Michael Jeter

Floating down the river of absurdity. Head of Brand Studio at Stripe.

[Michael Jeter @_MichaelJeter]

It’s more than a little daunting to set out to expand and improve the identity system for a company and brand like Stripe. But we knew we had to — the existing one had served us well, but wasn’t up to the task anymore. Our brand system required new and improved tools to scale with our ever growing audiences, new products, global footprint, and more.

This update introduces material improvements to infographics, advertising, type styles, and more. While the wordmark remains unchanged, we’re using the dot of the ‘i’ (called the “tittle”), a parallelogram pointing up and to the right, to serve as our identifying symbol. We’re also using it as an ever evolving storytelling device to use when talking about our many great users (you can see the latest brand campaign in SF and NYC doing just that).

Anyone who has ever worked on the refresh and expansion of an existing system for a large company knows that it is no small endeavor. Crafting impactful solutions, building alignment, creating extensible guidelines, building toolkits, and orchestrating rollout requires a ton of resilience. Here’s to the team that continually inspires me with their dedication, rigor, taste, and exceptional vibes.

Great work and thank you to the Brand Studio folks, and of course our many many amazing and invaluable friends and collaborators across the company who all helped shape the work. And a special thank you to a handful of creative agencies that helped us along the way.

[Michael Jeter @_MichaelJeter]

I was there today too! I was visiting with my son looking at schools. He’s interested in architecture, and we took the tour with some current students.

Our guide used the words “scary” and “ominous” multiple times as we walked the hallways. I found myself wondering what lasting effect such a place would have on these young aspiring architects and city planners.

[Michael Jeter @_MichaelJeter]

@devinjacoviello @narrowd

[Tamara Winter @tamarawinter]

And now you can preorder the NOMAD LETTERS (out December 1!): https://t.co/EN1kL7bGcz

For years these letters have circulated (at first, unofficially) among investors, acquiring a devoted readership. We wanted to give them a permanent home in print.

Nick and his partner Qais Zakaria’s record is extraordinary. The letters are the account of how they got there, featuring everything from studying Amazon and Costco (Nomad’s defining investments)—to visiting cement plants in Zimbabwe, and beyond.

They’re candid about their mistakes and curious about the forces that shape investors’ behavior: incentives, psychology, and the wisdom (or foolishness!) of the crowd.

Since closing the fund, they’ve devoted their time to philanthropy, a journey Nick recounts in the lovely foreword he wrote for this edition.

I’m thrilled to continue adding to the investing corner of our catalogue, and I can’t think of a better work to follow Poor Charlie’s Almanack. ❣️

[Michael Jeter @_MichaelJeter]

@StefanKang Incredible! Congrats Stefan!

[Michael Jeter @_MichaelJeter]

@russ_maschmeyer @stripe @lil_dill

[Michael Jeter @_MichaelJeter]

Are we sure we don't want to spell holistic with a "w"? We are in fact talking about the whole here. I get the greek roots and all, but still.

[Michael Jeter @_MichaelJeter]

@trufelman Yee-haw!!!

[Michael Jeter @_MichaelJeter]

Just finished @trufelman series on gear. I still recommend the one on Ivy to everyone I meet. Loving these deep dives. Western wear is next right? Right?

[Nan Ransohoff @nanransohoff]

We're looking for an entrepreneurial netizen to lead communications for our Public Goods work (today, that's Frontier and Intercept). This is a (IMO hugely exciting) full-stack comms role, encompassing everything from strategy and narrative shaping, to tactics and execution. This person will be instrumental in our efforts to remove CO2 in the atmosphere, end respiratory infections, and whatever else comes next. Please send the most outstanding folks you know our way!

https://t.co/U52RKQqWzQ

[Michael Jeter @_MichaelJeter]

This was a fun one to work on! Congrats to the team that moved mountains quickly to make such a beautiful brand and site.

[Patrick Collison @patrickc]

Delighted to partner with Visa, Mastercard, Coinbase, Cloudflare, Google, and many others, to introduce Open Standard, a new stablecoin designed for scale: https://t.co/0cRjmmtJGU.

[Michael Jeter @_MichaelJeter]

Congrats! I can’t wait to live in this world. The effort is definitely nothing to sneeze at.

[Nan Ransohoff @nanransohoff]

Today we're launching Intercept: a $500M philanthropic initiative to make respiratory infections, like the common cold and flu, a thing of the past.

We treat respiratory infections as a minor nuisance, but that’s really not the case. Most of us will spend 5% of our lives (!) sick from these viruses, they kill 1M people a year, cost $600B annually in productivity, and periodically threaten civilization through pandemics.

So, if they’re such a big problem, why haven’t we dealt with them yet? Last year we convened ~40 leading scientists, pharma R&D leaders, biotech investors, and regulatory experts to better understand that.

We heard two main reasons:
(1) First, it’s just technically very challenging: respiratory viruses represent hundreds of distinct, mutating strains across several families. Fortunately, recent breakthroughs make this newly possible.
(2) Second is a lack of funding: broad-spectrum solutions have historically been underfunded, in part because they’re not a great fit for most philanthropic or commercial funding (and while COVID generated a burst of activity around preventing and understanding respiratory infections through an influx of new funding, that hasn't been sustained).

We think that with enough focus and funding, this might be solvable. Intercept is a $500 million philanthropic initiative that will take advantage of new tools to catalyze the development and deployment of two types of products: broad-spectrum preventatives and air cleaning technologies.

This problem is undoubtedly difficult. But it’s more tractable now than it’s ever been. We think we should give it our best shot.

We’re enormously grateful to our anchor funders: @stripe, @AnthropicAI, @TheFluLab, @FoundationOAI and individuals from Jane Street.

And, I’m very excited to be building this with @incredutility and the rest of the team.

[Michael Jeter @_MichaelJeter]

Finally reading Dealers of lightning about Xerox PARC. I love that the first visual made programmatically on a personal computer was an image of Cookie Monster.

[Michael Jeter @_MichaelJeter]

@s8mb Yes please!

[Michael Jeter @_MichaelJeter]

An interesting shift is occurring for in-house brand design teams:

Our job is becoming less about making every brand expression ourselves, and more about building the tools that let the company express the brand beautifully at scale.

The future brand designer is part designer, part product maker. It’s going to be fun to see what skills this unlocks, and the second-order effects it will have on the aesthetics of brands in an agentic era.

My team is already blowing my mind with the problems they’re solving alongside their best friend, Claude.

[Michael Jeter @_MichaelJeter]

@soleio @adgmodular I do want to know what’s in the box!

[Michael Jeter @_MichaelJeter]

Whoa

[Josh Kale @JoshKale]

Every website you’ve ever used is broken in a way you never noticed and it’s been this way for 30 years...

A Midjourney engineer finally just fixed it.

It’s called Pretext:
A tiny library that lets websites lay out text the way magazines and newspapers do, with text flowing around images, wrapping into columns, and fitting perfectly into any shape, all at 120fps.

This has been basically impossible on the web for 30 years. Every website you’ve ever used relies on the same clunky system from the 90s to figure out where text goes on screen. Pretext bypasses it entirely. 500x faster.

The demos look like they shouldn’t be possible in a browser. Go look.

[Michael Jeter @_MichaelJeter]

@devinjacoviello Dude, what!?!? Incredible