2) On-Going Subscriptions: Whether you’re the NYT or an independent journalist looking to do your best Ben Thompson impression, it’s a boom time for subscriptions as consumers gravitate to more niche content and innovation abounds around the “picks and axes” powering the rush to recurring revenue content businesses. Whether it’s through bundling several adjacent publishers into a single subscription (e.g., the Everything bundle) or deploying a one-subscription-to-rule-them-all approach (Scroll or Apple News), the UX around subscriptions has become as easy as pushing the button on the side of your phone or by simply just looking at your phone.

• Paywall for bundled content: Represents various ways of rationalizing a subscription cost by offering original, licensed, and UGC content. Example: Medium
• Paywall for individual contributors: This is an area with the most innovation over the last five years as creators look to get paid. If Patreon is a digital tip jar, Substack is a Stratechery-in-a-box. PBJ Live enables paid live interactions, a model that Cam Girls and other elements of the online porn industry have been developing years before polite society caught on. Finally, OpenMessage enables influencers to build 1x1 relationships with their audiences disintermediated by social platforms. Example: Patreon, Substack, PBJ Live, 4Fans, Open Message
• Consumer Donations: This model plays on a general altruistic mindset (save the free press!) or affinity for a brand (save Ferriss!). When deployed as a recurring payment, the mechanics are the same as a paid subscription but the donation framing, reinforced in the follow-up messaging, provides the consumer with a feeling of benevolence versus purely being party to a transaction. Example: The Guardian
• Endowment: Carryover from the non-profit world in which corporate partners, trusts, endowments, and other entities fund a content endeavor because it advances a worldview aligned with their stated mission. The endowment model is popular in political media, especially on the right, as vehicles like the Real Clear Foundation and Federalist foundation look to shape national conversation without burdening content creators with the indelicacies of running a profitable business. Example: ProPublica

3) Production: Unlike subscriptions, in which the consumer pays for content, the production category refers to creators selling their content services to an enterprise customer.

• Premium: Longer form or episodic content inspired by a brand’s identity or its campaign’s theme. While a brand typically funds this, ownership may vary and exceptional content can yield additional revenue from licensing or other commercial applications of the intellectual property. Example: Pocket.watch
• Fact-checking for social platforms: The latest in platform largesse for publishers in which media companies, usually after receiving accreditation through Poynter’s International Fact Checking Network, receive retainers and performance bonuses for providing fact checks against the tidal wave of false content permeating our feeds. Still cheaper for social platforms, no doubt, than assuming editorial responsibility while reaping the exculpatory benefits of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. Example: CNN
• Asynchronous Pay-as-you-go: Whether it’s Lance Bass singing happy birthday to your aunt or your favorite fubol star revealing he’s much more charismatic on the pitch, these platforms host talent to sell their time on-demand. It’s a brilliant way to capitalize on “captive content creators” in a pandemic or anyone well known enough to monetize their downtime. Example: Cameo
• Synchronous Pay-as-you-go: This is the same model as above but with the added thrill of real-time interaction between creator and fan. Twitch represents one of the biggest companies in this category, facilitating connections between live-streamer and fans. Similarly, OnlyFans has quickly become a behemoth based on facilitating adult content that other social platforms prohibit, not dissimilar to Tumblr’s meteoric rise a generation of media companies ago. OnlyFans also features artists and personal trainers and presents a mix of subscription and asynchronous pay-per-view content opportunities as well. SextPanther, a pay-as-you-go model for — that’s right — explicit sexts from adult stars adheres more purely to the synchronous model. Example: Twitch

4) Selling to the Enterprise: Defined here as selling content products and services to large corporate (1,000+ employee) customers in which the organization is the customer, usually as part of a service-level agreement. Typical of B2B, this process involves more stakeholders and longer decision cycles offset by the promise of stable revenue and higher returns on invested effort.

