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Greetings all,

First up, in today’s episode of Ventures I had the honor of interviewing Omari Salisbury about his journey as an entrepreneur in the international media space, his company Converge Media, their unique spotlight in Seattle, and their new campaign NoExcusesJobs (which is a collaboration with us at Prota Ventures to help people of color land livable wage jobs).  

For more about Omari and Converge, check out some recent news in other Seattle outlets:

• Omari Salisbury and 'Red Revolution' capture Seattle history from the frontlines
• Black media is vital for Seattle's future — and must be protected

You can listen to today’s Ventures podcast episode anywhere you get your podcasts (search for “Ventures”) or directly here.

Testing out a private commenting experience on Satchel

Social media comments are full of noise and trolls. This is wreaking havoc on our mental health, especially amongst our teenagers dealing with cyberbullying.

On the flip side, email/text is fine for smaller groups or 1:1 discussions.

However, I’m curious, is it possible to have private discussions online with people you may not know (yet) and engage in meaningful, nuanced conversations?

I have an idea. I’m not sure if it will be of interest to anyone else besides me, but this past weekend I built a new feature on Satchel to enable private commenting. Learn more and test it out here. You can also test it out by commenting on today’s podcast here, and you can comment on this very newsletter entry here.

Importantly, the author of a post knows the identity of the commenters (who must opt-in and be approved by the author), but commenters don’t know who each other are unless they choose to reveal their identity. All the commenters know is that the post author has deliberately let each commenter in.

Let’s try it. I’m curious to hear what you think. As a bonus, by signing up to comment you also get access to Satchel’s private alpha, free trial for sending out email newsletters, etc…

Learning to code 

I’m almost 30 pages into a mega-post for the next installment of my series: Learn to code with sensibilities for business, product, and collaboration :: a curriculum for entrepreneurs.

I’m hoping to get it published over the weekend. Subscribe here and check the series box to receive a notification when it goes live.

In the meantime, if you are a student following along, you’ll want to first work on this CSS tutorial over the break.

And just for fun...

My partners and I are working with the team over at Bird Buddy. Our Kickstarter campaign launched last week and is approaching $1m in funding!!! Check it out here (including the amazing video the team put together).

Also - some of you may remember Butter Twist (a kitchen gadget for easily working with butter). It’s got some fun media attention recently here and here.

Have a great rest of your week!

~Will