In the fall of 1997, Four Hundred Years had just come off of a summer tour that saw us crisscrossing the US, playing the DIY post-hardcore venues of the time: mostly house shows, VFW halls, Unitarian churches, and the occasional festival that packed a bunch of bands like ours into two or three days of music. Our average audience size was probably about 50 people. By this point we were hitting our stride as a live band, a couple of years in and tight from pretty regular touring and rehearsing three times a week. When we came off the road we were playing the best we ever had and excited to work on new songs.

We didn’t write like other bands. No verse-chorus-verse, no one showing up with a finished song. We’d gather in our drummer Ash Bruce’s parents’ garage and just play whatever came out. Jamming, basically, though we never called it that. Here’s how Ash remembers it:

“I remember we would play a couple of the songs that we had toured on just to warm up, and then Dave would start doing some percussive thing on his guitar, and then he and I would build some sort of rhythm thing, and then you would find the melody, and Erin would be sitting cross-legged by her amp figuring out her own part. And we all, after only like 30 minutes to an hour, would just have a structure, just noodling together. And then by the end of a practice we’d be excited about something, and we’d come back either that night or the next night and play it again and again. I just remember it being so organic and so easy.”

Sometimes someone brought in a part, a rhythm on guitar or bass. That was about as premeditated as it got. We’d play three or four hours at a stretch. Ash and our other guitarist and singer, Dave Jackson, had a particular connection, and most songs started with the two of them locking into something rhythmic.

Ash: Dave would do a certain type of thing. He played the guitar like I’ve never seen anyone play a guitar. Where someone else would just be strumming a tune or something like that, he would just kind of hit it and bounce off of it, and rip it, and stick it, bop it, twist it.

Daron: And he would use feedback too, right?

Ash: Yeah, oh yeah. He would do that volume thing.

Daron: Controlling feedback.

Ash: Exactly. He would do melodies with the volume, like hitting a chord and doing the volume-up thing. That was almost like a groundwork thing from Dave’s previous band.

So when he would come up with a percussive cadence or rhythm, and this was before I went to school for drums, and this is probably going way too far into the weeds, but one of the things I didn’t like about going to school for percussion was that what I played in Four Hundred Years with you guys was just a natural feeling with what the rhythm was doing. I would just make up something, hit some bells, do a tom beat, whatever was going on.

And we all played together so organically that when I went to school, I think one of my assignments at one point was transcribing something I’d played on a previous record. I was like, “This sucks. I don’t want to know how I did it. I just did it.” And now it’s taking away the feeling of the way I did it. That’s actually one of the things I didn’t like about going to school for drumming. I guess one of my favorite things about Dave, and the way he played guitar, was just how organically we came up with these rhythms. They didn’t make sense, but they made sense at the same time.

I’m not even sure how we ever agreed a song was finished. We often just started playing them at shows and would continue to tweak them after that. Music always came before lyrics or even vocal parts, but we’d try out vocal ideas in the writing process, and sometimes lyrics were part of that. The vocal parts and lyrics were often being revised and changed right up until the moment we recorded them.

By the time we started working on what would become Transmit Failure, we’d been touring for over two years, already had a 7” and an LP, Suture, under our belt. The road was the influence. The scene was the influence. Bands we toured with, bands we loved: Julia, Sleepytime Trio, Shotmaker, Unwound, Drive Like Jehu, Fugazi, Hoover. And by then, more melodic bands too: Mineral, Sunny Day Real Estate, Jimmy Eat World, The Promise Ring, Cap’n Jazz, Lungfish, and especially Three Mile Pilot and The Black Heart Procession out of San Diego. Melody started creeping in. Our sound expanded.

I was twenty-four years old and living the life I had wanted to live since I was fifteen and picked up my first guitar. Touring in a band, playing with my friends and sometimes on shows with my heroes, releasing records. And also deeply confused. Lost. My ambition, my need to strive and be accepted, was an itch I couldn’t scratch, and it kept me dissatisfied, all the time. I should be doing more. We should be doing more. I’m missing something. That feeling took a toll, on my bandmates, my friends, my family, my girlfriend since high school. That relationship was strained to the point of breaking, and before we went in to record, it ended. My first real breakup, my first real heartbreak, and it would have a big impact on the songs we were writing.

Transmit Failure is an interesting record lyrically, though, because there were other influences at play too, political and social. We were part of a subculture, deeply critical of the mainstream, living both inside and outside of it, close enough to comment, far enough to see clearly. The record covers the pain of the breakup, but turns the spotlight on my part in it: “Transmit Failure,” “An Hour Too Late.” There’s commentary on capitalism, one of our favorite themes, on “A Penny for Your Thoughts.” Living life to your fullest potential on “Motion Sickness.” Even the disagreements within the band about religion and belief, on “Give Us This Day.”

We packed a whole lot into this record, but at its core, it’s a record about communication. How it fails us. How we so easily misunderstand each other. But also how we keep trying to connect, and find a way forward, in all our messy imperfection. We’ll keep digging deeper into the songs, the production, and the making of the record itself in the next issue.

Welcome to Directions in Music, our new imprint and exploration specifically in music. Here I return to my roots in music as a curator, producer, commentator, and artist. What DIM is not is a music production company for hire or sync house. That ground is well covered by the talented clients I support in my consultancy work.

