What is different for you today than one year ago?
Dear Friends,
I’m usually good about using the month of December to write year end reflections and create intentions and goals for the new year but for some reason I found myself uninspired last month and kept procrastinating it. Then, last week I came across a prompt from my friend Jeff Miller that got me unstuck. (Jeff was the Chief Learning Officer at Cornerstone when I worked there and my executive coach during my final year - he’s one of the most delightful, interesting, and all-around good people I’ve ever met.) Here’s the prompt:
What is different for you today than one year ago?
It was so much easier to start with this question, thinking about where I am today vs. a year ago. Once I had jotted a quick list in my notes app, reflecting on the past year and writing my 2025 goals came naturally.
Today vs. One Year Ago:
Tenger Ways
A year ago, I was focusing most of my energy on Tenger Ways, trying to articulate and package what we call "modern practices" (devops, experimentation, agile, cloud, AI, etc.) in a way that resonated with our clients. It was challenging because we operate differently from traditional consulting firms. I had intentionally set up Tenger to avoid the misaligned incentives often seen in consulting, where "the more work consultants do, the more they get paid," but communicating how we do that wasn’t easy at first.
Now, having made it through our second year of business, with more clients trusting us to do work for them, and more practice, the messaging is easier. We’ve developed a repeatable playbook that seems to work nicely using a model inspired partly by concepts from Better Value, Sooner, Safer, Happier (BVSSH), and centers around delivering foundational value as early as possible with limited upfront investment and following up with continuous and iterative delivery. (Note to self: Should probably write a blog post about this model for other service firms to replicate.) Today, Tenger is on solid ground. My business partner handles day-to-day operations brilliantly, freeing me to focus on creative projects.
GM Farcaster
A year ago, GM Farcaster wasn’t much more than a hobby. We had recorded 40 episodes, had only had a single guest (DWR in December 2023), and weren’t even on YouTube. We had no sponsorships.
Today, GM Farcaster has grown into a budding media network. We’ve expanded to include a variety of shows (The Hub, CastOut, Vibe Check, Here for the Art, and more), a newsletter (subscribe here), educational content, and event programming. The network is supported by hundreds of subscribers and enough corporate sponsorships to sustain our growth. Over the past year, we’ve hosted around 50 guests, including notable founders like Jesse Pollak (Base), Linda Xie (Bountycaster), Jacek (Degen), ProxyStudio (Clanker), and Henri Stern (Privy).
Most importantly, we’ve kept showing up week after week, and today, we’re proud to celebrate our 198th episode.
Personal
I have one less kid at home—my oldest turned 18 and went off to college. My youngest became a teenager so I officially am the parent of three teenagers. And I now understand every parenting cliche that has ever been said, but the two that feel most accurate are: “little kids, little problems” and “the days are long but the years are short”.
2024 Highlights
Personal Travel: Yoga retreat in Cartagena; family ski trips to Steamboat and Aspen; adventures in Portugal, Belize, and Aspen for a cousins’ reunion; PSU and Wisconsin college football weekends.
Work Travel: Portland for the DevOps Forum (which led to the creation of our Risks of Multi Cloud guidance paper); ETH Denver (karaoke brunch and the podcast studio); FarCon and our 100th episode on the main stage; BaseCamp in Idyllwild, CA.
Joined The Jeweled Horse Foundation as a board member.
Finally rejoined the gym post-COVID and getting back into a regular yoga practice
2025 Goals & Intentions
I don’t do resolutions, but I do find setting intentions and goals to be quite effective.
GM Farcaster
Lean into technology (AI, crypto, code), be the “new” in new media
Continue building the AI bot who will have access to all our video content so it can be the go-to source for Farcaster lore and history, making podcasts a truly interactive form of media
Create a V2 frame so people can watch our live stream without leaving Warpcast, then iterate and add more features and make it more useful
Keep defining what it means to be “onchain first” for a media company
Grow the network
Continue to develop entertainment and tech-focused shows like CastOut and The Hub, plus live Poker, Ethereum updates, VC and more tech news.
Variety of mediums: newsletters, podcasts, livestreams.
Attract VIP guests like Sriram Krishnan, Mark Andreessen, Vitalik, Laura Shin, Fred Wilson to talk about their Farcaster perspectives.
