Itay Dreyfus

Even subscriber counts were originally capped at 2,000. You couldn’t even pay to raise the limit.

Along those lines, I believe that mechanics design is a distinct discipline separate from both interface design and product management. I believe it deserves its own terminology, principles, processes, deliverables, and bodies of knowledge.

We are shifting from the mode of “surging” on Tumblr with tons of people to get it to exciting growth, to working on how we can run Tumblr in the most smooth and efficient manner. Pretty amazing things in the social and messaging space have been accomplished with small teams, so I’m actually quite curious to see a smaller and more focused Tumblr’s ... See more

The site feels like a chaotic newsroom with the cutting room floor exposed. I think that’s part of the excitement — and good design.

"The amount of serendipity that will occur in your life is directly proportional to the degree to which you do something you're passionate about combined with the total number of people to whom this is effectively communicated." https://t.co/KfFpouh7Dm

Online, we need to make the big feel smaller, in the right ways. The challenge to start small from something that is currently controlled by Facebook and Google, is very hard. But people are doing it. Look at The Correspondent, or Open Culture, or Brain Pickings, or thousands of other small projects that have good communities around them. We need m... See more

There’s an activity that the Barrel partners have been doing for a while: reaching out to a couple of contacts per week. These have typically been former clients, industry acquaintances, other agency operators, investor types, old friends and classmates, etc. It’s been a practice we’ve kept up weekly since 2017.

So, small is good but doesn’t scale and can be overwhelmed by changes, and big is powerful, but ugly.

But he and Ross still come to work, daily, in search of transcendence.