Postlight at a year!

We’re having our one-year anniversary tonight, and launching Postlight Labs. It’s been a lot of preparation—we’re in our new office, announcing some new products, with a new website. We’ve rehearsed five times. We have good-looking books to give away (thanks to the design team). Nearly 300 people RSVPed and we would have been okay with 60, so we’ve been adapting our plans and ordered another pallet of beer (plus non-alcoholic beverages; we do our best to include everyone).

By the way, the books are called “Practice,” and they feature excerpts from our podcast. They turned out good. (I love making content from content.) If you want a copy you can send us an email to hello+practice@postlight.com with your mailing address, and we’ll send you one, while supplies last.

The birthday party has turned into a kind of “fall cleaning”—an opportunity to revise the brand, pick out a new font family, rewrite the copy, get new business cards, put not just a new design but a proper CMS behind our website (cobbler’s children go unshod, etc.), write the case studies, attach a visual identity to the open-source framework, register some domains, put a few hundred books about technology, design, and culture on the library bookshelves (which we needed to have built), get enough chairs, and so forth. We’re ready for 2017. Let’s go.

Most of the time when I think about Postlight I think things like: Are we growing? Are people learning things? Are employees stressed? Is the client happy? These are the subjects that my co-founder Rich Ziade, our managing partners, and I all stress over. Growth is great but it’s a lot of work.

Nonetheless when I look at the work we’ve done, and the speed at which we got here—and the willingness of people to work together to make things happen—I can ignore the massive 50-ton weight of self-doubt that hangs over my head and let myself think (just for a minute) that maybe we’re on to something.

See you tonight!