• Classes/Workshops: Content-as-a-service to organizations, generally as part of L&D, HR, and D&I initiatives. Popular current varieties of this type of business include content companies providing wellness information for overworked employees or mass upskilling and retraining from education publishers to a global workforce. Example: Thrive Global
• The Secondment Model: In this model, a media company embeds its talent in a client’s physical or virtual office to create content more quickly in a dynamic news environment. This embedded talent model is different than in-housing because the employee is still a W-2 of the media company and not the client. The client’s benefit is that they enjoy the talent and operational know-how of a media company’s people without the cost or ramp-up period of hiring an outside agency. This model isn’t technically advertising because the fee structure is generally based on people-as-a-service rather than the creative output those people produce or the media by which the output is distributed. Example: [Companies who are doing this would prefer I did not share]
• CMS: The commodification of publishing technology has fueled the explosion of content over the last 20 years. In those instances in which media companies have demonstrated a competitive advantage with their technology, software licensing has become a revenue growth area. Example: Washington Post’s Arc
• Research: Leverage journalists’ research practice for organizations looking for more in-depth market insight and business intelligence. Example: Insider Intelligence
• Data: What may start as covering a beat — say technology investments — can become a business intelligence product that relies on a combination of human expertise and software designed to ingest massive amounts of proprietary data. Example: CB Insights
• Corporate/Bulk Subscriptions: Defined here as multi-user access to content based on a contract instead of a single user’s credit card. From student subscriptions for news products to corporate Learning & Development teams looking for content that uplifts remote workers. The corporate subscription model may also encompass third-party sponsoring subscriptions on behalf of an audience as a way to create value in exchange for attention. Example: New York Times x Lincoln

5) Licensing: One of the more potent ways to quantify your media brand’s value is by how much the market would pay to be associated with your content. While advertisers may pay for adjacency, licensing as a business model is a more wholesale judgment on the value of what you produce and the appeal of past actions, design decisions and general brand reputation over time.

• Rights: On the low end this encompasses reprints and e-prints, while the high end involves richer packages with annual payments to the original IP owner. Example: Authentic Brands
• Feeds: This generally involves content platforms paying IP owners for access to their content feeds to capture attention that can be monetized some other way, usually through advertising. This model encompasses full or partial content feeds and more prominently reflects how AVOD services generate content as an alternative to investing as heavily in original productions as an SVOD service. Example: CBS and Pluto
• Co-located content: The only distinction I would draw from feed-based licensing is that this generally refers to newer, fresher content instead of back catalogue productions. Example: Associated Press
• Credentialing: In a system of many choices, it pays to have a trusted brand navigate consumers towards your desired product. This model directly leverages your brand equity to help drive sales activity for another company. Assuming you’ve already made the investments to build a brand that the market cares about, this is a high margin business and easy work if you can get it. Example: US News & World Report

6) Live/Virtual Experiences: Before COVID-19, the global events industry was on pace to grow to $2.3 trillion by 2026, up from $1.1 trillion in 2018. While the pandemic will inevitably stunt that growth, virtual events are expected to grow to $774 billion by 2030, up from $78 billion, according to SF-based Grand View Research. In either case, events are a natural expression of content businesses as consumers look for community and real-time access to creators and their ideas.

• Touring: Applying the concert model in which content creators take to the road for a multi-venue tour with revenue from ticket sales, concessions, merchandise and possible IP extensions such as documentaries and specials capturing the road magic. Example: Pop-Up Magazine
• White-labeling/Franchise: Offering up an experiential formula to a trained team in multiple markets — think many teams in many markets instead of one team traveling across many markets. The franchise model works best if the product is the formula and not the unique personality of the original creator. Example: Tinkergarten
• Expo/Conferences: One team, minimal markets approach to events that can service thousands of consumers at once with a programming schedule, exhibition access for vendors and ample networking opportunities. Example: AfroTech
• Paid Community: A gatekeeper model in which access to the community provides just as much value as the creator’s content. Paying communities are particularly relevant in B2B environments in which dues-paying members gather regularly IRL or online for learning, development, networking and crowd-sourced support opportunities. Example: The Information

Notice anything missing? Have a better example that you’d like to share? Let me know at mike@fatherly.com.