About Marking the Now
We’re living in history. I’m documenting it in real time.
Marking the Now is about entrepreneurship, economic opportunity, and the institutional shifts reshaping how we live and work, written as they unfold.
We are living through a period of massive change, and the future is unknown. AI is rewriting how established businesses operate. The terms of work have changed, and companies and people are still figuring out the new ones. The capital environment for small business has shifted in ways the rules haven’t caught up to. A generational transfer of small business ownership is beginning. Community lending, philanthropic capital, and the partnerships that move money into neighborhoods are all being reconfigured under conditions nobody fully understands. Established entrepreneurs, and the people who fund, advise, and design programs for them, are making decisions inside this every day, without knowing how it resolves.
That uncertainty is the reason this publication exists. The strongest accounts of any moment have always come from people who recorded what was happening while it was happening, before the outcome was known and before hindsight cleaned up the disorder. Writing inside the unfolding is the only way to actually understand how decisions get made when the answers are not yet clear.
Marking the Now is an observational record of what is happening, while it is still happening. Patterns surfacing across sectors. Profiles of established entrepreneurs and the conditions they are navigating. Notes on how capital is moving, or not moving, into communities. Changes in societal rules and shifts in how institutions operate.
I write from inside many of these rooms. My observations come from the tech partner ecosystems, advisory engagements, and small business and economic development conversations I sit in. I am a doctoral researcher studying how entrepreneurs build and restore the capacity to make decisions while they navigate change. I am also grappling with the “breaking news” that hits my inbox every day. I have more questions than I know how to answer alone. I think a lot of us do.
I am writing here partly to figure out what I actually think, and partly because we are create the future each day. We need to capture it, and more voices need to speak about it.
Subscribe to ask the questions with me, observe alongside me, and reflect on what this moment looks like.
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Roughly weekly, I publish:
• Observation essays on entrepreneurship and economic opportunity inside this moment
• Current headlines and what struck me about them
• Research from my doctoral journey at Teachers College, Columbia
• Conversations, celebrations, and spotlights of founders and organizational leaders making decisions while navigating change
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