Time does something interesting to the people who were genuinely worth knowing. It does not diminish them. It deepens them. The version of you I am writing to now has lived through things I do not know about, made decisions I cannot see the full weight of, built something or broken something or both, and arrived here having accumulated a specific quality of understanding that the earlier version of you did not have. That is true of everyone on this list. It is true of me. And it is the reason I am writing.

We lost touch. Some of you I knew well. Some of you I crossed paths with at Accenture, or during the years I spent building earlier companies, or through Debajit, my co-founder. Some of you I may not know yet at all, which makes this more of an introduction than a reintroduction, and that is equally fine. What matters is not how we got here. What matters is that we are both still moving, still building toward something, still reading things that change us, still finding that the most interesting questions are the ones that do not resolve.

I have been building something that I believe is the most important work of my life. Not important in the way that word gets used carelessly in startup culture, but important in the way that a problem you cannot stop thinking about eventually becomes the only honest use of your time. I started by trying to solve something personal: a system to hold what the mind holds imperfectly, to catch the thought before it disappears, to build something that worked like an extension of how I actually think rather than how a product designer imagined I would. That problem pulled me deeper than I expected. What I found at the bottom of it was the oldest unsolved problem in the history of human intelligence: that the most valuable thing any person builds across a lifetime disappears when they stop. And for the first time, the possibility of solving it.

That is Twelfth Brain. But more on that when it earns its place in the conversation.

· · ·

What I am starting here is something I have wanted to do for a long time: write, monthly, from inside whatever I am actually thinking about. The building, yes. But also the reading, the Joan Didion and Patti Smith books, for example, that are a constant source of inspiration, even in what I build, and ‘feeling’ for me. The connections between apparently unrelated things, because that is how I actually think. The opinions I hold that most rooms are not quite ready for, because those are usually the most worth saying. The things I find beautiful, because a life without that register is a smaller life than the one worth living.

It will feel personal. That is intentional. The version of writing I find worth doing is the kind that creates the feeling of knowing someone, not their credentials or their company or their carefully managed public persona, but the actual texture of how they think and what they care about and what they are still trying to figure out.

That is what this is. Wide Awake, once a month, from wherever the thinking is most alive.

If it is worth your time, you will know quickly. If it is not, unsubscribing is one click and there are no hard feelings. But I hope you stay. I have a feeling the next few years are going to produce the kind of thinking that is worth sharing with people who are serious about being awake to them.

We are better versions of ourselves than we were the last time we were in touch. We will be better versions still. Let us think together in the meantime.

- Subh

Wide Awake is by Subh Mukherjee, Founder of Twelfth Brain.

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