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#4 — August 2025

  • Planted:

In July I announced my book about domains, so I’m about two months into full-time independent work (with a bit of travel mixed in). It has been quite fun so far—most days I seem to look up and it’s already dinnertime. I’ve been telling friends who ask how it’s going that maybe I’m still in the honeymoon phase and that it’ll feel like Work soon enough, but now I’m not so sure.

The reading and writing and coding are all good fun, but I probably draw the most energy from the frequent conversations I’m having, with both old friends and new. Pretty much anyone who has worked in tech or even just bought a domain for their business has a story to tell and curiosities that I can answer (or add to my research questions). If we haven’t talked yet, reach out! No domain expertise required—I’m curious about your experience with domains, what you find interesting, and what you want to know.

Writing

Most of my writing energy is channeled into the book right now, but I did just plant an essay in my garden that I’m calling the Millspaugh method, which is a play on James Somers’ blog post, the McPhee method. It’s about my writing process that emphasizes writing in the act of learning, working in public, and experimentation.

Since I started work on the book, I’ve sent out four email newsletters:

The middle two, on domain investing and Yugoslavia’s dramatic .yu story, have been the most popular. You can sign up for future emails at dotcom.press knowing that I’ll get a dopamine hit when you do.

Talking

Next month is Startup Cincy Week where I’ll be demo’ing tools I’ve built for the book (Monday afternoon at the Woodward Theater) and presenting a talk on domain know-how for startups (Wednesday afternoon at the Marketer Collaborative). I’ll publish my talk materials and recordings afterward.

Conference talks are something I’d like to do more of, mostly because I love the idea of talk-driven development—i.e. having to learn something well enough to teach it. I have one project and related talk proposal on the Web platform that I’d love an excuse to work on. Lmk if there are any conferences or meetups you have on the calendar or have enjoyed in the past!

Reading, watching, listening

I read Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries by Kory Stamper, who spent her career as a lexicographer at Merriam Webster. It makes all the sense in the world that she’s such a deft writer after spending a lifetime reading and defining. Her writing is often fun and funny, and I find the subject matter quite interesting. The book’s subtitle is what inspired my book’s working subtitle, The secret life of internet domains. Which, btw, I wondered if there was a word for those common, almost cliché phrases like “The secret life of X” or “Uber for X”, and there is! They’re called snowclones.

I read How the Internet Happened by Brian McCullough. It was light research for my book but mostly just filling in internet history that I missed while unborn and in pre/elementary school. Its title is a bit of a misnomer—it’s more like How the Web Happened, but I know those two are conflated colloquially.

I’m reading The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt. I plan to read it again when I have young kids. I already really liked Haidt after reading The Coddling of the American Mind. He is a researcher but also a parent whose kids have lived in the smartphone era. He bases observation and theories in empirical fact, and he offers actionable, hopeful advice for parents. It’s the kind of book that reminds you why we need experts.

We’ve been watching the Tour de France documentary on Netflix. I think it’s fascinating how cycling is both an individual sport and a team sport at once. I didn’t realize that before watching. Tour de France podium hopefuls cannot get there without support from their teammates, but in the end they stand alone on the podium. The team is there to support its leader. They even call the supporting riders domestiques, which literally means servant in French. The resulting intra-team friction seems much more present in cycling than in other sports (where it does still exist, like an NFL wide receiver demanding more targets in a contract year). I really like the documentary. There are three seasons out so far, following the tours of ’22, ’23, and ’24.

I listened to the first part of Acquired’s podcast on Google, and I’m eager to listen to part two when I find four hours to spare (or maybe 2-3 at ~1.5x). They dug up all sorts of neat tidbits, like how Google crammed cheap commodity servers into (at the time) pay-by-square-footage-not-by-electricity-usage data centers with a shockingly high failure rate (around 10%) while competitors used sleek, expensive ones. And how PageRank borrowed a backlinks-based method from scientific papers to rank website relevance in search results. And how there wasn’t an obvious winning business model for search until Adwords. And how Bezos was on Google’s original cap table as a meaningful investor. I’m hoping they explore in part two why Google has killed so many popular products (like Google Reader and Google Domains).

NYC in September

NYC friends: I’ll be in town the week of September 15! I’m planning to drop by Cafe Compute and Side Project Saturdays, so come join me for one of both of those. I’m hoping to catch up over coffee/lunch/etc. with as many friends as the constraint of the subway system allows.

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