This newsletter will serve as a written document of the work we are involved in creating as well as a place to educate and comment on the state of music as an art form and a business. It is all changing quite rapidly, and understanding where we come from helps inform where we are going. We are excited to be part of the conversation.

Our first topic is a visit to my past as one of the guitarists and vocalists for the political post-hardcore band Four Hundred Years. Active from 1996-2000, established in Tucson, AZ, but based in Richmond, VA. Four Hundred Years was part of a specific moment in the history of the DIY (do it yourself) post-hardcore movement in the mid to late 90s that is having a moment of renewed interest in 2026, a fact that I find incredibly interesting. We are, like many bands of our era, reissuing our music for a nostalgic but also an entirely new audience who have found us on platforms like Tiktok and Youtube. This has created a new movement of reissue nostalgia culture serviced by labels that are mostly dedicated to reissuing this relatively obscure music. Many of the bands are reuniting to play shows and, in some cases, create and release new music. Like I said, fascinating. Why this music? Why now? Who is the audience driving it? What does it say about where we are now? All questions worth exploring, which is what I plan to do here.

I will start with an educational and informational exploration of the post-hardcore movement of the mid to late 90s from my perspective to help place all of this in some context. Then we will dive into the Four Hundred Years Transmit Failure LP as I tell the story of the making of that record, from my perspective as well as hopefully from the other band members and the people around us at that time, our audience, fellow artists, and the labels, fanzines and other infrastructure that supported us and others in the scene. The hope is that by zooming into our personal story around the making of this record, we can illuminate why any of this matters now.

The post-hardcore scene on the eastern seaboard in 1997 and ‘98, when we wrote and recorded the music that would end up on Transmit Failure, was a rich, vibrant, and diverse musical hotbed of activity. By this point we were about a decade into the birth of post-hardcore, which, as the name implies, was born out of the original hardcore scene of the early-to-late 80s: Black Flag, Minor Threat, and Bad Brains, and later straight-edge bands like Youth of Today, Gorilla Biscuits, and Uniform Choice. By 1987, bands had started to move beyond the loud, fast, hard sound of early hardcore into a much more experimental and melodic sound, pulling from R&B, pop music, jazz, dub, reggae, hip hop, metal, noise, and electronic music, led by bands like Rites of Spring, Fugazi, Pitchfork (a band from San Diego, not the website), and Slint. Post-hardcore was less a sound and more a mindset, a way of existing as an artist that was emphatically DIY.

By 1997, a decade in, three important things had occurred. First, Nirvana released Nevermind in 1991, catapulting the underground punk and indie music scene into the mainstream. Second, Fugazi, in particular, had turned the business practices of the still-independent post-hardcore scene into a well-oiled machine, showing it was capable of supporting a band that sold hundreds of thousands of records. Third, the DIY network of touring venues, labels, distribution, and promotion was now well established and could support hundreds of new bands. This was fertile ground for independent post-hardcore music to grow and expand.

So how did it look on the ground in 1997? It’s hard to overstate the influence of two bands on the scene at that time. Nirvana, the biggest band in the world from 1991 to 1993, who’d come from our world of basement shows, fanzines, and indie labels to change the face of popular music. Fugazi: defiantly independent, musically diverse, overtly political and personal all at once, and selling out large venues and hundreds of thousands of records on their own terms. Not to be reductive, but I think it’s accurate to say rock bands from our era had essentially gone in one of these two directions, attempting to follow the path laid out by one or the other. Either go grunge, sign to a major, and try to grab the brass ring, or opt out of the existing music business paradigm entirely and go underground.

Ian MacKaye sang, in Minor Threat, that there was “no set of rules.” Then his next band, Fugazi, basically wrote one: tour the worldwide network of all-ages venues that had been well established over the last decade, relentlessly; never charge more than $5 at the door; record and release your records only on independent labels using independent distributors; keep record prices lower than $10; do all your own promotion, PR, booking, and management. Make music that means something, that challenges the status quo and your own assumptions.. There was also a desire to tear down the artificial barrier between artist and audience, which led to bands sharing the stage with fans who would come up to sing along, dance, and dive from the stage. Some bands eliminated the stage altogether and played on the floor, eyeball to eyeball with the crowd.

This didn’t end with business practices; it really became a lifestyle. That meant working mostly low-wage, hourly jobs to support you when you weren’t touring, but not constituting a career; keeping expenses low by living in communal houses with names like Dischord House, Funk House, the Mighty Ship, or simply Shithouse. Thrift clothes and cheap workwear. Vegan or vegetarian diets, political as much as personal. There were also many bands of this era that still maintained a straight-edge lifestyle, abstaining from drugs and alcohol, a movement that had peaked in the late ‘80s but was still very much alive as a way of pushing back against mainstream youth culture and the alcohol industry’s grip on live music.There were other political leanings in fashion in this lifestyle, at least in name if not always in practice: anti-racist, anti-capitalist, climate-conscious, and anti-violent. Unfortunately, misogyny and homophobia were still prevalent in the late 1990s, and our scene was not exempt, which gave rise to the Riot Grrrl movement.

