I make things that help people, give a lot of it away, and try to notice the beauty in life while I do it.
The rest of my site showcases the work I do, while this page is about the person actually doing it — because I don't think those should be separate.
I'd rather make the next thing than guard the last one.
A few years ago I deleted every blog post I'd ever written, about 180 of them, and walked away from a following in the tens of thousands that I used to make my living on.
The résumé version of me started companies, helped grow a crowdfunding platform from $25M to $100M, ran a studio, and built AI tools that Hollywood bought. All true, and all on the work side of the site. This page is the rest of it . . . the actual fun stuff :)
During COVID I started a little Instagram account. A few hundred followers, no plan to grow it, and I don't share it around. It's just a practice: cell phone photography, mostly around Milwaukee, mostly early or late when the light's doing something.
I don't go looking for shots. I just try to take a few seconds for the quiet little moments most people walk right past. For instance, this old table outside a vintage restoration shop. It isn't designed; it's utilitarian. It's been holding displays for years and has bowed under the weight of age and weather. But sitting there in a drift of fall leaves, it becomes art. I love it.
Once in a while I'll actually do something with one. I was wandering a used bookstore and caught the owner reading, her dog asleep at her feet, one of those scenes you know won't be there tomorrow. I printed it, framed it 8×10, and brought it back to give to her for the shop. That's about the most I ever do with these. I take them because the moment's worth keeping, not because anyone's watching.
I write the same way: a lot less than I used to, and mostly just for me now. A few pieces survived the big delete and live on my Substack: short stuff about being present, about love and loss, about how I think we all carry way too much these days. If you actually want to know how I think, that's a better place to look than any résumé.
And every few years I cause a little trouble for fun. I once wrote a story claiming Abraham Lincoln filed a patent for Facebook in 1845. CNN, The Atlantic, and The Washington Post all ran with it for a couple of days. I'd left the clues all over the place — the internet just didn't slow down to read them.
I still have a handful of subversive sites and a couple secret identities lying around, ready for use when inspiration strikes and the time is right ;)
Before any of the AI work, I built community. ItStartsWith.Us asked people to change the world in fifteen minutes a week. Small stuff, like take two bucks and use it in a creative way to make a stranger's day. Love Drop picked one family a month who was going through something awful, told their story, and let a thousand strangers pitch in a dollar at a time. Over a year we gave away about ninety thousand dollars. Love Bomb left notes of hope on the blogs of people who were hurting.
None of it made me rich. That was kind of the point.
What got me was never the totals. It was watching some regular person take a tiny idea and make it completely their own: read "spend two dollars on a stranger" and turn it into something I never could've come up with. Little things, made personal, adding up. I still do some of this kind of work with my buddy Jay, under Skeleton Crew Creative.
Two of our Love Drops. Left: Jay and I bookend the frame, and the woman kneeling with her arms out is the CEO of Cinnabon, who drove in to bake dessert for them herself. Right: one of our members donated her Mustang to a teacher who needed a car — we delivered it during school hours so all her class could participate <3
"Just two guys with laptops… I think Nate has the right idea. To not hoard. To give."
Susannah Breslin · Founding Editor, Forbes Vices
She'd met us at a tech conference where everybody was busy chasing sponsorships and trying to build their social media empire. Love Drop was the opposite of all that, and I think it caught her off guard.
Turns out that's exactly what AI is good for, if you build it right: helping regular people do more than they thought they could.
I make tools that help people instead of replacing them. My screenwriting tools got bought by a Hollywood entertainment production studio, and the whole idea behind them was simple: writers should write, and AI should not. My platform lets a small business — or even just one person — do what used to take a whole team. And sometimes I do it one-on-one: I sit down with a business, find where AI would actually help, and build it in for them.
Honestly, it's the same instinct as the photos — find the value people are walking right past, and hold it up so they can finally see it. If you want the details of how that works, it all starts at the home page.
Life in my office cave — I only venture out into the world when necessary ;)
40+ people have written recommendations for me over the years, and the word that keeps coming up is honest. They're on LinkedIn if you want them.
That friend Jay I mentioned earlier — he's been my best friend for almost twenty years. We've done philanthropy together, business together, the whole thing. Lately we've traded most of the big stuff in for something smaller, and honestly a lot more fun.
It's a little video interview series called What Do You Collect? — "Show and Tell for Weirdos." We sit down with people and ask them about the strange stuff they collect and why they actually care about it. Sci-fi paperbacks, fountain pens, chess sets nobody's ever played. The whole thing is a love letter to the early internet, back before the algorithms told us what to like, when you'd just wander around until you found somebody who was into the same weird thing you were.
It's the same thing I've always done, just with a microphone now. (For the record, I don't collect anything. Jay will point at the few hundred 1950s sci-fi paperbacks on my shelf. We're both right.)
If we work together, that's the guy who walks through the door. If we don't, I hope something here was worth the read. Either way, thanks for getting this far.