A Memo, not a mission statement.
Who's comin' with me?
The Things We Think and Do Not Post
Jerry Maguire. One Bad Pizza and then… Fewer clients. More attention. Actual relationships instead of volume. He prints it, distributes it to the whole company, gets a standing ovation, and is fired within the week.
“I’m finished, I’m fucked. Twenty-four hours ago, man, I was hot! Now... I’m a cautionary tale. You see this jacket I’m wearing, you like it? Because I don’t really need it. Because I’m cloaked in failure! “
I’ve been writing my version of that memo in my head for about six months. This is it. I’d appreciate it if nobody fires me, mostly because I’m self-employed and the meeting would be awkward. Who’s comin’g with me? Dorothy Boyd, thank you.
Here’s the thing I think and have not posted: LinkedIn has stopped delivering my work to the people who asked for it. And this is not new news
Not in a dramatic, shake-your-fist-at-the-sky way. In a quiet, structural way. You followed me. You subscribed. You opted in. And somewhere between my keyboard and your feed, an algorithm decided you’d rather see a carousel about morning routines.
I can’t compete with what LinkedIn wants to promote. More importantly, I don’t want to. Show me a video of someone crying in a Cybertruck and I’ll show you a man closing the app.
I’ve made a huge mistake (almost)
The Gob Bluth move here would be to keep doing the same thing and expect the feed to change its mind. To keep feeding my best work into a machine that treats it like an illusion sorry, a trick. Tricks are what platforms do for engagement.
The actual huge mistake would be staying fully dependent on rented land. I’ve spent fifteen years telling ecommerce brands exactly this: if your entire business lives on someone else’s platform, you don’t have a business, you have a tenancy. Marketplaces, social commerce, the lot the rent always goes up, and it’s never paid in money first. It’s paid in reach.
I wrote in my own planning documents months ago that soul is what makes people stay subscribed when the algorithm stops surfacing you. The algorithm has now stopped surfacing me. Time to find out if I meant it. I say a lot of things.
The Richard Hendricks bit
If you’ve followed my ALREADY FILMED series, you know I believe Silicon Valley wasn’t a comedy, it was a documentary delivered early. Richard Hendricks spent six seasons trying to build an internet that nobody owned where the network belonged to the people on it, not the company sitting in the middle taking a cut of every interaction.
He was right. He was also a disaster of a human being, which is the part of the comparison I’m choosing to ignore.
The closest thing a one-man media operation has to Richard’s new internet is embarrassingly old technology: an email list and a subscribe button. No middleman deciding whether you see the thing you signed up for. You subscribe, it arrives. Revolutionary stuff, circa 1998.
So here’s what’s moving where — and what’s actually on
Video is going to YouTube. Spotify and Apple will carry the audio for the commuters and the dog-walkers. And this isn’t a vague “more content coming soon” promise — here’s the actual slate:
The V Spot News continues — your ecommerce and retail news, seen through the eyes of a madman, as the contract requires.
The Sunday Supplement is new — because the week’s news deserves a slower read, ideally with a proper breakfast.
The Struggle Bus Season 3 gets its finish — the conversations that actually matter, brought home properly.
The Ostrich Report starts next week — the long-form editorial, head firmly out of the sand, with theostrichreport.eu as its home base.
Subscribing on YouTube does one beautiful, old-fashioned thing: it adds that little bell. You ring it, the work arrives. No algorithm sitting between us deciding whether you’ve earned it. The bell is the whole philosophy of this move, shrunk down to one button.
Writing is continuing on Substack. That’s where the stream of consciousness lives, the deep reads, the daily digest, the essays, the meanderings. And speaking of meanderings, here’s what’s coming down that road: more Parks and Recreation in the mix (every ecommerce platform has a Ron Swanson and a Tom Haverford, and I intend to identify them), Larry David coming to the fore (because nobody has ever audited an industry’s social contracts more thoroughly), Flight of the Conchords joining the rotation (business time, indeed), and July is Silicon Valley month a full thirty-one days of the show that predicted everything, lined up against the reality that caught up with it. ALREADY FILMED goes feature-length.
Behind all of it sits the supporting cast: The Struggle Bus for the conversations, and camptralee.com because in January 2027 I’m dragging this whole industry to Kerry and feeding it properly.
LinkedIn? I’m not leaving. I’ll always post here this is where the industry talks to itself, and I enjoy the eavesdropping too much. But the best of the work the full versions, the things I actually stayed up making will live where I can guarantee delivery. What you’ll see here is the trailer. The film is showing elsewhere.
Maybe so, sir. But not today.
There’s a scene in Top Gun: Maverick where an admiral tells Maverick his kind is headed for extinction. Pilots are obsolete. The future is drones. Maverick takes it on the chin and says: “Maybe so, sir. But not today.”
People have been declaring independent media dead for a decade. Email is dead. Newsletters are dead. Long-form is dead. Nobody watches anything over ninety seconds. Maybe so.
But not today.
The bit where I mean it
Before the ask, the thank you because it’s owed. It is because of you I still cannot describe to my parents what I do. A transponder is what I was called recently.
To everyone who has come along this far: thank you. Genuinely. You have been more generous than the work deserved on its worst weeks and more generous than I expected on its best ones. You’ve shared things without being asked, commented when the algorithm gave you no reason to, turned up to webinars at awkward hours, and sent messages that arrived on exactly the days they were needed. You didn’t have to do any of it. You did it anyway.
I am far from perfect. I don’t have all the answers. What I have is opinions, a cross-Atlantic vantage point — Tralee to New York and back, watching the same industry behave completely differently on each shore — and a genuine intention to entertain you while we figure this out together.
So please: keep supporting the madness of this idiot. It turns out the madness works better with company.
If that’s worth anything to you, do one simple thing:
🎬 Subscribe on YouTube and ring the bell. The bell is everything.
✍️ Subscribe on Substack — for the stream of consciousness, unfiltered.
That’s it. That’s the ask. No funnel, no lead magnet, no “free masterclass.” Just: come where the messages actually get through.
Jerry Maguire ends his memo with a question, so I’ll end with his:
Who’s coming with me?
(You don’t even have to bring the goldfish.)
Vinny O’Brien writes about ecommerce, retail, and AI from Tralee, Co. Kerry — when he’s not in New York pretending the time difference doesn’t hurt. Find the full operation at The V Spot on Substack, @thevspotnews on YouTube, theostrichreport.eu, The Struggle Bus, and camptralee.com.