This was the backdrop, or the water, post-hardcore bands were swimming in, and most of us followed this playbook to one extent or another, almost always coloring outside the lines, or even openly reacting to the “rules” by rebelling against them. There was constant debate, argument, and disagreement, which made the scene more alive, not less. If growth, rebellion, and angst were the whole point, we weren’t about to fall in line with a new rulebook either. The rules stayed under constant revision. Messy, hot, loud. Like a punk show.

What I am genuinely curious about, and want to explore more deeply as we go, is the current attraction to this music and, by proximity, the values and lifestyle that went along with it. Why, in 2026, are we drawn to a scene and music that, with a few notable exceptions, barely made a dent in mainstream culture? Perhaps, that’s the point. We were challenging the status quo then: the deeply embedded values and biases of a society that felt unsustainable to us. Unchecked capitalism and consumerism, a planet treated like its resources were infinite, a patriarchal and racist society intent on finding more and more ways to numb our dissatisfaction and collective pain. In 2026, those same systems haven’t slowed down, they’ve expanded, spinning further out of control. Maybe now that we’re at a tipping point, there’s a lot to learn from a group of punks who found their way to build something that functioned outside the mainstream.

I’m sitting on a video call with Joe Chura, founder and CEO of Go Brewing. He’s telling me about the day he showed up to his new brewery and found a foot and a half of spent grain on the loading dock.

They had been working around the clock to fulfill a massive order for Costco: mixed 24-pack cases of NA beer. Something no NA brewery had ever done. They didn’t know that at the time.

Their new packaging machine wasn’t cooperating. Beer had been exploding out of cans for days. Then the mechanical arm that separated the grain from the beer failed. Their fix: a 2x4. It worked, but the grain took on too much liquid. When the truck came to collect it, the weight was too much. Spent grain spilled across the entire loading dock.

Shit and fan were coming in close proximity. The Costco deadline was ticking.

What did Joe do next? He called in a spiritual advisor to sage every inch of the brewery; she got into every crevice, and then, things started to shift. They fulfilled the orders, and that gave GO Brewing its first high-profile retail foothold in the Midwest. They also became the first NA brewery to produce a mixed 24-pack for anyone. This story sums up who Joe is and how he responds in the face of adversity. It’s tattooed on his arm, a reminder of Milarepa, the Buddhist figure who sat with his demons and made friends with them rather than running away. He will tell me another story later, this time about the time he was 9 years old and at the plate facing the best pitcher in his little league. This kid threw ungodly stuff and struck out almost everyone. Joe found himself standing at the plate with a smile on his face, and then he began to laugh. He connected with the ball.

Joe started working on the assembly line at Ford in their Chicago plant, but he was also always pushing himself to learn, grow, and expand. On the line, when he had any downtime, he would read books on business, marketing, and entrepreneurship, five minutes at a time, expanding his knowledge and building the foundation of what would come next. He eventually built an online marketing firm called Launch that helped car dealers reach new customers. He and Launch were doing quite well, signing up car dealers and using online marketing tools to advertise, when one of his customers challenged him with a simple request. “I see the line item of how much we are spending with you, but can you show me an actual customer who has bought a car from your efforts?” Joe tried to explain that’s not how this works — we can show you clicks, views, and impressions, but no tool exists that tracks who actually buys a car. His customer’s response: “Maybe that’s something you should figure out.” So Joe did. He started Dealer Inspire as an add-on tool to his digital marketing agency to help dealers track their actual sales. That proprietary technology became a huge unlock, and Cars.com ended up acquiring both Dealer Inspire and Launch for $205M. Joe stayed on as CEO for three years, tripled the business, and then, when he went to leave, they made him Chief Innovation Officer, a leadership position where he answered to no one.

He had built what anyone from the outside would describe as overwhelming success, but he felt like he was suffocating. He couldn’t place it. He only knew something fundamental was missing. He started drinking more and taking care of himself less. He was stuck, and what looked like success had become its own form of failure. As he puts it, “The suffocation was slow, like I didn’t realize it until I started creating again. Then I began to feel this energy that was reminiscent of when I first started Launch and Dealer Inspire, and then it hit me. That’s what I had been missing.”

To shake him out of his rut, he and his wife started a fitness challenge, and as part of it, he stopped drinking. He loved beer, though, and began to cycle in some non-alcoholic options that he was enjoying. He launched Refuel, a one-day conference that focused on motivational stories of creators and innovators. Originally only for his employees, it grew and ended up hosting heavyweight speakers like Tony Hawk, David Goggins, Jocko, Mel Robbins, and Dan Harris. What he didn’t yet realize was that he was about to find his own way forward.

Part of what was frustrating him about Refuel was that people loved the speakers, but they weren’t taking any inspired action themselves, so he switched things up the next year and changed the name of the conference to GO. This time, people would need to complete events in order to attend. Not only would they be inspired: they would take action. At the end of the events, he served people non-alcoholic beer. This got him thinking. He was loving the non-alcoholic beer he was drinking — what if he created one under the GO name that would be something for people to take away from these events and hold in their hand, something practical that would change people’s lives for the better.

