What is Big Desk Energy?

While yes, it’s a newsletter I sent to 60,000 people this morning… it’s also this:

Here’s how we got here.

It all started in 2019. I was leading a small team of engineers at Morning Brew, which had over 2M daily readers at the time.

In the summer, my friends and I would escape the city and squeeze 12 of us into a 4 bedroom house in the Hamptons. Each Thursday we’d take the LIRR down to Southhampton and work remotely from the house on Fridays.

I remember it all so vividly. I was working at the kitchen table with my headphones on when Silk Jam shuffled through my Spotify.

*Right click → add to playlist → create new playlist.

This was back when everyone in tech was micro-dosing LSD to do creative work (is this still cool?). One thing led to another and the makings of a new playlist quickly came together. I’d consider the genre to be like indie electronic: upbeat enough to keep you energized and focused, but not too assertive as to distract you.

Meanwhile, The Independent was doing hard-hitting journalism and publishing pieces like this:

A fun play on words (à la Big Desk Energy), a cool retro logo, and we were in business.

Side note: strangers have told me I look like Pete Davidson and I’ve never seen the resemblance… until now.

I don’t know how you broach the topic of having a chill playlist without everyone at the office finding you obnoxious (to be fair, they may have)… but the playlist began to spread. Morning Brew plugged it in the newsletter one day and the follower count climbed from a few hundred to a few thousand.

My claim to fame was having a mildly popular Spotify playlist. Some may call it the lamest flex ever, others consider it a signal of an elite tastemaker.

Around that time, React was rapidly growing in popularity. It’s a javascript library, created by Facebook (fun fact), that makes it easy to create interactive UIs… and I had absolutely no idea how to use it.

I taught myself how to code in college, and somehow ended up leading an engineering team just a few years later. Punching above my weight and learning things on the fly was par for the course. At risk of becoming the most useless and out-of-touch engineering lead, I began tinkering around with React.

Then in 2020, the world shut down due to covid. While everyone else was busy binge watching Tiger King, I decided to learn React by using it to build a new website.

Much to the dismay of my girlfriend at the time (ex now, so it’s all good), I spent 6 months tinkering and building this…

Big Desk Energy was a cool website that would garner a couple hundred page views each week, and a Spotify playlist contributing to the global GDP. And that’s how it would remain for a few years while life got busy.

Morning Brew was acquired by Business Insider, then I joined Google to work at YouTube Music. I’m certain the ridiculousness of me explaining Big Desk Energy during the interview process at Google is what landed me the job. This was later confirmed by my manager.

I didn’t last long inside the corporate walls of Google. Instead I left and raised $2.6M to launch beehiiv back in the late summer of 2021.

From day one, I fully embraced the “build in public” mantra and shared everything from product updates, to notable new users, revenue milestones, partnerships, and everything in between.

I even created one of the first newsletters on the platform, Building beehiiv, as a vessel to share the inner workings of how we were building the company in real-time.

But that ended up being a bit of a pipe dream. Who has the time to write a newsletter in those early days when you’re busy fighting for survival?

However, around this time last year, the idea of a personal newsletter crept back into my consciousness for a few reasons:

• The whole “building in public” thing was working really well; I credit it to us being able to raise our $12.5M Series A in just one week. A newsletter would become a natural extension of this.

• How meta is it to build in public via a newsletter, building it on the very platform I was building? It’s dogfooding to the max, and allows me to be a true power user of our product.

• beehiiv at the time was generating over $1M per month and I felt I had plenty of insights and a real story to tell.

Shaan Puri often shares the motto: the best product is just you, pushed out to the world.

I launched the newsletter in January of this year and can confidently say, Big Desk Energy is 100% me pushed all the way out. I’ve shared:

• Startup strategies like how we ship new features every week and our adoption of focus days.

• beehiiv company milestones like raising our Series B and acquiring Typedream.

• Thought pieces like the global impact of remote work and my bull case on Meta.

• Why Friend is the dumbest startup ever and the ridiculousness of annoying business influencers.

• Memorable company moments like our 2024 offsite and surpassing $10M ARR.

Not only does it appear to be resonating…

…but it also helps personify the business and build stronger relationships with our users.

When the newsletter surpassed 20,000 subscribers, I decided to try something different. I wanted to get off the grid and host a mastermind with a group of ridiculously ambitious founders. A long weekend of surfing, business strategy sessions, yoga, deep dives, demos, and just genuine connection with others who have the same hustler mentality.

Well, it worked. Over 50 people applied, and in July of this year I hosted the first ever Big Desk Energy mastermind in Tamarindo, Costa Rica. It was one of the most enjoyable and transformative weekends of the year for me and the others.

As soon as I got back to LA I booked it again to run it back for round two… which took place just a few weeks ago. Different founders, same results: an unbelievable amount of value creation and fun. Half of the founders had built $100M+ businesses in just the past few years, and the other half were all well on their way.

BTW: round 3 is coming in February. Shoot me a reply if you’re interested in joining.

I’ve since created a private Slack community that combines members from both mastermind groups. It’s become the foundation of a highly vetted network of A-list founders, all of whom have shared the experience of spending 96 hours together in the jungle of Costa Rica.

Most other communities try too hard to force connections or compromise on quality to achieve scale. Not Big Desk Energy. I’m not in a rush or even doing this to build a business. I’m just looking to foster meaningful relationships with those who are “next up” in the startup world.

Just last week I dropped a new line of merch… that I think is legitimately fucking awesome.

At this point I’m just having fun with it.

This is an outlet for me to flex my creative muscle and build things I enjoy. It just so happens that it also allows me to do my job better, connect more deeply with our users, bring together dozens of ambitious founders, and share my thoughts with an audience big enough to fill an NFL stadium.

So what the hell is Big Desk Energy?

It’s a mindset. It’s a reminder that you don’t need to conform to the unwritten rules of the world to succeed; you can just be yourself and have a lot of fun along the way ✌️.

If you enjoyed this post or know someone who may find it useful, please share it with them and encourage them to subscribe: mail.bigdeskenergy.com/p/what-big-desk-energy

beehiiv isn’t an “AI company” but we leverage a ton of AI software and tools to make our team wayyyyy more efficient.

Your competitors are doing this too.

Don’t fall behind — Hubspot wrote a free guide to help founders and business leaders take advantage of AI today.

No jargon or BS either. Just tactical advice on how to invest and leverage AI to supercharge your business.

It’s become mandatory reading for my employees at beehiiv… and it should be at your company too.

You don’t see enough pyramid backdrops in offices these days.

Shoutout Amir for the reader submission 🫡.

Reply with your own AI generated office and I’ll feature it in an upcoming issue.

Turn on, tune in, drop out. Click on any of the tracks below to get in a groove — each selected from the full Big Desk Energy playlist.

Some of my favorite content I found on the internet this week…

• The strengths and weaknesses that set founders apart (Harvard Business Review)

• When does the human brain peak? (Inverse)

• Nike’s Hollywood-themed World Series ad was 💯 

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Until next Tuesday 🕺🏽

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