OpenTabs - and the road to the NYC Marathon
One curious New Yorker's evolving list of what's worth your attention — food, fitness, building, fatherhood, and the playlists I'm engineering to get me to the finish line.
Somewhere around minute 40 of a hard run, your legs start negotiating with you. We could stop. We’ve done enough. Nobody would know. I’ve spent my whole life in some version of that argument — in pools as a kid, in companies I built, in deals I got wrong, at 11pm with a sick toddler and a payroll to make. And I’ve learned the only thing that reliably ends the negotiation is the right input at the right moment. For a run, it’s a song at exactly the right tempo. For everything else, it’s usually a person who’s been there telling you the honest thing.
That’s what this is.
I’m a native New Yorker — since 1983 — and a father of three. I’ve spent my life building companies, backing a few, and teaching founders at Cornell; I’ll get into all of that another time. What matters today: at my age, after a lifetime as an athlete, I’m finally doing the one thing I always said I wouldn’t — training for my first marathon. NYC, this November.
Why now? Because I’ve spent decades collecting things worth paying attention to — restaurants, ideas, workouts, books, mistakes, the occasional gadget — and quietly sending them to friends one at a time. Open Tabs is me doing it out loud. The name is the honest one: these are the tabs I actually have open. The stuff I’m chasing down, testing, eating my way through, arguing about, and occasionally getting wrong in public.
What you’re actually subscribing to. Not a brand. A person thinking out loud, across the things I genuinely live in: food and restaurants (forty years of eating through this city), training and fitness, building and investing from the operator’s seat, technology, and fatherhood — because all of it connects, and the connections are the interesting part. My one rule: specific over abstract, always. I’ll name the restaurant, the workout, the deal, the mistake.
A few things I can already promise you’ll get:
The running playlists. I did the obnoxious founder thing and built a system that maps every track to the effort curve of a run — songs charted by BPM against the minutes, engineered to carry you through the part where you’d otherwise slow down. Not a vibe playlist. A pacing tool. A free starter one is coming in the next couple of weeks. I’m not the fastest guy out there — I’m just relentless about the details, and these work.
Office Hours. Real questions founders and students have asked me, answered the honest way — the one I’d give across a table, not the LinkedIn version.
Road to the NYC Marathon. I’ll bring you along the whole way to November, the tech, the good days and the ones where my legs win.
The deal, plainly: right now everything is free, once or twice a week. Subscribe and you’ll never miss it. Down the road there’ll be a paid tier for the full playlist library and the deeper stuff — but you don’t have to think about that today. Today, just get on the list.
I’m not here to be the loudest voice on the internet. I’m here to be a useful one. If that sounds like your kind of thing, hit subscribe and come run with me.
— Randy