As he puts it, “It was more at the end of the event, after the run, jiu-jitsu, and yoga. The thing I felt missing, in all honesty, was a way to stay connected to this group of folks who had just participated in the day’s events. I then had the realization that community was an opportunity with non-alcoholic beverages, as I didn’t know of any community that had existed, and thought GO could be community first, then expand to what it is today. That was one of three main signals from the universe, which told me to take the next step and explore if this was a feasible thought.”

He took inspired action and started creating again. He put out a job listing on brewing sites for a brewmaster who was up for the challenge and found James, who is now one of his partners. They started working on recipes in Joe’s garage. More people in Joe’s orbit got on board. Things started to move very quickly, and Joe realized this might be his path forward.

In his words: “I believe in taking an acceptable level of risk, and that changes depending on where you are in life with family, finances, etc. Once you cross that level of risk, it’s important to then ask yourself if you’re comfortable going to the next level. In my case, that was to find a brewer who would go on this journey with me, but it wasn’t until I felt confident in the product that we decided to build a brewery.”

Since GO Brewing officially launched, they have grown by more than 400% year over year, and are currently the fastest growing brewery, NA or not, in the US. But more importantly, Joe now understands something fundamental about himself. He always needs to be creating and innovating, or he suffocates and atrophies, just like at Cars.com. He has set up GO not only as a beer brand but as an engine for constant renewal, creativity, and innovation, pushing the boundaries of what NA beer can be and how it is marketed. With this approach, there is risk involved, but this is something his team and investors understand about Joe. They signed up for that spark. That’s the deal.

Listening to Joe. I kept coming back to three things.

Sometimes, the opportunities that come, even if they look good on paper and feel exciting, may not be right for us long-term. They are simply breadcrumbs leading us to what is next, if we are willing and able to pay attention to what comes up in us. When something felt off to Joe, he recognized it and started investigating.

Next is his line about the acceptable level of risk. When making a big leap, we don’t always have to make the jump all at once. I have often been guilty of this all-or-nothing mentality, but we can move toward what wants to come through us in stages, assessing what feels comfortable for where we are at the time. That builds a more solid foundation for what we create.

Lastly, Joe uses adversity to drive him and his creativity: the pitcher at the plate, the customer who asked for the impossible, the 24-pack for Costco that no NA brewery had ever made. Each time Joe’s response is the same. He looked at the impossible, smiled, and built what didn’t exist. Like Milarepa placing his head in the biggest demon’s mouth and saying, “Eat me if you wish,” this is a story of surrender to the unknown. And through that surrender, of doing what has never been done.

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We will never know
with our thinking
what lies beyond the abyss,
in the darkness,
or even in the vast spaces
within ourselves.

We must begin
to rely on something else,
to sense the life
behind things.

It is there
in all our interactions

Welcome back to Dispatches From the Other Side of Failure, a series of conversations about the messier, deeper truths behind building something real.

Failure is often treated like a final verdict. I’m more interested in it as a lens. Not because it’s glamorous, but because every founder who has made something original has had to encounter the edge of their own doubt, missteps, and misalignment somewhere along the way.

What emerged in my conversation with Michael Chernow was not simply a story about business failure. In fact, in many ways, his businesses were successful. The deeper failure was more intimate: twice, he handed power to people he believed were smarter than him because he still carried shame around the very gift that made his businesses work in the first place.

Chernow is the co-founder of The Meatball Shop and the founder of Seamore’s and Kreatures of Habit. He’s also someone whose path through struggle, addiction, recovery, business, and personal reinvention has given him unusual clarity about leadership, authorship, and what actually sustains something over time.

What follows is less an interview than a dispatch from that conversation, one that I think will resonate with anyone who has ever mistaken their gift for insufficiency.

One of the most powerful things Michael said was that he had to learn the same lesson twice.

At the center of both stories was the same pattern: he knew how to create energy, culture, brand, loyalty, and momentum, but because he felt embarrassed by his lack of interest in administration and spreadsheets, he kept assuming the answer was to hand authority to someone built very differently than he was.

That worked, until it didn’t.

He described himself as someone with high EQ, a visionary, a “culture cowboy,” someone who knows how to make people feel something, and how to build a business people gravitate to. But for years, he treated those gifts as somehow less legitimate than operational rigor.

The first version of this lesson came through The Meatball Shop, the business he built with his best childhood friend. It became a phenomenon in New York: multiple locations, a devoted following, TV appearances, the kind of buzz people spend years trying to manufacture.

Michael knows how to create that kind of energy. The Meatball Shop was a novel concept: taking a simple staple food and building an entire experience around it. Everyone got a laminated menu on entry where they could choose their meatball, sauce, and cheese. The reclaimed wood tables, exposed brick, and laid-back industrial aesthetic were ahead of their time. Open late, it was often the place to be until 4 AM.

This was Michael’s gift, giving people an experience they didn’t even know they wanted, and he was great on camera too and thrived appearing on multiple shows, including The Tonight Show, Chopped, and The Today Show.

But he also believed he needed someone beside him who could compensate for what he lacked. As he put it: “Anything that requires admin is just not my skill set. I hate it. I just hate it. And I used to be totally embarrassed about that. So when I launched my first business, I wanted to partner with someone who I knew was going to be way better at that than I was. And I did.”

