Memos by Brian Swichkow

• McLaren

  McLaren is a motor racing name dating to 1963, when Bruce McLaren founded the team that bears his name, McLaren Racing. McLaren Racing describes itself as home to teams in Formula 1, INDYCAR,...

• Podcast Hawk

  Podcast Hawk is a podcast guest booking company that describes itself as "Guest Booking & Appearance Intelligence." It offers full-service podcast guest booking for founders, agencies and enterprise...

• TriCoast Media

  TriCoast Media is a company specializing in Connected TV (CTV) and Out of Home (OOH) advertising, providing brands with opportunities to reach audiences through premium content and data-driven...

• Verizon

  Verizon (NYSE: VZ) is an American telecommunications company formed in 2000 by the merger of Bell Atlantic and GTE. It provides mobile phone service, home broadband (including Fios fiber and 5G home...

• Deel

  Deel is a global HR and compliance platform offering hiring, payroll, and workforce management services across over 150 countries that was Dounded in 2019 and backed by top-tier venture capital...

• Kenneth Hahn Park

  Kenneth Hahn Park, formally the Kenneth Hahn State Recreation Area, is a 401-acre regional park in the Baldwin Hills of Los Angeles, CA. Los Angeles County Parks and Recreation manages it. The land...

• Flux

  f.lux is software that, in the words of its website, "makes the color of your computer's display adapt to the time of day, warm at night and like sunlight during the day." The f.lux site offers it...

• YouWare

  YouWare is an ai-powered platform for creating, customizing and publishing web applications from plain-language descriptions, the approach known as vibe coding. Its documentation presents it as...

• LinkedIn Advertising

  LinkedIn Advertising is the paid advertising offering of LinkedIn, through which businesses build campaigns in LinkedIn's Campaign Manager and target members of the professional network. On its ads...

• Relevancy Score

  Relevancy score was an ad metric, called relevance score by Facebook, that rated an ad from 1 to 10 based on the positive and negative feedback Facebook expected it to receive from its target...

• self-compassion

  self-compassion, as Kristin Neff's website defines it, means "being kind and understanding toward ourselves when we suffer, fail, or feel inadequate, rather than ignoring our pain or flagellating...

• vanity metrics

  vanity metrics are, in Eric Ries's account, metrics such as website "hits" that he sets against actionable metrics, writing that his favorite example has "no built-in measure of causality." In a...

• Registered Agent

  A Registered Agent is, as the Delaware Division of Corporations describes it, the agent every entity under Delaware law must appoint to accept service of process; the Secretary of State of California...

• C-Corporation

  A C-Corporation, or C corp, is described by the U.S. Small Business Administration as "a legal entity that’s separate from its owners," and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) recognizes it as a...

• Data-Poisoning

  Data poisoning is a poisoning attack in which an adversary controls part of the training data, as defined in the NIST glossary, which cites the NIST report AI 100-2 E2025. That report, "Adversarial...

• Insta360 ONE X2

  Insta360 ONE X2 is a camera from Insta360 that records 360 video and photos as well as a 150° flat mode called Ultra Wide Stabilization. According to Insta360's online manual, it shoots 360 video at...

• derivative work

  A derivative work is, as the U.S. Copyright Office defines it in Circular 14, "a work based on or derived from one or more already existing works." The U.S. Copyright Office lists translations,...

• Jidoka

  Jidoka is one of the two pillars of the Toyota Production System, a principle Toyota says can be loosely translated as "automation with a human touch," based on stopping immediately when...

• Internal Revenue Service (IRS)

  The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is, in its own words, "a bureau of the Department of the Treasury," organized to carry out the responsibilities of the secretary of the Treasury under section 7801...

• California Science Center

  California Science Center is a California state department in Exposition Park, a state-owned 152-acre tract in south Los Angeles, whose mission, according to its 2025-26 state budget entry, is to...