2024

but first, we made a cute website for 2023

[click

to see!]

and a lil website for hypertext.

meanwhile…

account disables.

head of paid is no where to be found.

how will we ever sell this dumpster fire.

we find out someone on the team is trying to sell secrets to a competitor.

squashed it.

but still,

how tf

do we sell?!

feeling uncertain, we take a beat to explore + think.

we also had a call with our first hypertext beneficiary ❤️

it was inspiring.

we have the spiciest gnocchi on the planet

emily learns how to make a rug

and zizi learns how to send text messages to josh on whatsapp.

and then we have our first

talks with a potential buyer.

it’s emily’s

ex boyfriend.

it is a

very bad idea ™️.

we cold-email 100’s of contacts.

zero responses.

so we hire real investment bankers.

…who introduce us to dozens of interested parties!

from all over the world!!

we land our first

in-person buyer meeting

at a wework that shares

office space with

jessica alba’s

“the honest company”!!!

josh wears a zip up hoodie

with more holes on it

than we can count.

we are exhilarated + exhausted.

the road looks very, very long.

so we pick ourselves up...

craig visits for an email workshop with us in wework and

a trip to

terranea...

while josh’s grandpa’s health

heartbreakingly declines.

so josh climbs up on his roof to get a new perspective.

emily meets her mom’s boyfriend from romania...

they re-connected a

50+ year friendship from when they were dancing partners in school

and then we head to florida for grandpa’s funeral.

we all pick our favorite grandpa tie to wear at the memorial

and its the first time in several years all of josh’s mom’s siblings have gotten together.

emily cries at the sight of her motel (it’s scary + not what was expected) and we almost get a gun drawn on us for arguing about getting a refund

(thankfully, a cute historic spot over a restaurant is available and crisis is averted)

we catch the sunset daily, climb banyan trees, ride bikes around venice, walk the jetty, and spend time with fam.

and then we have an amazon rates crisis.

and our incredibly helpful finance guy goes on indefinite paternity leave.

we hire -and fire- two leaders

(one says they don’t use slack during business hours)

and again we wonder, how are we going to sell this thing.

but it’s emily’s birthday, so we go to the ringling museum for the day, in between difficult business calls + meetings.

(it’s here that we get the idea to build a “museum of the internet” some day)

josh lives his dream life for another couple days with a 6-seater golf cart and home-made oatmeal cake from aunt lorry, and then we head back home.

with the help of bankers, we land 18 interested potential buyers, one which remarked we must be too expensive based on our financials.

things are looking up.

zizi gets a heart shaped pizza for valentine’s day 🍕

josh introduces a matching game to zizi on the ipad

nugget is baby babushka

❤️

we have 3 meetings with buyer prospects, and abaham comes to town to work on new test concepts

emily goes to utah to work on accounting, get fancy soda’s, and walk on a frozen lake

josh gets zizi some hot pink rainboots and more pizza

blue kazoo signs a deal with barnes & noble to be in 500 stores by fall

josh dives deeper into ai and makes zizi her own princess story, which she absolutely goes bananas over

and josh shows zizi real-time prompt engineering

we spent a magical weekend in san clemente biking around and wondering why we don’t live there

and created a graveyard of project trackers from over the years.

we discover a very inappropriate joke about suicide on a brainjolt article and freak out over thinking the ai copywriting bot made a terrible mistake… but find out it was a human writer and had to part ways.

buyer meetings

continue…

and taylor swift’s eras tour movie comes out so we host a watch party with haley, bellamie, and the pipers flying out for the weekend to sing and dance and go to toppers

zizi gets double pink eye for the first time, and emily + zizi both learn about eyedrops for the first time.

we ended march in pine mountain club for easter, watching home videos of josh as a teen playing punk covers while getting completely snowed in.