For a while, that balance worked. Until the money got bigger. Until the stakes changed. Until fear entered the room.

Like many successful partnerships under pressure, Michael and his partner responded to growth in fundamentally different ways. As the business became more complex, the question was no longer just how to keep it running, but what exactly should guide it. For Michael, the answer was never only on the spreadsheet. It was in protecting the culture, energy, and customer experience that made the business matter in the first place.

As he put it: “Smart people with high IQ and intellect ultimately are going to always think that they are the right person to make the decision when things go wrong because they’re able to say, ‘Hey, look on paper, this is what this is.’ Logistics are going to dictate the decision that you should make, data is going to dictate the decision that you make. And quite frankly, that might work for some people. It just doesn’t work for me because I just think bigger, and because I think bigger, my optimism always outweighs my fear of failure.”

That difference created friction, then resentment, then a breakdown neither of them could reconcile. Looking back, Michael doesn’t describe the failure as the business itself. He describes it as a failure of confidence.

“I made a lot of mistakes, feeling like I needed to voice my opinion when probably I just didn’t have to. I failed in the relationship, in the partnership. And potentially would have had Meatball Shops all over the world. And do not.

I learned in that relationship that I had a lack of confidence in my ability to bring a vision to life without a partner.”

He eventually took a buyout and walked away from something he had helped build. The lesson was painful and hard-won. For a moment, it seemed like he had learned it.

Then came the second test.

This time, he went solo. He sketched the exact menu, design, and experience for a new concept on the back of a napkin, then spent the next year bringing it to life almost exactly as he had imagined it. The result was Seamore’s, and it was an immediate hit, bringing in just under $5 million in its first year.

While he was developing Seamore’s, he brought the concept to a mentor who was then the president of Le Pain Quotidien. He loved the idea. After seeing the execution, he secured $6.5 million in verbal commitments and offered to leave his prestigious corporate job to help scale Seamore’s as a partner.

Michael was back at the same threshold, facing the same question in a new form.

“I thought about it for a little while and thought, maybe he’s different. He’s been so successful. He’s been at this company for eight years. Now, it’s a big corporate entity, right? There’s a thousand people that work there. It’s not like two guys grinding it out together trying to build something special. So I said yes and brought him in.”

And away they went. It didn’t take long for a familiar pattern to emerge.

“The guys that he brought in were big hedge fund guys. They didn’t put a lot of pressure on us in the beginning, but then pressure started to come. Jay started to devalue what I brought to the table. He would say things like, ‘You just came up with the brand. You came up with the concept.’ And I’m like, ‘No, no, no, Jay. I did everything. I did $5 million before you walked in the door.’ He would even say, ‘Oh, you just came up with the logo.’ And so it was pretty quick, like a year and a half into our partnership, he would start saying these things and I realized, Oh my god, I did it again. I did it again. This is my lack of confidence. I put myself in a position with someone that was devaluing my inherent skill set, which is I’m a brand builder. I’m a culture cowboy. It’s what I do.”

That realization cuts to the heart of the story. The failure was not simply bringing in the wrong partner. It was bringing in someone whose way of valuing the business made Michael start apologizing for the very thing that made it work.

The management meetings quickly became dominated by the P&L, what numbers were being missed, what margins needed attention, what the business had to do to satisfy the logic of scale. The company Michael had imagined and built to a tee began to feel unfamiliar to him.

And this is where his philosophy becomes especially clear.

“Of course, finances are a massive part of the business, but when you think about the world of hospitality, what are you really doing? You are asking people to walk into your establishment, spend money with you, get a great meal and great service, and walk out ideally at least 10% happier than when they walked in. That’s the business. It has nothing to do with a P&L. There’s never been a single time where someone, a guest, walked through the doors of one of our restaurants, looked around, and said, ‘Oh man, I wonder what the P&L is like in this place.’”

This wasn’t just a disagreement about management style. It clarified Michael’s larger point of view about leadership. If you make the numbers the north star for the people actually running the business, they will optimize for the numbers. And in hospitality, that means cutting corners in exactly the places that matter most.

“When you lead with the P&L with the people that are running these establishments, that is where you are telling them to put most of their energy towards and focus on. And they make decisions knowing that a stronger P&L is going to make the boss happy, so they cut corners. Ultimately, the only way to increase the P&L at a restaurant is to have more people come. It’s the only way to do it. The way that you pump the P&L is to make sure that your team is stoked, supported, and fired up to be there so the guest walks out 10% happier, because when the guest walks out happier, they tell everybody they know and that gets more people in.”

Jay did not see the business that way, and eventually the writing was on the wall.

“I said to Jay, ‘Hey dude, this isn’t going to go the way I hoped it would go. You and I are not good together. Let’s get this thing to six stores.’ We had opened three to that point. ‘Let’s just grin and bear it and open another three. Let’s get through these next two years together and then you will buy me out.’ And that’s what happened.”

By the time he left Seamore’s, the business lesson was obvious. The deeper personal lesson was finally becoming unavoidable.

When Michael launched his third business, Kreatures of Habit, he understood something fundamental about himself: he did not need a co-captain. He needed support around his blind spots without surrendering authorship.

