Memos by Brian Swichkow

Divvy
Divvy, now operated as BILL Spend & Expense, is a spend-management platform that pairs free expense-management software with smart corporate cards, giving small and mid-sized businesses real-time...
NanoLeaf
Nanoleaf is a Canadian smart-lighting company, founded in 2012 in Toronto, that designs energy-efficient LED products—most recognizably its modular, touch-reactive light panels—for the connected...
Bill
BILL (NYSE: BILL), founded in 2006 as Bill.com by René Lacerte, is an American financial-operations software company that automates accounts payable, accounts receivable, and spend and expense...
Foundation for Intentional Community
Foundation for Intentional Community is a United States 501(c)(3) nonprofit that supports the intentional-communities movement—ecovillages, cohousing, communes, and cooperatives—serving the field as...
Matter
Matter is a royalty-free, IP-based connectivity standard for smart home devices, developed by the Connectivity Standards Alliance to let products from different manufacturers work together across...
Millennial Pokemon
Millennial Pokemon is a term for the increasingly widespread use of location sharing with the Find My app, especially among millennials in southern California. By letting people reveal their...
Rho
Rho is a fintech-company designed to unify business banking and financial management, specifically tailored for startups scaling through various growth stages. Rather than operating as a standalone...
First Prints for a New Printer
The parts worth printing in a new machine's first week — the ones that make the printer easier to live with, for someone who just unboxed one. Part of Getting Started with 3D Printing. Print for the...
3D Printer Starter Tools
What to buy alongside a new enclosed FDM printer — for someone who just ordered one and would rather not spend money they do not have to. Part of Getting Started with 3D Printing. Buy it with the...
Venting a 3D Printer
Getting print emissions out of the room you sit in — for anyone running an enclosed FDM printer somewhere they also live or work. Part of Getting Started with 3D Printing. Decide between filtering...
Filament Storage and Drying
How to store filament so a spool opened today still prints six months from now — for anyone whose collection has outgrown the box it arrived in. Part of Getting Started with 3D Printing. Store an...
Getting Started with 3D Printing
Getting started with 3D printing on a current enclosed machine is a purchasing decision, a storage decision, and a ventilation decision — not a tuning project. Printers now arrive calibrated and hold...
Bambu Lab
Bambu Lab is a Shenzhen-based 3D printer manufacturer, founded in 2020 by former DJI engineers, known for fast, enclosed CoreXY desktop printers with automated calibration and multi-material...
3D Printing Filament Types
Quick-reference for the everyday Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM) filaments — what each one is genuinely good at, where it fails, and the printer conditions it demands. Specialty and novelty materials...
Kaiser Permanente
Kaiser Permanente is an integrated managed-care consortium founded in 1945 by industrialist Henry J. Kaiser and physician Sidney R. Garfield and headquartered in Oakland, California. It is one of the...
The Trifecta of Moats
"The trifecta of moats is data, user experience, and community." — Vidya Narayanan The framework identifies three compounding defensibility layers that, when combined, create durable competitive...
Bugonia
Bugonia is a 2025 satirical thriller directed by Yorgos Lanthimos in which two conspiracy-convinced men kidnap a pharmaceutical executive they believe is an alien. Written by Will Tracy and adapted...
Harvey
Harvey is a privately held artificial-intelligence platform built for legal and professional-services work, founded in 2022. It applies large language models to the document-heavy tasks that fill a...
have to
A wholly different way of thinking underlies “I can”, “I choose to”, and “I want to”. The story of powerlessness cannot be told with them. Reflections "Marshall Rosenberg suggests rephrasing every...
Narrative Immunity
Narrative immunity is the collective ability of a community or organization to withstand distortion, gossip, and misinformation after rupture or change. It functions as a social immune...