Knicks In Six
Pattern Matching My Way
It’s been a while, reader. Almost two months since my last dispatch, when I had made a promise to write you twice a week! But I would rather change than die in my dread. When something isn’t working for me, I adapt.
Truly, I couldn’t miss two opportunities to say, I told you so! (LOL ChatGPT told me that is bad energy.)
Just like I predicted in January, the Knicks are headed to the finals. The first time since 1999. The last time I was in a city for a championship run was Chicago - 1998.
Predictions are mostly 90% pattern matching and 10% luck. So when last week’s news broke that Everlane basically imploded as a brand, I was not shocked. But as I wrote in my last newsletter, the issue isn’t that feel-good can’t last, it’s that there was no foundation for that goodness to operate within.
The reason this era fascinates me so much is that, as I mentioned before, your way of approaching entrepreneurship is likely informed by these brands. If you’ve ever invested in digital advertising, you’ve invested in a myth propagated by broken brands. You may not see yourself as a venture-backed brand, but your digital advertising strategy, no matter what the investment, is downstream of their myth-making.
Over the last two months, I’ve been using Pyramid to reset myself and rebuild both my consulting practice and this actual company. It’s been a mind-altering, meta experience.
I worked for months with an incredible tech consultant, who I believe I only truly connected with because we both knew who Hypatia was (IYKYK). I will tell you more about him soon, but I consider him a guardian angel of Pyramid (there have been a few). Pyramid, as I have built it to do, helped me clarify values that, in some ways, were right in front of me, and in other ways, the very essence of my being that I have overlooked and undervalued for most of my life.
We are all always pattern-matching, whether we’re conscious of it or not. I actually think it’s why prediction markets have become so popular. Because we crave pattern matching, but without a true compass, we are left with empty calories — much like Everlane, Allbirds, and Glossier.
What I have come to learn from my experience working with Pyramid, before I release it to the world, is that values are more than just nice-to-haves: they are how you choose which patterns to match. What has been thrilling about using Pyramid is that it actively keeps my values alive, not filed away on a Google Doc or on a deck. It forced me to confront some hard truths about my consulting, my marriage, fundraising for this very company, and my relationship to myself. It revealed to me a level of clarity I haven’t found through any other process.
Last week, a dear student and client passed along this interview between Krista & Michael (first-name basis, basically). I had initially passed it up, but per their rec, I ended up listening to it 3 times and sending it to many people.
Michael Pollan has this observation I keep coming back to. After the Enlightenment, we split the world in two. Science (Galileo) got the objective side: what’s measurable, what’s “out there,” what can be proven. The (Catholic) church got the subjective side: meaning, value, the inner life. And then the two divorced. They were handed separate territories and told to stay in their lane.
That divorce is the whole story of these brands. And its opposite is the story of our collective future.
Everlane didn’t lack values. It lacked a marriage. The values lived over on the subjective side: the vibe, the campaign, the feeling you got buying a $50 tee that flattered your morals. And the business ran on the objective side: the unit economics, the funding rounds, the spreadsheet. The two were never introduced. So when the numbers got hard, there was nothing on the objective side that was the values. They were decoration, not architecture. Easy to sell to Shein, because they were never load-bearing to begin with.
This is the, our, inheritance. When you split your values off from your operations—values on the deck, decisions in the spreadsheet—you’ve recreated the divorce. And a divorced business pattern matches with only half a brain. It can see what’s measurable and copy it. It can’t see what matters and choose by it.
That “deal” that Galileo made was with the Catholic Church. The irony is that the Catholic Church is now speaking out again, but this time on the marriage of morality and technology.
So here we are. A new era, and if you pay close enough attention, the pattern is shifting. The divorce is ending. Not because anyone declared it over, but because the businesses built on the split keep imploding in plain sight, and we’re pattern-matching to that.
The remarriage isn’t a vibe. It’s a discipline. It’s a decision to let your values sit on the same side of the table as your spreadsheet. That’s the whole reason Pyramid exists. Not to file your values away on a deck, but to keep them in the room when it’s time to choose.
Everlane couldn’t do that. They’d rather be ruined than change.
PS I am praying for a Knicks-Spurs rematch and a visit from the Sisters!
YES! "If you’ve ever invested in digital advertising, you’ve invested in a myth propagated by broken brands."
Full court shot right here 🙏🏼🙏🏼🙏🏼 thank you Holly!