This time, the structure changed.

“With Kreatures of Habit, I don’t have any partners and I’ve surrounded myself with the most amazing people... I’ve got really smart people around me that are going to help me make informed decisions, but at the end of the day, I always have the ability to say no. No fighting. I’ve got this vision. I need guard rails. I need speed bumps. I’ve hired you guys to be that.”

That, to me, is the real unlock.

Not doing everything alone. Not pretending weakness doesn’t exist. Not rejecting structure, numbers, or smart people. The lesson is subtler than that: founders can ask for support without handing away the wheel. They can build around their weaknesses without treating their deepest strengths as liabilities.

What Michael finally stopped doing was apologizing for the very thing that made his businesses work. His intuitive understanding of culture. His sense of feel. His ability to create belonging, energy, and loyalty. Once he stopped treating those gifts as somehow less legitimate than operational rigor, he could build a structure that protected both the business and himself.

Founders usually don’t fail because they lack talent or vision. Sometimes they fail because shame distorts the relationship to their own gift. They overvalue what looks more rational, more measurable, more legitimate on paper, and in the process hand away authorship to people who may be brilliant, but cannot lead the business from its truest center.

The real work, always, is not just external. It is internal. To know what is actually yours to lead. To know where you need help. To know the difference between collaboration and capitulation. To build in a way that lets your core values show up not just in the idea, but in the structure holding it.

That is one of failure’s hidden gifts: it reveals the places where we have abandoned ourselves. In Michael’s case, the lesson was not simply about choosing the wrong partners. It was about handing authority to people who could not recognize his deepest strengths because, somewhere inside, he had not fully recognized them either. Failure asks for more honesty than success ever does. It asks us to face our weaknesses and shows us where we need to stand firm in our strengths. The point is not to become invincible. It is to become whole enough to create as who we actually are, without apology, without substitution, and without handing away our agency.

As Michael put it, “It took me 11 years to get there.”

It is in this way that I will walk through the world.”

Look for it, and you will find it

in solitude,
in stillness,
in the darkness,

all around you
and inside you.

I started Dispatches from the Other Side of Failure as a place to explore what breaks us open, to remove shame from the reality that we all fail, and that failure is often the doorway to growth.

These Quantum Poems are something slightly different.
They’re signals gathered in the quiet moments between the Dispatches - fragments of insight that arrive without narrative, asking only to be felt.

This first one is about the architecture of our perceived flaws.

12.3.19

Everything that we think makes us broken makes us whole.
Why would we attempt to eradicate
what was designed to open awareness within us?

At the still center of the circle,
you begin to see
that there is nothing about you that needs to be fixed
only accepted and embraced
as your true self,
beyond time,
beyond limits.

Welcome back to Dispatches from the Other Side of Failure.

In the previous pieces, I explored failure through business, leadership, and timing. This installment goes somewhere more uncomfortable. It’s about what happens when things start working—and you don’t trust yourself enough to receive it.

Zetamale was a solo musical project of mine that began with a four-song EP recorded at Sound of Music Studios in Richmond, Virginia, in 2001. The EP was produced by Bryan Hoffa and featured many of my friends and fellow musicians from the Richmond music community at that time. I wrote the songs that made up the EP in my bedroom shortly after the final shows of my hardcore band, Four Hundred Years. For this project, I left my hardcore roots behind and challenged myself to become a more melodic and multidimensional songwriter, musician, and singer. This required serious effort on my part; I spent months taking vocal and piano lessons and taught myself Pro Tools. Luckily, I also had some very talented roommates who helped me flesh out the early demos. I took those demos to Bryan Hoffa, an engineer and producer I respected at Sound of Music Studios. Housed in a three-story building in downtown Richmond that I would later purchase, along with my partners from Black Iris Music. Over the course of several months and multiple sessions, Bryan and I completed a four-song EP that we were proud of. I self-released the EP under the name Zetamale. With the help of a local publicist and my girlfriend, we began sending it to clubs and publications along the Eastern Seaboard. Almost immediately, it gained attention and positive feedback; features were written, and promoters wanted to book us on shows. This meant I needed to put together a live version of the project, so I recruited some of my talented friends who had played on the recordings. Our first shows were very well received, and within a couple of months—thanks to a chance booking where we were promoted from the small stage to the main stage at North Six in Brooklyn—we received an offer from an independent, well-respected record label.

This put me into a tailspin. I hadn’t anticipated this kind of success or positive reaction to these songs so quickly, if at all. I felt both overwhelmed and unsure of myself while simultaneously enjoying the positive feedback and opportunities that were appearing. In short, I was more afraid of my potential success than I had ever been of my potential failure, and unconsciously, I started laying the groundwork for self-sabotage. Here’s how I did it: First, I sat on the record deal, thinking that if I received one offer so quickly, more would soon follow and there would be a bidding war. That did not happen. By letting the offer sit for so long, the label eventually moved on, and we went without any new interest for months. Second, I quickly handed over creative control to my bandmates and opened the door for them to write songs for the project. While this may have seemed like a positive move, my motivation behind it was flawed. I chose this path not out of a spirit of collaboration but out of insecurity and impostor syndrome, mistaking the relief of handing something off for genuine partnership. Zetamale and the songs I had written in my bedroom had a strong point of view and vision, but instead of trusting that, I quickly handed the reins to others whom I believed to be more qualified. They were talented songwriters, but they did not deliver the same point of view and vision as the original batch of songs. We even changed the name of the project to Delegate, as we had morphed into something else entirely. In the end, we recorded an LP on our own, built a local following, and had some brushes with major labels and publishing deals, but nothing ever materialized. After a couple of years, we disbanded, and the music never saw a proper release.