[click

to see!]

emily officially changed her middle name to her last name, and swore to never change it again

josh introduced kahn academy to zizi as a learning tool, and while zizi loved it, we were skeptical

josh went for a hike in malibu, encountered a mountain lion on the trail, and a random guy gave him a note and a cd of his music

and emily met him at nobu afterwards to celebrate not getting eaten by the lion.

second round meetings with interested buyers (including forbes), and 5 brand new prospects.

one of them was a billionaire with a huge exit in insurance tech (although we didn’t realize it during the call) and josh told him he did a good job at the end and our bankers laughed at us

emily went to a tiny zine poem workshop in the arts district with gabrielle

we took zizi to summerland: showed her the best pizza ever (bettina) but she fell asleep at the table

she also:

- tried kombucha for the first time

- loved staring at the ocean

- took her first rolling eye selfie

- re-created the iconic counter-top photos

[zizi, 2024]

[josh, 2023]

[abraham, 2019]

emily and zizi made their own version of taylor swift’s “fortnite” music video

zizi was a little too inspired by post malone in that video and tried to recreate it one morning before school

josh continued to find new ways to scale

and we tried interviewing lawyers for the potential sale but everyone was so bad.

we had our first in-person buyer meeting in a very cool office in culver city

(where an ex-brainjolter also worked)

emily had a fun girls night for kat’s birthday in l.a.

and while still wondering if any of these companies will make an offer to buy brainjolt, we designed a coffee table book of ai ads josh made + printed our favorites to decorate our walls.

greg got a fax machine and we made him a song and sent faxes

we invested in anthropic and x.ai

more second, third, and fourth round buyer meetings - the grind is real

josh designs a font entirely with ai, and runs into a few hiccups along the way

we hire holly as head of paid, and are super excited about it as josh is dying running all the things: the company, paid media, and trying to sell at the tsame time

emily teaches zizi how to use voice-to-text with chatgpt and she designs things like dinosaurs made out of hearts

we met with centerfield in person at their office… which is in the same wework we had our very first buyer meeting in, but this time in a new floor with a massive board room.

during the meeting, josh notices a bird nest outside the window of the huge room and we’re all really hyped about it

we decide to head to vegas to meet haley for the weekend

and get our very first offer to sell brainjolt while taxiing for departure. we both cry a little… maybe this will work after all.

still, no one at the company knows.

we see a show at the sphere, enjoy nobu in vegas, go to a spa, and lose track of time enough to miss our flight back.

we rent a car and drive instead.

we rent a car and drive instead. and on the way, we pull off on zzyzx road, just for fun.

and then…

we get a second offer!!

and then a third!!!

amidst the chaos, haley tells emily that taylor swift tickets in stockholm, sweden, are way less than the shows in the u.s.

so on a wednesday night… emily + haley decide to leave the next day for a saturday taylor swift show in europe, and come back sunday.

we go to seattle to visit the company behind offer #2 – the smartest (and richest) people we’ve ever met. in a room all day with 14 people peppering 100’s of smart technical questions. we have dinner together and it’s an incredible day.

before heading back, we visit the space needle and moma, why not.

and run into an ex-brainjolter on the plane on the way back!! literally sitting in josh’s seat!

we decide to take offer #3… with centerfield. we sign an loi, absolutely beside ourselves. are we really doing this? is this really happening?

terrified of the unknown journey ahead, we agree that it’s imperative to focus and lock in. it’s going to get crazy.

and then emily finds out her landlords want to sell the apartment. soon. so much for limiting more chaos.

josh makes a new tool called the bob ross creative maker, and its a hit - jamming out 100’s of creatives in minutes.

with kristoffer, we set our sights on slovenia for the 2nd annual naive yearly conference, which we’re nervous about missing due to sale implications but dedicated to trying to figure it out.

and then we decide to meet family in florida, and emily stays with aunt marianne and uncle steven.

we go to the aquarium, have scrabble nights, and watch the sunset at the beach every night. while internally screaming at the possibility of actually selling this thing. and the prospect of moving to a new place.

josh went for a hike in malibu and encountered a mountain lion and a random guy gave him a note and a cd of his music