Double down on what works:
Niche focus on Farcaster, celebrate Farcaster founders, culture, innovations
Build community for hypersub members, particularly around in person events like ETH Denver and FarCon.
Grow Up.
Create a beautiful website
Build a media kit
10x our YouTube subscribers
Professionalize operations with work emails for the entire network, shared calendars, and banking tools like Splits
Line up premiere sponsors for reliable revenue for 2026
But not too grown up.
Keep having fun. Follow passion and curiosity.
Tenger Ways
Continue supporting our clients and do everything possible to make them wildly successful and help them use technology to accelerate their growth.
Personal/Misc.
More cooking, less takeout: Take time for meal planning and cook dinners.
More strength training, less sitting.
More books and long-form reading, less scrolling: No tech by the bed.
Prioritize Travel: 3 ski trips, a return to Cartagena for the yoga retreat, Spain and Iceland with family, and doing everything I can to get back to Mongolia this summer for riding horses and other adventures.
Be present for the kids: This time with teenagers is precious and goes by fast. I’m lucky to be in complete control over my work schedule so I want to be mindful about staying present with the time I have with them. Help Cici navigate college applications.
Publish the childrens’ book I’ve been working on with my sister!
Consider starting to format/edit Roy’s memoirs for future publishing?
Keep writing. Should I stay on substack? Or migrate to Paragraph? Or self-host?
In past years I’ve specifically written an intention to spend more time in nature and to lean into art and poetry. It now feels part of my life so I don’t feel the need to write it down anymore. If I start to lose it, maybe you’ll see it back in 2026.
Wow. That was a doozy. Longer than I expected but feels good to get it out. If you’re a long time reader, you know the last section of my journals are the “some of the things” section which tend to be links or notes about random things I’ve found interesting.
Some of the things
Finished reading Frozen River by Ariel Lawhon, historical fiction that takes place in Maine, shortly after the revolutionary war, and follows the main character - a midwife. I loved it! Classic story of feminine strength. Made me sad but resolute, and proud to be a woman. Like all good historical fiction, I felt transported to a different time/place. Recommend!
The collapge of self worth in the digital age, Why are we letting algorithms rewrite the rules of art, work, and life?- This was an excellent essay. When you are an employee your worth is easily calculated by your salary. But how do I value my worth when I’m no longer employed? Since starting down the entrepreneurial path two years ago, I’m earning less money than when I was a full time employee. I’m following my passions, I’m earning some money, I’m building a brand I have equity in and I have flexibility and freedom. Not much to conclude but good to meditate on.
Quorum Messenger, the first/main app built on Quilibrium launched and I tried it up on my phone. Truly private messaging. End to end encryption. Messages are only stored on the network during transmission.
“We’re in multiple golden ages at once.” This founders podcast about bezos makes it really hard to feel pessimistic about anything.
Registered for ETH Denver and the default setting is to NOT share attendee contact info! This is unheard of for big events and conferences - I’m still getting spam from attending AWS reinvent 3 years ago. I’m glad to see the Ethereum community living its values.
Some of the pics
From top to bottom, left to right:
Winter solstice in New York is cold and dark. This photo of the sun going down behind the trees was taken around 3:50 PM.
But luckily we can escape the dark and head south to Florida - That’s the Atlantic Ocean in Boca Raton.
A sky full of clouds
Superblue Miami interactive art exhibit, by TeamLab
Loved this art on the lawn at stovall house in tampa.
Staring into the inside of the prism - I was mesmerized
Back in the north, it’s cold but peaceful and pretty
Happy last night of Hannukah
Donuts and latkes
A Note to My Readers
I started this substack in December 2022 as an experiment to see if developing a writing habit would help clarify my thinking and/or provide other benefits. You can read about my original intentions in my first post or my more recent reflections after sticking with it for a year.
I write about twice a month and share musings, meditations, and links to things I’m finding interesting as I build out a farcaster-native media company, a modern technology consulting company, raise my kids, and have fun creating and learning in the worlds of crypto, tech, finance, science and wellness.
Thank you for supporting my writing and journey. If you’d like to get in touch you can reply to me here or find me on X and farcaster.
Until next time, keep putting good into the world. —adrienne🌏❤️