Subscribers,
One of the things that’s quintessentially Silicon Valley is being a Founder. I’m on my third go of it - and this time I’m actually having fun! I want to do a better job of documenting this journey - I would write often during the ups and downs of my first company (Scripted).
Hamlet began almost two years ago. The original premise of the company was that valuable information buried in the thousands of hours of public meetings that happen every week in every small American city. I learned this the hard way by running for City Council in '22 (which I’ve talked about in other posts).
I originally thought I could turn public meeting insights into a valuable media property, by putting information in the hands of citizens - filling a void that's been left by the unfortunate demise of many local papers.
Mid last year, we started getting outreach from private companies and governments, who value the public data, but whose use cases are different.
Real estate developers use Hamlet to extract data from planning commission meetings to understand a city's development dynamics and track updates on specific projects.
Governments use Hamlet as a transparency tool, so they can share summaries of meetings with residents.
Another thing that’s quintessentially Silicon Valley is asking for help when you need it - and have if you have time, I'd be grateful for support in three ways:
If you have any friends who are real estate developers, land use attorneys, or part of a pro-housing PAC I'd be grateful for intros.
If you could ‘like’ or comment on this LinkedIn post (so cliche, I know), it would help a lot.
And last - if you'd like to just catch up I'd love to hear from you. Text is always the fastest, but email is also fine! I’ll try to write more, but it has been pretty busy.
I've definitely learned a lot between Founder journey 1 and now (#3) and I'm cautiously optimistic about how this one is going. Grateful for you following my writing over the years.
Sunil