The late twenties can be a bit of a career wasteland. You've got some experience under your belt, maybe had a promotion or two, but the path ahead can feel murky and long.
Or maybe you're a wunderkind on nothing but an accelerated upward trajectory and can't understand how it could possibly get better than where you're at right now.
Wherever you land on that spectrum, the recently announced Sama x Jony collab has us thinking about career arcs (full disclosure, Relay isn’t on the Sam Altman wave but we’ll go to bat for Jony Ive).
For those who don't know, Jony has had arguably the most impactful career of anyone, ever, in shaping product experience. He's the designer behind the iMac, iPod, and iPhone — products that rewrote entire industries and created an entirely new category that users couldn’t have dreamed up themselves.
Jony hit his peak moment with Apple, then stepped away to start his own thing with LoveFrom. Fast forward to today and he's circling back to tackle AI hardware and hoping to define yet another product category.
It's encouraging to watch someone who could've cashed out after already changing the world once decide there's still more to build. The takeaway for us is — Life is long. Like, really long. Of course there are peaks and valleys, but watching Jony play the long game shows us that reinvention isn't just possible, it can be inevitable if we can stay curious and loose enough to believe there's another chapter waiting around the bend (even when we can't see it yet.)
Keep grinding team. We won't all build the next iPhone, but there's something out there for each of us despite the economic gloom and doom. Life is long — play the long game with us.
I think there is a profound and enduring beauty in simplicity; in clarity, in efficiency. True simplicity is derived from so much more than just the absence of clutter and ornamentation. It’s about bringing order to complexity.
— Jony Ive
Who's to say tomorrow won't be the best day of your life?
― Matty Healy
Top of Mind
He wore a camera around his neck with a posture of quiet confidence; I knew he was a photographer or artist, something like that. Most noticeably, he was a much older man in the sort of social space that skews young.
As a kid, I (Jack) was always afraid of life becoming boring when I got older. I saw these adults all around me and it really just seemed like all they did was work and didn’t have that much fun. Obviously, at the time I had no concept of what “old” was, but I fear, as all of us do, that on some days I become one of those adults that seems only to work. The ones I thought were old and boring. Reading about folks like Raymond makes me think that as we age we become more of ourselves, not less, and to not the pressures of daily life stamp that out.
Arena Mag, a beautiful and highly recommended tech-focused resurgence in print media (quarterly) delivered their 4th magazine issue this week, War. They’ve published two amazing articles from the issue for free on their site, featured below.
Brian Schimpf: Engineer at War (Arena Mag, Issue 004: War)
“I remember Brian and me trying to get these ATVs up the hill in the mud and it being a pain,” he reported of his first week at Anduril. “But I think in a way it set the culture that the CEO was not above driving an ATV in the mud to get to the tower to do the tests. We hold to that same idea today. Nothing’s above or below anybody.”
In a rare feature, Maxwell Meyer tells the story of Brian Schimpf, Co-Founder and CEO of Anduril. Largely through the eyes of Matt Grimm, Co-Founder and COO of Anduril, there is so much to garner from leadership lessons to the nuances of running an exponentially growing engineering organization—especially one in the highest stakes industry of defense tech.
Chose Your Adventure (Arena Mag, Issue 004: War)
For at least a decade after its release, the M1 Abrams was considered a premier land battle vehicle. Fast forward to Ukraine in 2025. Over 20 of the 31 M1 Abrams tanks sent to Ukraine are believed to be destroyed, disabled, or captured. Most main battle tanks fielded have proven extremely susceptible to cheap drones piloted remotely that can exploit weaknesses in their armor. As a result, the Ukrainians have deemphasized the role of M1 Abrams tanks on the front line.
The defense procurement cycle and feedback loop is objectively broken. From the M1 Abrams battle tank failing in modern urban conflict, and the archaic feedback loop and the pentagon with the defense primes is not a winning formula. Even if defense isn’t your thing, it’s something an informed American should be wise to, as the largest defense budget in history, passed this year.
Do you think you are part of the new establishment?
I hope I’m in the extremist category. I don’t—don’t put me in the the non extremist category, that’s gotta be the category of the most boring people.
CNN host Elle Reeve managed to sit down with one of our favorites: Tim Dillon. There’s no sharper form of political commentary than a seasoned comic riffing on the headlines and Tim might be the best to ever do it. He’s the Jony Ive of rhetoric and watching him in a full-hour CNN interview was a dream. He held back his laugher with every response, was asked about his time with Vance and Bannon, and gave his take on nearly every current event. Tim carried the interview, but it was the YouTube comments that really carried the bit.
Best of Substack this Week
Dating 8 Girls at Once in New York City -
(Relay’s Scumbag of the week, Endearing)Week 17, Reccomendations from smaller brands -
ICYMI: Happy Hour Edition
InventWood has raised $15 million and is looking to mass produce fake wood. Earlier this quarter it was fake meat now it’s fake wood.
The Rev. Nontombi Naomi Tutu, or maybe you know her has Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s daughter, wrote an opinion piece on the Episcopal church ending a 40-year partnership with the federal government.
X users were eating up the Jony Ive’s & Sama collab. One of our favorites went something like “this is like getting lebron for 6.4 billion.”
Father Padre Guilherme is the biggest DJ you’ve never heard of. He’s the Vatican-sanctioned DJ cranking out sets in front of Christ the Redeemer in Rio before heading to the Vatican for the Conclave. Based.
It’s Not That Deep, Randy
Thanks for reading — or for mega scrolling all the way down here.
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