This story is not uncommon for a musical project, as many bands never make it to a record deal. However, I share it here because it reflects a larger theme that continued to haunt me for years: my distrust of my own intuition and creative vision. I have often felt overwhelmed by the belief that I am not good enough, which has led me to quickly seek out someone I perceive as more qualified or talented to lead and take charge of something I start.

At times, I have overcorrected and become controlling, unwilling to collaborate with others. More often, though, I have simply relinquished control and responsibility for projects that I was well-suited to lead. This lesson has been hard-won, and in many ways, I’m still grappling with fear of success and self-doubt. However, I have significantly improved my ability to recognize this pattern in myself. I now take more time to reflect on how to involve others in my endeavors in genuinely collaborative ways that highlight our collective strengths, ensuring that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

As an aside, out of the failure of Zetamale/Delegate, Black Iris Music was born. Many of the same people were involved. In that formation, we collaborated in ways that served the whole and each other in harmony and balance—until new issues emerged.

Looking back, Zetamale/Delegate didn’t fail because the music wasn’t good or the opportunity wasn’t real. It failed because I didn’t yet trust my own intuition enough to lead with clarity and conviction.

This pattern, fear of success disguised as collaboration or patience, has shown up in many creative lives I admire, not just my own. In the next phase of this series, I’ll begin conversations with artists, founders, and leaders about the moments where they failed—and what they learned from standing at that edge.

Failure doesn’t always look like collapse. Sometimes it looks like walking away from yourself.

Welcome back to our deep dive into how failure and adversity can be the greatest catalysts for growth and expansion. I want to shine a spotlight on one of my favorite projects: Twenty Four Hour Beer. This brand was born from a vision I shared with my two partners, emerging as an extension of our award-winning music production company, Ring The Alarm.

RTA earned its reputation in part through legendary parties, often featuring alcohol sponsors. While we appreciated their support, the craft breweries donating their products were primarily focused on high-alcohol IPAs, stouts, and sours. Our community craved low alcohol, light lagers like Modelo or Tecate—they wanted to enjoy great music, good food, and the ability to stay social without getting completely hammered after just a couple of double IPAs. Recognizing this gap in the market, we decided to create our own solution. My partner, Brent, came up with the perfect name: Day Beer!

You might think that our lack of brewing experience would hold us back, but it actually served as an incredible advantage. Approaching the challenge with a beginner’s mindset freed us from the constraints of conventional thinking, allowing us to discover innovative solutions. We understood what we didn’t know and strategically sought the best partners to help us craft the ideal recipe for our golden nectar. While we knew we could handle the branding and marketing, we wanted the beer inside the can to be just as impressive as the packaging. We teamed up with local homebrewers, the Brews Brothers, who were in the process of launching their brewpub. They rose to the challenge and helped us create a fantastic low-alcohol, easy-drinking lager. After numerous tastings and iterations, we landed on a recipe that we were proud to finalize with the legendary Will Shelton at Concrete Jungle Brewing. We then focused on building our brand, designing a simple but eye-catching can, creating a compelling marketing campaign, and developing a slogan that resonated with the nostalgia of beer culture—“A beer you can count on.” Interestingly, we later sold this slogan to AB InBev, providing us the seed capital to kick-start Day Beer.

When we finally launched Day Beer, we faced immediate resistance from the craft beer community, which failed to see the demand for a craft lager. Critics dismissed us, with quotes like “I’m guessing these guys decided to open a brewery after closing down their vape shop and getting out of the fidget spinner business” and “if you really like macro lagers maybe you should just drink a macro lager. At least they were started by real brewers” —without ever tasting our product. This backlash fueled our determination and paradoxically brought us much-needed attention. Within two years of our debut, every craft brewery began producing lagers or pilsners, proving we were ahead of the curve.

By February 2020, we had successfully sold Day Beer into over 150 on-premise accounts (bars, hotels and restaurants) in downtown and eastside LA and Palm Springs. We had investors eager to join us, an advertising agency lined up for a campaign launch, and we had just brewed and canned our second beer, Night Beer, a dark lager. We felt we were on the verge of becoming a formidable player in the brewing world when… The COVID lockdown hit in March 2020. Because we hadn’t yet penetrated the off-premise retail market, we lost 98% of our accounts overnight. With no profits to sustain the brand, this effectively brought our promising venture to an abrupt halt.

I mourned the loss of 24 Hour Beer; it was devastating. However, during this period when I had a lot of time and an overabundance of Day and Night Beer in my fridge, I realized something profound. While selling our beer, I discovered that consumers appreciated it, especially for its low alcohol content. This represented a shift towards lower and non-alcoholic beverages that offered the social experience without the downsides of overindulgence. This insight led me to co-found ALTR, a groundbreaking non-alcoholic drinks technology company. ALTR has since raised millions in funding and is emerging as a leader in a rapidly growing market, significantly changing the trajectory of my career and life.

