Give me the context
January 8, 2026newsletter
Hello,
New year, new newsletter! I'm going to see if I can revive my newsletter and hit a level of consistency with it.
As a reminder, in this newsletter I share my recent social posts, links I've saved in the past few weeks, highlights I've made in books, articles, and podcasts and something that’s been on my mind.
I'm Joel Gascoigne, Founder CEO of Buffer. My goal with this newsletter is to learn in public and share insights into how I operate while building a long term, independent, profitable business with big ambitions.
Did anything resonate from this edition? Hit reply and let me know.
💬 My top recent posts
I write a lot more than I publish, and one of my goals for 2026 is to release more of my writing. I'm going to think aloud and learn in public much more. If this resonates for you, here are a couple of great quotes I've recently come across to nudge you to publish more too:
"Get comfortable publishing things that aren’t perfect. I know many people who wait too long to publish and, well, never do. They do this for years. If they’d gotten the ball rolling back then, they’d be better writers today. It’s weird: you’d think regular private writing would be sufficient to get better. But it isn’t. There’s no stakes. No feedback. The only way to get better is to ship." – Drew Breunig
It’s a good idea to aim to progress in other dimensions of life throughout the duration building a company.
I've come to believe that while working on a company (in my case Buffer) you should be progressing in other dimensions of your life. Generally, any sort of progress is not linear. Meaning that sometimes you’re seeing significant growth and progress, sometimes you'll be going through a flat patch, and sometimes even declining.
I believe that when a business shifts to value extraction instead of value creation, it's the beginning of the end.
With Buffer, I’m trying to operate with what I’d call an “under-extraction” philosophy. Create real value for customers and lean into generosity in how we package it.
🌍 Links I saved recently
The Profitable Startup
→ Enjoyed these thoughts from Karri Saarinen, the co-founder and CEO of Linear, on the benefits of profitability and questioning of the assumption of a trade-off between growth and profitability.
Why I Write
→ I've started the new year with renewed energy to publish a lot more of my writing, and this article was a great injection of motivation to do just that.
Competing With PowerPoint: A Framework for Success
→ Grant Lee, the Co-founder and CEO of Gamma shared some nuggets of wisdom on strategy and how they've been successful in competing with a long-standing giant.
📚 What I’ve highlighted recently
There are no results within the organization. All the results are on the outside. The only business results, for instance, are produced by a customer who converts the costs and efforts of the business into revenues and profits through his willingness to exchange his purchasing power for the products or services of the business.
– Peter F. Drucker in The Effective Executive
Too many of us live by the to-do list. We look at what needs to be done, then try to force ourselves to do it. It’s no wonder why, even if we have the time, we rarely have the energy.
– David Kadavy in Mind Management, Not Time Management
We’re born into stories that keep us from accessing our genius. We grow up among those stories and become like fish that aren’t aware of the water they’re swimming in.
– Gay Hendricks in The Big Leap
🧠 Something that's been on my mind
One of the patterns I've noticed as a CEO is that people will often try to save me time by presenting just the specific question or items they're hoping to get sign off on.
I'm sure that in some ways I've caused this pattern by presenting as busy, and probably in other ways it's a learned habit people have developed from their career experiences. It's probably somewhat natural to try to save the CEO time, and many CEO's may be quite efficient at making decisions on much less data than I am.
But for me, I see it as a critical part of my job to strive to make great decisions, model how I approach doing that, and take every opportunity to help people grow by thinking through decisions holistically.
Many problems arise from companies being too silo'd, and it's natural for someone in an individual contributor position to not always have the full picture of strategic choices across other areas. Similarly, I often lack the detail-level context that an individual has. Combining our forces, we can arrive at the optimal decisions.
As the CEO, I believe I am uniquely placed to keep the whole strategy in my head and draw connections where others may not spot them. My goal when helping teams make strategic decisions is to ensure that our combined efforts across the organization are interconnected and greater than the sum of their parts.
Over time, I've become better at spotting this habit early on and shifting the course of the conversation. I will regularly ask for more context and encourage us to step back to a higher level of context in a meeting before going back into the decisions that need to be made. Very often, we arrive at different outcomes than we would have by working only within the details.
👨🏻💻 New and noteworthy at Buffer
Community
We built a place where all your social comments come to hang out together. Threads, LinkedIn, Bluesky, Instagram, Facebook, and X. All in one spot!
Read more →
Dark Mode
We (finally) added Dark Mode to Buffer! It's perfect for late nights, early mornings, or just if it's your preference. No more eye strain when using Buffer. Launching dark mode represented a significant milestone of us fully migrating to our new design system, which enabled the feature.
Read more →
Until next time,
– Joel