Essay

Against the founder letter

The genre is exhausted. What to publish instead when the company needs to be heard from.

5 min · Lisbon

The founder letter has become a form with no content: a gratitude paragraph, a market paragraph, a paragraph that gestures at hard decisions without naming one.

Readers have learned to skip it, which means the one time a company genuinely needs to speak, the channel is already discounted.

The alternatives are unglamorous and effective: publish the decision memo, publish the numbers behind it, or publish nothing and let the product announcement carry itself.

Reported by the CliqueTrees newsroom. Corrections run at the top of the following edition, set in the same size as the mistake.