The lesson I learned from the failure of 24 Hour Beer is that some ideas serve as stepping stones towards something far greater. While it was fun to craft a beer brand for our friends, creating a company that contributes to a cultural movement in drinking was infinitely more fulfilling. The landscape of business and life is filled with such examples, reminding us that what might seem like a setback is simply a launchpad for future success. I learned to be more flexible and open to what shows up, even when it is wrapped in disappointment, adversity and failure. Where it leads next could change me and the world around me. I hold my expectations much more lightly after this, and I am more curious as a result. There is so much potential in the unknown if we can tolerate the discomfort that comes with not knowing.

Black Iris Music and its counterpart, White Iris Records, were, by traditional measures, successful. Black Iris was a music production collective that created original music primarily for advertising, as well as for film and TV. It generated significant revenue, employed almost 30 people at its peak, had studios in Los Angeles, New York, and Richmond, Virginia, and won numerous prestigious awards, including an Emmy. White Iris Records, its singles label counterpart, helped launch the careers of notable artists such as Best Coast, Electric Guest, and FIDLAR, amassing over 30 releases all recorded almost exclusively at Black Iris’ studios.

My involvement in the company as co-founder and creative director spanned from 2004 to 2014. I will focus on this timeframe, offering my perspective and the role I played, with great respect for my former partners and collaborators. The reason Black/White Iris feels like a failure to me, despite its success, is rooted in how I squandered that success. White Iris folded in 2014, and as far as I know, Black Iris works only sporadically on music projects today. So, how did we fall so far? I can only speak to my part, which revolves around three core issues: a lack of transparency and integrity, a lack of accountability, and perhaps most significantly, a sense of toxic individualism that became my Achilles’ heel.

As the face of the company and the brand, I worked closely with our sales team, networking and promoting our unique vision. I excelled at this role, clearly articulating what set us apart and how we infused authenticity into a world that seemed to lack it. This, coupled with the exceptional 7” vinyl records we produced, earned us credibility and opened many doors. However, I began to believe I alone held our vision, disregarding the contributions of our talented musicians, producers, and partners. This inflated sense of self-worth, fed by the outward validation I received, blinded me to the collaborative efforts that sustained our success. In reality, much of the work that translated opportunities into wins came from others to whom I failed to give credit or recognition. This created resentment, leading some of our best individuals to leave.

I compounded this toxic individualism with a disregard for budgeting and financial discussions, willfully spending money on whims without consulting anyone. I dismissed challenges to my decisions, including those from my partners. This lack of accountability eroded the trust and mutual respect we had built. I also misrepresented my behavior, operating almost in isolation, with no transparency regarding my actions. Eventually, my partners reached a breaking point and pushed me out. It took me many more years and failures to learn what I needed to, but those are tales for another installment of this newsletter. What I now recognize is that anything built on a foundation lacking transparency, accountability, integrity, and trust is destined to fail.

I am proud of the work we accomplished at Black/White Iris. It stands as a testament to our incredible team, many of whom have gone on to establish their own successful companies or thrive in our industry and beyond. The immense talent we had around us is undeniable, and I am deeply grateful to them and to all the lessons failure taught me about being a better leader, partner, business owner, and creative

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The reality is, most of us fail more than we succeed; we face adversity and struggles, trials and tribulations, and we are better for it. The most growth comes from adversity and failure, or sometimes even from our deepest bottom. This process is how we are forced to look at ourselves, see what isn’t working, and change what needs to be changed. If it were all just success after success, as it appears on these feeds, we would never become any better at what we do; we would cease to evolve, we would stagnate, and atrophy.

So, why don’t we talk more openly about our failures? (I think it would be much more valuable for the reader who is looking for true insight into how to keep going and growing.) Because we are taught to be ashamed of our failures, to downplay them or ignore them, and, so we perpetuate the myth of overnight and continual success.

I once had someone tell me that if they had looked more closely at all the failed businesses on my resume, they would not have done business with me. My first ego-driven reaction was to defend myself and list all my successes, but then I paused and really looked at it. It’s true I have failed many times, and on many different levels; it’s true that my failures caused pain and suffering, not just for me, but also for others whom I care about. It is also true that I learned the most about myself and my blind spots, what I was unconscious of, how I needed to change, and I began taking action to create that change, only because I had suffered and caused enough suffering.

If we want to be conscious creators, if we want to make great work that resonates with others, if we want to initiate meaningful change in the world, we will have to take big swings; and that means we will probably miss more often than we connect. We will never be guaranteed any outcome; it will not go the way we think; there will always be uncertainty.

This uncertainty is part of the path, but we can learn to operate from faith and take action regardless of the outcome. That is when we will fulfill our potential. If we deny our failures or try to move past them too quickly, we miss massive opportunities for growth. In this newsletter, I will be openly discussing mine and other people’s failures, not as a way to shame but as a way to live in reality and pass along experience that may be helpful and serve others. Failure, along with success, is part of creating and everything we create matters.