From time to time in the years to come, I hope you will be treated unfairly, so that you will come to know the value of justice. I hope that you will suffer betrayal because that will teach you the importance of loyalty. Sorry to say, but I hope you will be lonely from time to time so that you don’t take friends for granted. I wish you bad luck, again, from time to time so that you will be conscious of the role of chance in life and understand that your success is not completely deserved and that the failure of others is not completely deserved either. And when you lose, as you will from time to time, I hope every now and then, your opponent will gloat over your failure. It is a way for you to understand the importance of sportsmanship. I hope you’ll be ignored so you know the importance of listening to others, and I hope you will have just enough pain to learn compassion. Whether I wish these things or not, they’re going to happen. And whether you benefit from them or not will depend upon your ability to see the message in your misfortunes.

The last bit of advice I’ll give you is very simple, but I think it could make a big difference in your life. Once a week, you should write a note to someone. Not an email. A note on a piece of paper. It will take you exactly 10 minutes. Talk to an adult, let them tell you what a stamp is. You can put the stamp on the envelope. Again, 10 minutes, once a week. I will help you, right now. I will dictate to you the first note you should write. It will say, ‘Dear [fill in the name of a teacher at Cardigan Mountain School].’ Say: ‘I have started at this new school. We are reading [blank] in English. Football or soccer practice is hard, but I’m enjoying it. Thank you for teaching me.’ Put it in an envelope, put a stamp on it and send it. It will mean a great deal to people who — for reasons most of us cannot contemplate — have dedicated themselves to teaching middle school boys. As I said, that will take you exactly 10 minutes a week. By the end of the school year, you will have sent notes to 40 people. Forty people will feel a little more special because you did, and they will think you are very special because of what you did. No one else is going to carry that dividend during your time at school.

John Roberts' Unconventional Speech to His Son’s Graduating Class

Last month, after almost exactly ten years, my side projects Daily 140 and Macaw stopped sending out emails thanks to Twitter's API changes.

Some stats:

• 14,547 users
• 21,201 Twitter accounts that Daily 140 users chose to monitor
• 7,333,659 total Twitter accounts monitored for likes/follows for Macaw
• 4 million+ emails sent with a 40% daily open rate

Daily 140 was by far my most successful side project, so I wanted to document its arc and what I learned, particularly for the many people it's helped connect me with.

• All credit for the premise and the name goes to my old roommate Ryan, who was manually tracking the likes and follows of a few high profile VCs with interesting results and more generally is a spectacularly creative Twitter user
• Built over a few weeks in the fall of 2014, and launched on Product Hunt in January 2015
• I forgot about the project for a few years after starting a new job, but realized after 3 years that I had thousands of users and a bunch of mentions on various blogs
• The biggest issue with Daily 140 was not knowing which accounts would yield interesting results (in hindsight, I should have published something like @BigTechAlert that was more easily visible and followable). That led me to launch Macaw, which showed you a feed of the tweets all of your followers liked each day, and the new accounts they followed.
• Tech stack for Daily140 was PHP, MySQL, TwitterOAuth. Macaw used Python and Tweepy instead, for performance reasons.

Both projects led to a few fun opportunities:

• I met a number of investors who would use it to get leads on new deals, people leaving companies, and other business intelligence
• The Twitter Developer team did a one-hour research call with me, as part of their diligence before launching the v2 API and new Developer site
• I emailed several crypto anons, all of whom used Daily 140 to monitor new protocols and blockchains
• I got 3 offers to buy the software outright

And were written up in a few publications:

• 5 must-have apps to download while you're on vacation from work -Business Insider
• Macaw will curate Twitter for you, help expand your network -TechCrunch
• The 50 Best Twitter Tools to Use -Hootsuite
• The Big List of Twitter Tools -Buffer
• 16 Twitter tools to boost your brand’s marketing -SproutSocial
• 80 Twitter Tools for Almost Everything -Hongkiat
• "Sometimes it is hard to get started with Twitter. Take advantage of the daily emails to find people of interest to follow or stay current on the latest education conversations. Use Daily 140 to stay up to date with other educators, politicians, The White House, and more." -TeachersFirst

All of my time now goes towards building Clay, a home for your people and relationships that leverages a lot of the skills I learned building Daily 140 and Macaw, and we may end up rolling in some of the features those tools provided.

In both Clay and my side projects, I'm thinking about similar features layered on top of the next wave of social tools that are replacing Twitter, like Mastodon, Bluesky, and Micro.blog. Decentralized architectures and availability of APIs unlock a whole world of possibilities on those platforms, and there's clearly still a need for tools like Daily 140 for research, discovery, and monitoring.

Some final thoughts:

1. If you'd be interested in a replacement for either tool, take my quick survey here.
2. If you're interested in learning more in the coming months, sign up for my updates newsletter here.