Business Identity & Writer Collectives
Doug Ludlow joins us to discuss how to save the American heartland. Then Nathan Baschez & Marshall get real about the day-to-day challenges of being a creator/founder.
The Deep End is a podcast where visionary builders, creators, and experts discuss world-changing ideas. We skip the surface level and go in-depth into ideas that matter.
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Announcements
Live episodes:
We’re having Abe Choi come on the show to talk about launching an Africa-focused venture fund. It will be on 11/16 at noon EST. Reserve your spot at lu.ma/abe - should be a great episode!
From the larger On Deck Community:
ODX is live and has already extended offers. We’ll get back to you fast if you decide to apply - folks hear within 48 hours if the fit is right.
🎧 Episode #30 | The Smart Business Bundle with Doug Ludlow
Listen on Apple, YouTube or Spotify
Doug Ludlow is Cofounder & CEO of Mainstreet - an organization devoted to helping startups & small businesses get what they’re owed so they can push the world forward.
Imagining if businesses had aggregated online identities
This conversation is about the unbundling and rebundling of the smart bank and how the 35 million small businesses in the US can benefit from aggregating their business identity data in one place.
We talk about helping small businesses navigate PPP loans during COVID, discuss how startups can earn tax credits easily for things like research & development, and other ways that Mainstreet can help restore America's economy coming out of the pandemic.
Doug was a particularly fascinating guest because he has spent his life between two worlds. There's the tech world, where he's been a senior employee at Google, AOL, and other iconic tech companies, and then there's the world of his childhood: he grew up in a small, rural USA town where farmers have seen their land consolidated and sold off. His unique perspective led us to chat about the brain drain among US heartland cities and how the rise of remote work might enable talent to stay in more rural communities where they grew up.
Mentioned in this Episode
If you operate a startup, you might be able to get as much as $50K back from the IRS in half an hour on Mainstreet’s website.
An overview on KYC (Know Your Client/Customer).
🎧 Episode #31 | Navigating the Founder Journey as a Creator with Nathan Baschez
Nathan Baschez is Cofounder & President of Every - a writer collective focusing on business, productivity, strategy, and more. He’s also a former product lead at Gimlet & Substack and hosts several podcasts of his own.
Marshall & Nathan have a wide-ranging conversation about web3 skepticism, media companies, and more before getting real about the personal realities of being a creator on the founder journey.
This conversation with Nathan blends a few different threads that we've covered on The Deep End.
Nathan's background as a prolific writer & podcaster makes this a natural extension of the conversation that we covered when discussing Creator-Operators with Josh Kaplan two weeks ago. We chat about the wavering stability of media companies and the obvious upside of the Substack economy to creators. We ruminate on questions like “Should writers try to become stars in their own right?” and “What did early millennial-centric media businesses get wrong?” while examining how ambitious people often are replicating their behavior based on the models that have proven to be successful.
The episode also echoes some of what we chatted about with Saagar Enjeti when we discussed the challenges & benefits of going independent. Nathan thinks that the fact that creators can reach fans more directly than ever before is to the passion economy what the shift to mobile was for tech.
Finally, right after having Dr. Anhalt on the show to discuss mental health, Nathan & Marshall do some therapizing of their own as they discuss the day to day realities of the creator journey and how it affects them on a personal level.
Mentioned in this Episode
Nathan runs a few publications of his own, including Divinations, Talk Therapy, and Means of Creation.
Explore more shows via the bundle available at Every
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See you next week!
- Jackson (Producer of The Deep End)
The Deep End is hosted by Marshall Kosloff and produced by On Deck—where top talent go to accelerate their ideas and careers.