Introducing the "Ask a Birb" column 🐦
Lessons from conversations between founders, in the form of an anonymous advice column.
The other founders that a startup founder knows are major sources of advice and inspiration. The experiences that are shared with one another, although anecdotal, serve as critical sanity checks and are an important part of the startup ecosystem.
“Ask a Birb” is an anonymous advice column for people working on startups (including, but not limited to, founders). The format of each article is a letter from someone seeking advice and a response from someone else. By default, all identifying details will be removed.
Each letter and response will be based on a real conversation; although the words exchanged between the participants in the conversation may not be in a letter and response format (unless it took place asynchronously over email or something like that), the key takeaways will be distilled into an advice column format in hopes that the audience might more easily learn from the experiences described within.
How it works
After Birb Street learns of or is involved in an interesting conversation between two people working on startups:
We will see if all parties involved are interested in presenting the conversation and its key takeaways in the “Ask a Birb” column.
We will draft an article in the letter and response format with all identifying details removed.
We will work with all parties involved to create a final draft and confirm whether any of them want to include identifying details.
After all parties have approved, the article will be published in The Birb Street Journal.
We understand that some of the topics discussed may be sensitive, so at each step we will only move ahead with the article if all parties involved approve doing so.
Future additions
One goal for this column is to highlight the different possible approaches to any given situation by offering multiple perspectives on each one. As the number of published “Ask a Birb” articles increases, we will remix previous articles by inviting guest writers to respond to letters in past articles.
Submitting letters
Although our goal is not to solicit letters (we will primarily be basing articles off of conversations that take place in or around our immediate network), if you have something on your mind that you’d like to get feedback on, we invite you to submit a letter via email to chirp@birbstreet.com. We can’t guarantee that it will be responded to or published in the column, but we’re happy to see if we can help!